Many of the companies pursuing Agile transformation mistakenly believe that setting up an Agile framework and performing Agile practices and ceremonies makes their organizations Agile. This problem is ubiquitous and framework agnostic (true regardless of the Agile framework practiced), whether in a start-up, large organization practicing team, or enterprise Agile.
Organizations that focus solely on performing Agile practices and ceremonies without focusing on intent-driven results (“outcomes”) are missing the fundamental essence—and benefits—of Agile. Why? Because Agile is a mindset, not just a framework. Treating Agile as a framework alone will mislead organizations into incorrectly assuming they are Agile-led. These organizations will also miss the transformative benefits of a genuine Agile transformation.
When starting an Agile journey, an Agile framework is an essential guide, providing structure in planning, managing, and executing work in small, cross-functional teams. However, this is only the beginning of the journey. Organizations need to move beyond working within an Agile framework to focusing on outcomes—from doing Agile to being Agile.
In this article series, we’ll provide guidance on how to determine if your organization is making headway in its journey to become truly Agile. First up is an overview of the six things you should be focused on. In subsequent articles, we’ll delve deeper into each of these topics with further details on how to become “more” Agile in each area.
Customer Focus
Let’s face it, a company must have customers to exist. However, it is no longer enough to just know who your customers are. Today’s customers have more choices than ever before so understanding your customers’ needs, wants, experiences, and pain points is more important than ever. Keeping your existing customers happy and attracting new customers with the innate knowledge of their wants and needs creates tangible value for them.
We can speculate on what our customers want, but why not ask them directly instead? By working directly with your customers, getting fast feedback, you’ll learn what is essential to your customers and what is not. You’ll get a better understanding of who they are, the challenges they face, and how you can uniquely meet their needs. This will enable you to focus on what is important (the “outcomes”), quickly fix issues, or pivot away from products or features that aren’t important to your customers.
Alignment
Alignment of goals and strategy across an organization—top to bottom—is necessary for any size company. Initiatives require prioritization at the highest level to provide clear direction for execution and implementation. Unfortunately, many large, traditional organizations contain functional silo structures that are often focused on their own functional domain goals and self-preservation instead of the business goals their companies are trying to achieve. It’s an uncollaborative and often unproductive approach that fails to serve the organization or its customers. Alignment across all company areas, not just IT, is also necessary to prevent friction between an organization’s functional areas—such as the friction that arises when an Agile initiative is funded, but still grounded in traditional project funding techniques.
By creating organizational alignment on Agile, the organization works together, cross-functionally, toward the same goals, strategy, and with an Agile mindset. This harmony leads to less organizational friction and better outcomes.
Funding
Traditional project funding and management assume the world is predictable and that nothing will change. It relies on a fixed business case, assumptions, and dependencies to identify the most current, valuable opportunities. A Waterfall model assumes a static project scope, requirements, schedule, and costs that are inflexible and expected to stay the same. However, in reality, there are often funding overruns, scope creep or changes, the solution may not meet the need, or the original business case may no longer be valid.
Traditional project funding is also fraught with overhead. It pushes the work to teams in phases, leaving essential resources underutilized until it is time for their phase.
With Agile, transformation work is centered around products, not projects. Agile-based funding is flexible to allow for experimentation, testing, and shifting priorities if warranted. It focuses on the customer, creating tangible value and outcomes rather than deliverables. Funding is provided in stages, aimed at solving and developing the most critical product problems and features. This approach enables teams to quickly deliver value to customers and feedback for the future iterations and improvements.
Leadership Support
With full organizational leadership support, initiatives to adopt Agile Transformation will be able to realize the full slate of benefits that makes the Agile way of working so transformative. It requires full organizational leadership support for a culture of change, innovation, and constant improvement.
What does full support look like in practice? To start, leadership must understand their new role, and what the organization needs from them to be successful. If they are unwilling or unable to change their management style, practices, and structures across the organization—or even if they inadvertently continue to exhibit and support conventional management practices—they may undermine their own Agile initiatives and any benefits that might be gained.
Leadership must also:
- Consistently communicate and evangelize the organization’s vision, goals, strategy, principles, and priorities so that all areas have a shared understanding and alignment.
- Prioritize and support the most critical initiatives across the so they know what to collectively focus on.
- Guide the organization and teams to focus on outcomes.
- Inspire and motivate the organization and teams to believe in and support an Agile transformation. Empower teams by providing their commitment and support and demonstrating and embodying Agile leadership:
The level of leadership support for an Agile Transformation can make an incredible difference between frustration and success.
Empowered Teams
It’s essential for organizational leaders pursuing Agile transformation to create an environment in which their teams can thrive. This means moving the organization and themselves away from the command-and-control style of management and structures.
By empowering Agile teams, the best people with the necessary skills closest to the problem, will be allowed to determine the appropriate solution. All they need is the vision and strategic context of the problem you want them to solve. An empowered team has the authority to make decisions supported by the organization. They are self-organizing and will take ownership of their work and accountability for the decisions they make. As individuals, they will work autonomously, become more self-managing and capable, and develop invaluable cross-functional skills. Empowered teams are also happier, with lower turnover and absenteeism. With genuine empowerment, an Agile implementation is more likely to be successful.
Continuous Learning
Agile, by definition, is the ability to create and respond to change, and continuous learning is necessary to become Agile. Learning through metrics provides insight into your outcomes, which provides an opportunity for change. If no response is taken when change is warranted, then you are doing Agile. By continuously learning and responding to change, you are focusing on outcomes and being Agile.
Why do continuous learning and responding to change matter? At the business and market level, we are in a rapidly changing environment and global marketplace. Your customers have more choices and options than ever, and you have new competitors to worry about. Will your organization respond and address these new challenges? Or will they wait for disruption, lose customers, market share, and profitability?
At the organizational level, there are many opportunities for continuous learning and for being Agile. For example, if a strategy or business case is found to be unproven or invalid, then the organization needs to “fail fast” (or, even better, “learn fast”) and pivot quickly. If you get feedback that customers do not like a feature, then the team must respond quickly to understand the problem and respond with change. If a team retrospective identifies an area of improvement, then the team must implement changes to improve it. These organizational opportunities encourage and build a company-wide mindset of lasting agility, which is a critical part of being Agile.
Where is your organization on its Agile journey? Has it moved past focusing on Agile practices and ceremonies? Would it be able to pivot quickly if new innovative technology, new competitors, or another market event like the pandemic occurred? Is your organization applying continuous learning in how they respond to change (if they do respond to change)? It’s critical to ask these questions of your organization as you embark on and advance your Agile transformation journey so you can progress beyond doing Agile and achieve being Agile—and all the organizational, market, and customers benefits that come with it.
Stay tuned for the next article in this series which will explore Customer Focus in more depth.
Melanie Lee, Senior Consultant
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