Is your organization designed for an agile transformation?
There are common patterns that show up in agile transformations. Many include a bottoms-up approach where one or more teams act as the spark, the agile example that inspires other teams. Some include a top-down approach that includes an executive champion, often in Technology, who steers the company towards applying agile processes and principles in forming teams to deliver value to customers incrementally. The more successful transformations include both approaches. And the most successful ones will integrate a connected strategy, business* teams, and ultimately a product-centric focus that puts the customer and the strategy of the company in the center.
What you’ll notice about the patterns mentioned above is that there is no dramatic shift expected; these things do not happen overnight. The HR chain of command, who reports to who, cost-center driven departments and divisions, and budget and spend patterns are fixtures from older ways of working that tend to slow down transformations. So what can you do?
Surprisingly, there are no great quick fixes. Instead, every company needs to find their own organic approach to shifting these challenges and rethinking the constraints that slow them down. We have to learn and understand the pressures and demands that our partners in finance, marketing, and HR are experiencing, so we can work together to find new and dynamic approaches to adopting change in our VUCA world to leverage agile to its fullest extent. The business needs to be able to measure progress and adjust in weeks, not months or quarters or years.
When I said business* earlier, hopefully you heard the chant in your head, “we are all the business!” and know that boundaries between technology and non-technology teams need to disappear. Instead, our agile teams need to focus on putting the dedicated people with the skills and subject-matter expertise they need on the team in order to be succesful. Teams should see this as a lean exercise of the Theory of Constraints. If there is a critical person or team that impedes your ability to deliver, work to remove that dependency. It will not be easy. You may need help from senior leaders, shuffle work responsibilities, move people between teams, or share people for a while until they can be backfilled. This is also true of stakeholders and less frequently needed subject matter experts. We must co-opt them into our mission, make them part of our agile events, include them in planning activities or even story writing as required.
What I describe above seems to be the most popular pattern for large companies adopting agile. But are there other ways? I can imagine a few, though they seem a lot less likely to happen. Here are two:
- Agile from zero. Startups that begin with agile and product-focused processes in mind could very well keep the mindsets and customer-centric product strategies in mind as they grow, continuing to shift and evolve the way they operate as they grow, learning to scale agile as needed.
- An agile reorg. Should the entire executive team be on board with the shift necessary, perhaps because they are a lumbering old company that must adapt in order to survive, I could see a company pausing operations long enough to lift and shift entire departments, disassembling teams, reorganizing around meaningful products, innovation, and support strategies to both maintain old and build new products.
You may also notice I don’t mention the use of any scaling frameworks or specific agile approaches at all when I discuss agile transformations. That is because I believe any company, using any agile processes can find a way to accomplish these things organically on their own using a custom approach instead of some one-size-fits-all framework. Instead of looking to apply SAFe in its entirety, pick and choose the concepts that work for you and your company at your stage of maturity. SAFe has plenty of great ideas published, including concepts around improving teams of teams, applying servant leadership to middle management, and keeping strategy and product as the north star. Instead of blindly applying any scaling framework, I’m a huge fan of adopting something like the Scaling Manifesto. Or, if you prefer, write your own flexible set of principles that will guide your own organic philosophy of scaling your transformation slowly as you go.
About the Author: Brian Link is the author of AgileMisconceptions.com and the owner of Practical Agilist, LLC. Brian provides leadership and enterprise agile coaching services as an Agile Coach at LeanDog. He is the co-founder of the 2nd Business Agility Conference in North America and the Columbus Business Agility Meetup. Follow Brian on Twitter @blinkdaddy or LinkedIn, and subscribe to his newsletter.
