The Reasons Agile Transformations Succeed or Fail
If you’ve studied the agile mindset, principles, behaviors and practices, you likely know intuitively how an agile transformation can be successful.
In a nutshell, it goes like this:
- Form self-sufficient, long-lasting, durable product teams. Embrace product management principles and make “Product” part of the organization, maybe even the center of the organization, connecting business and technology.
- Train and coach early adopter teams in the agile mindset and practices. Either partner with or hire skilled agile coaches.
- Build up Scrum Masters and Product Owners to be agile champions. Bolster your Learning and Development function. Make these roles career paths with a training curriculum, open to anyone who’s interested.
- Form a self-sustaining process to build and coach more agile teams that includes enough training, the right culture, and a supportive internal community for people to learn from each other.
- All executives must support the agile strategy, set and align the company vision and product strategy to the vision and goals of the newly formed teams.
- Celebrate early successes, expand the number of teams, rinse and repeat. This takes years.
- None of the above can happen unless ALL of the managers support the agile adoption strategy and new ways of working, especially the middle managers.
- Somewhere along the way, HR and Finance need to align to the new ways of working as well and embrace both the team-centric and iterative mindsets. Old ways of funding products and projects and old ways of rewarding individualistic behaviors will prevent the success of the transformation.
This is the path to business agility. And yet, all too often, it breaks down. Each of the above concepts that contribute to transformation success has its own stumbling blocks. Because, overall, it does involve quite a bit of change for a large number of humans that are often inherently resistant to change.
And there are of course many more things that contribute to success including the concepts of scaling, technical excellence, customer centricity and customer support, as well as the approach to innovation and design thinking.
Where should you start? I’d like to explore some of these concepts above in future posts. Thanks for reading!
Hi, I’m Brian Link, an Enterprise Agile Coach who loves his job helping people. I call myself and my company the “Practical Agilist” because I pride myself on helping others distill down the practices and frameworks of the agile universe into easy to understand and simple common sense. I offer fractional agile coaching services to help teams improve affordably. See more at FractionalAgileCoach.com
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