#13. The visible rituals are only the small tip of Agile [The playbook for HOW! A journey to sustainable performance in the digital age]

Operating in an Agile manner or with Agile ways of working can be a core enabler of transforming your organisation into a digital business. This is a principle I agree with, and have used and seen used to create great customer experiences and significant business value. What's important to focus on, as it always has been and will be, is not the approach in itself (Agile), but rather the delivered outcomes (great customer experiences and significant business value).

This may seem to be fundamentally understandable, however it is interesting to observe how many organisations, including enterprises, only adapt the visible rituals of Agile without making the additional changes to their core operating model and ways of working that are less visible but more material to overall success.

The visible rituals of Agile include:

• Daily stand-ups,
• Agile walls, both physical and digital,
• Articulating requirements through user stories and epics,
• Work being completed within sprints, and,
• Functions being repurposed into Guilds, Chapters, Tribes and Squads as their teaming construct.

The core operating model and ways of working changes that enable Agile include:

• Organising people and work around customers and their journeys vs products,
• Forming and empowering self-contained teams incorporating all the people required to deliver the work end-to-end and having control of the work end-to-end,
• Ensuring the KPI's for all people within the team are aligned and focused on delivering value to customers,
• Having a single individual within the team, the product owner, who sets the priorities and manages demand and engagement with stakeholders, projects and parts of the business external to the team. This allows the team to singularly focus on the work to be completed within the sprint,
• "Hand-offs" between different teams is minimised,
• Management overhead within the teams is minimised,
• Continuous communication, alignment, clarification and learning on a timely basis within the teams is maximised,
• Senior and executive leaders changing their own behaviours from overly directing, demanding and controlling, to guiding, trusting and aligning, and,
• Funding and governance approaches are changed from managing discrete long-run projects to supporting ongoing capability teams who release prioritised work in shorter release cycles.

To get the best outcomes from going Agile ensure you do the hard, complex and challenging work of making all of the enabling changes to your core operating model and ways of working best practice provides guidance on; implementing the visible rituals by themselves will not deliver material success.