The key elements of a successful Agile transformation.

A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of speaking about ING’s Agile transformation journey at Agile Australia 2017

I am personally not a big fan of presentations such as case studies, war stories, transformation journeys etc. In my experience, those talks were never what I expected. Lot’s of successes and bragging however not much I could learn from and use. I kept this in mind while preparing for this talk.

There were successes but obviously some failures (I prefer to call them learnings). I did my best at trying to cover both sides to give the audience my perspective on what an Agile Transformation is all about. My goal was to leave the audience with a few things they could take away and apply in their own context.

Looking back I thought a good analogy to explain our journey was to think of it as waves. So that’s what I did.

Journey Summary

As you can see there were ups and downs, successes and failures but most importantly a continuous eager to get better and not being the best.

The key things I would like people to take away from this talk was the fact that Agile is not a destination, nor methodology or practices but instead, it is a continuous search for better ways of doing things.

To sum it all up I’ve talked about what in my view would be the key elements of a successful agile transformation.

Here they are:

1 — Start small, experiment and adapt

Use Lean Startup methodology to your transformation

2 — Build it from within

Don’t outsource your transformation. Do it yourself.

3 — Let your Agile bubble grow organically, don’t force it

Let things emerge as the organisation evolves

4 — Focus on people, always

No matter what you do people should come first, always

I’ve been invited back to present the same talk again at Agile Encore late this year in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane so come by and say hello.

Have you been part of an Agile transformation? I am keen to hear your stories and insights.