What It Really Takes to Go Through an Agile Transformation
The challenging journey to becoming agile
With a high pace of digitalization, businesses went through a massive transformation. What worked in the past doesn’t work anymore, at least not fast enough.
Start-ups keep emerging and disrupting traditional businesses.
Airbnb and booking.com transformed how people find accommodation. Uber disrupted how to move from A to B, and Spotify innovated how we listen to music. The list keeps going, Paypal, LinkedIn, and Netflix, to name a few more.
How could such small companies reach exponential growth in a short time?
The answer isn’t straightforward, but it heavily relies on how they work. Unlike traditional business approaches, they didn’t focus on processes and risk avoidance.
They strived to try out things and learn as fast as possible.
Such companies are Agile per se, yet they don’t claim to be. You can read several books (No Rules Rules, That Will Never Work, Working Backwards) to learn more about them, and curiously you won’t find the word Agile or any other mention of Agile frameworks because they were born Agile.
Traditional companies are forced to catch up with their pace or face the inevitable risk of getting disrupted. That’s why an Agile transformational isn’t optional but the way to remain in the game.
Understanding Agile
Agile isn’t a process you can deploy from one day to the other and benefit from its fruits immediately. Agile is a mindset, and it’s often adverse to what companies are used to.
The core of Agile is getting comfortable with the unknown and accelerating learning. It’s not about having a process to speed up output.
In 2002, the Agile Manifesto was born, leading to many transformations. The values are still highly relevant:
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan
In a nutshell, Agile is about getting things done instead of endless talking about how to progress.
Common Mistakes
Becoming Agile is a journey that takes you years to get there, but high rewards will make the efforts worthwhile.
The most common mistake is using Agile frameworks with a fixed mindset. That will lead to watered-down results. Unfortunately, that’s what most companies do.
Neither Scrum, Kanban, Shape Up, nor any other framework can make a company Agile. They create room for valuable collaboration, but you need to develop a growth mindset.
What I’m about to say will discomfort many of you, but none of the following techniques will help you get closer to agility:
Velocity: It sets an output mindset and strongly connects to predictability and project management
Burndown chart: It creates pressure to deliver the output and micromanages team members instead of empowering them
Story points: It leads to many abstract conversations instead of getting hands-on and learn-from experience
Definitions of Ready: It hinders collaboration by requiring upfront work from a small group of people
I’ve used these techniques for years and felt trapped but didn’t know why. Once we ditched them, I felt free to fly, and the result was more value delivered to businesses and end-users.
Starting with Agile
Most companies would start an Agile transformation by hiring an Agile Coach or Scrum Master. That can work, but it depends on how they start doing it.
Agile transformations will fail without leadership support because they’ll be more or less the same in a different way. Let me give you my take on starting with Agile:
Remove the clutter: Start by removing prescriptive roadmaps and processes. Teams commit to outputs and deadlines and follow strict processes. Start by removing them. Instead, the leadership needs to define what to focus on next, e.g., customer growth, retention, and profitability.
Create alignment: Leadership must provide the context and direction instead of defining what needs to be delivered by when. Once that happens, teams can work towards a goal instead of building features. They start becoming achievers instead of executors.
Run experiments: No company is willing to change its working mode immediately. This is important to get comfortable with the unknown. Start small by running experiments with one or two small teams.
Learn: Evaluate the result of the experiments and strive to uncover opportunities to do it better next time. You’ll quickly realize many opportunities to make it better. And that’s the power of Agile. It helps you see the world from different lenses.
Grow: As you learn, you can improve how you work and scale that up to more teams. Gradually, the company can become more Agile.
Rinse & repeat: Repeat these steps several times. Each cycle will take three to six months, creating the experience you need to become agile.
You don’t say you’re Agile; you act with an Agile mindset and become Agile. It’s about the attitude and not the frameworks or techniques you use.
Different Agile Frameworks
A common way to start any Agile transformation is by selecting and implementing an Agile framework. I’d say that’s a mistake because you’ll quickly focus on the how and miss the why.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying frameworks are bad. I love working with Scrum, but it’s not a good starting point for a transformation. Eventually, you will start using a framework, but first, you’ve got to develop the mindset behind it.
My favorite approach is understanding different frameworks, evaluating the team’s challenges, and bringing aspects of the framework. In short, I try solving a problem I see instead of solving problems I don’t face.
The following table gives you an overview of common Agile frameworks and their characteristics.
Perhaps you’re missing SAFe from this list. Well, I’ve got to be honest with you, SAFe is an undercover waterfall agent and not an Agile framework. The roots of this framework come from Rational Unified Process (RUP), a heavy project management framework.
SAFe’s a heavy set of processes that tries to solve everything. If you want to get full support on a process, SAFe is the best choice because it’s highly prescriptive. But if you want to become Agile is by far the worst choice you can make.
Keep it simple. Address problems you have and ignore the ones you don’t.
The following table shows you my take on different Agile frameworks. I tried to make it easier to understand what to use when while naming the advantages and disadvantages I perceived.
Maintaining a High-performing Agile Team
Becoming Agile is arduous and will take time, but that’s not enough. Teams need to evolve to remain Agile continuously. New team members arrive, stakeholders change, and so on. It’s easy to fall back to traditional ways of working.
One of the key things I like doing is a health check every quarter. A quick way to do it is by taking the Agile Manifesto Values and asking the team to rate how often they live up to them. Then, you see the results and talk about what to do differently.
When you step back from your busy routine, you allow yourself to reflect and improve your work.
Stepping back allowed me to ditch definitions of ready, burndown chart, and velocity. With the team, we realized that such techniques hindered our collaboration and hurt our agility.
The more courage you have to embrace the unknown, the more Agile you can become.
The faster you learn, the quicker you can create value.
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