Adapting Enterprise Agile Transformations

What is an Enterprise Agile Transformation?

Enterprise agility is when all the parts of the organization work together to create an Agile outcome, which in the customer’s point of view is continuous deployment of new features and bug fixes.  The agile transformation is rallying the company around customer satisfaction whether that means the company responding to a customer’s request for new feature development or a response to a customer escalation.  Implementing an enterprise level agile transformation allows quick response times for customers by also implementing an agile concept of continuous deployment.  Continuous releases are beneficial to a company because it’s an earlier return on investment for feature development which reduces the need for a large upfront capital investment for software development.  Taking it a step further, it also means earlier customer feedback to new product features if A/B testing is implemented to determine which two possible implementations more customers prefer. 

A Common Cliché

I hear this a lot, companies fall into a trap of thinking that by having Agile development teams, they have an “agile organization” when in fact the other parts of the business are not integrated.  To effectively be Agile, the entire delivery capability of the enterprise has to be focused on Agile principles and execution.

“The goal of implementing agile at any scale in an organization should be to create a learning organization with a continuous focus on learning and adapting to new circumstances” Olav Maassen. 

Almost As Scary As a Stephen King movie

Something worth trying in order to try improving enterprise collaboration are to invite those groups outside of the current Agile process to a Planning Meeting, Daily Standup, and Retrospectives in order to see how effective those can be.  To anyone who has never implemented Agile in an organization, you might not be cognizant of the fact that fear is the #1 barrier to implementing an Enterprise Level Agile organization.  Why?  Fear comes from the protected silos (in other words departments) which historically only share information at the top levels.  What you’re talking about is just as scary as a Stephan King movie on a Friday night.  The proposed change is that now we’re freely sharing information and collaborating at all levels across all departments.  This situation could stem from decentralize management of different segments of the organization or can be the consequence of historical disagreements (push / pull systems) that have severed the critical interactions with one another within the organization.  Whatever the reason, your job as a change agent is to be able to collaborate effectively with other parts of the organization and start building those damaged relationships which led to the breakdown of communication between the groups and the silo that exists today.  

The end goal is customer satisfaction.  With that in mind, you can think the entire situation like being on the bridge of the starship Enterprise.  As something unexpected comes on the radar, everyone on the bridge becomes aware.  “At the end of the day, enterprises are complex and require versatile array of capabilities to be successful.  Agile and scrum are not what your customers and stakeholders are demanding from you.  They need you to help them solve their problems, which requires understanding and flexibility to adapt agile to their specific needs” Lowell Lindstrom.

Execution

How would we even kick this off, is probably what you’re thinking right?  Start with this approach:

1. Pilot Agile: if your development teams are already using agile, but not the business originations, try agile out on a “pilot” team already formed, and integrate a business partner (ex. Marketing rep, Customer Service rep) into a few Daily Standups to prove success.
2. Leadership Transformation: get consensus and buy-in from stakeholders and leaders from various silos necessary for building a high performing integrated cross-functional communicative organization (huge endeavor alone but necessary to proceed to steps 3, 4, and 5).
3. Team Transformation: transform functional, cross-functional and distributed teams to high collaboration using either a daily standup for verbal communication or an enterprise level communication tool that the whole organization is using so that anyone can ping anyone from anywhere at anytime.
4. Transformation Enablement: realize that the practices that we put in place at the team level often won’t work when we apply them to a large organization, so we have to be adaptive.
5. Apply Agile Philosophy: Agile at scale requires a broader set of tools and techniques such as (team level: Scrum, XP) (Kanban and Lean management at the Program and Portfolio. So, identify how different methodologies can be applied such as Agile and Lean Portfolio Management across the enterprise.

Scaling Agile Across The Entire Org

Tips on successful adoption and implementation:

1. Agile practices are built around cross-functional teams (not just Engineers)
2. Teams that stay together over time are more productive than teams that are constantly in flux forming and reforming (not change team chemistry too much or velocities will be affected)
3. Teams that are self-directed are able to quickly resolve problems rather than heavy oversite
4. Rather than forming teams to deliver projects, agile methods leave teams together to funnel project work through teams (“Spotify Scaling Agile”)
5. The more external dependencies that exist, the more the team will not be able to meet their commitments because they don’t have everything necessary to meet the commitments
6. Many organization are guilty of throwing ill-defined requirements over to development teams, constantly changing requirements, and yet hold teams accountable for timely delivery. Ensure that user stories have a “definition of done” that is well understood by those working on the story
7. Delivering an increment of working, tested potentially shippable software on regular time intervals assures that we can measure progress against real, measurable product outcomes
8. Agile works only if there’s technical excellence and product quality. The health of a system is critical for success, as well as a blend of addressing technical debt.
9. A highly engaged product owner will make or break a team because they are the clear voice of the business who can make tradeoffs to make time and cost constraints. A deficit product leadership will lead to confusion on teams around “what’s the next highest priority for us?”
10. Create teams focused on delivering a product definition by a) establishing a product vision, b) defining a product roadmap, c) decompose that roadmap into features / user stories, d) estimate the size and level of effort, e) ensure there’s clearly define “definition of done” or acceptance criteria
11. Ensure that there are good delivery practices by building the continuous deployment solution, testing the deployment solution, establish the fail/acceptance criteria for unit and regression testing which establishes product quality, and finally an easy deployment process.
12. Establish a planning cadence that is predictable for business owners responding to customer requests.
13. Establish metrics and reporting on various things important to product owners such as team velocities which aide planning development work, system uptimes to report on Production environments, bugs in the backlog which address technical debt, and Quality unit testing coverage that create baselines on code coverage.
14. Organization enablement is possible only if teams are formed and responsive to each other which embraces effective communication, collaboration, empowerment, and trust.

Remember, Agile adoption is about what you do such as practices, tools, techniques, ceremonies and habits that you embrace.  Agile transformation is who you become after adopting those ceremonies and habits that you embraced.  Culture is the collective personalities that you employ in your organization.  The organization structure that your company puts into place will create the teams and ultimately result in the interactions or lack thereof.  Results will depend on how well the organization can adopt an Enterprise Level Transformation to adapt to a customers and the markets ever changing demands.