April 18, 2018

This morning I read this article: How to mess up your agile transformation in seven easy (mis)steps
When reading this, I got to thinking about how transformations are working with in organizations that I am working for. Here are my thoughts on what Christopher Handscomb, Allan Jaenicke, Khushpreet Kaur, Belkis Vasquez-McCall, and Ahmad Zaidi wrote on the seven easy mis-steps.

Misstep 1: Not having alignment on the aspiration and value of an agile transformation

Many organizations that have tried the bottom-up approach have failed miserably, while I’m not saying that every bottom-up approach fail, the ones that I have observed have simply because leadership fail to understand that value from an Agile transformation doesn’t fall on dollars and cents. I believe that what our customer is saying and listening to that feedback is more important. Money will come later as we get better.

Misstep 2: Not treating agile as a strategic priority that goes beyond pilots

At a previous company that I worked with, they in fact did exactly that. The organization invested heavily on standing up agile teams in a lab environment. They gutted floors, bought lunches and more. I loved what they offered. However, these labs became only tiny pockets of light that has yet to expand beyond their lab environments.

Misstep 3: Not putting culture first over everything else

This one also rings true with companies that I’ve worked with. In another company that I worked, one senior product manager absolutely refused to change his cultural beliefs, despite the fact that the parent company was heavily supporting an Agile transformation. Within one year, this company lost every one of their newly hired ambitious Scrum Masters, an Agile Coach and at least 3 very good product owners to companies that offered better cultures.

Misstep 4: Not investing in the talents of your people

From experience, I cannot speak on this one effectively. I’m not sure if it’s because I believe in continuous learning and have always done something about it, or I have always worked in companies that believed in investing in their employees.

Misstep 5: Not thinking through the pace and strategy for scaling up beyond pilots

Simply put… Any transformation takes time. In fact transformations can often feel like they are getting worse before it gets better. It’s not a 3 month or even a 3 year pace. It is in fact an investment in getting better over the life of a company.

Misstep 6: Not having a stable backbone to support agile

Here, I would like to include the quotes that the authors wrote. I think they explained it very well:
“Too often, agile is taken as an approach to managing projects. It is important to recognize that for teams to operate using agile methodology requires changes to core management processes and the supporting tools that a team has access to, among other things.”
“Agile teams also require the ability to deploy technology assets rapidly. For example, a large North American company required around six to eight weeks to provision environments, which meant that the team had to spend considerable time planning to compensate for the time lag.”
“Absent these changes to core management processes, teams may find it hard to execute rapidly, which hampers innovation, increases time to market, and so on.”

Misstep 7: Not infusing experimentation and iteration into the DNA of the organization

This may be the last of their missteps, but I think it could be one of the most important of all. If we don’t embrace the experimentation as part of the DNA, we could be doomed to make the same mistakes that other made. In trying things out through experimentation and iteration, we can very quickly see if we are on the right track, AND have the ability to pivot quickly if we are going down the wrong path.
These are my thoughts. What do you think?