Agile Enterprise Transformation : Eligibility criteria

Agile or to be more specific Scrum works for any kind of projects and deliver values be it IT or non-IT related product development-with this belief more and more companies are looking for Agile transformation now a days. Agile Consulting is gaining momentum as a repercussion, more and more Agile Coaches or Agile Consultants are being hired.

Here the question arises what kind of company or projects will precisely get benefited from Agile transformation. If we say "ALL", hypothetically we may be correct but we know it's not legitimate to say so.

It's important to know beforehand for which company to go for or which not to for the obvious reason to secure Agile eminence, the failure also endanger the capability/ credibility of the Agile Coach involved in the transformation. The company who are new to Agile mind-set may not understand the real reason behind failure, may be their incompetence, but will surely blame the framework or the Coach.

Here are some organizational characteristics Agile Coach should be looking for in the company endeavour towards Agile transformation:

1. Company fit for Agile:  Certain business model like healthcare is strictly regulated and just can't work effectively within Agile framework, team develop products within existing model and exactly knows the steps to follow till the end product and don't expect any changes during development. Hence traditional waterfall works better for them.

2. Team Interest & cultural correspondence with Agile value: For a team to embrace Agile mind-set everyone in the team should have equal level of interest, at the same time organization culture should match with Agile values, otherwise it is difficult to transform to Agile. If team members are not enthusiastic we can engage an Agile Coach, no one can explain core principles of Agile better than someone who is professionally trained just to do that.

3. Executive support & Leadership consent: Agile transformation should be a top down approach where leadership should be committed to support every aspect of it. Training is a key to successful Agile transformation which involve huge cost and if Leadership is reluctant to provide monetary support they’re likely to neglect other key elements, such as coaching, workspace design, and the expenses involved in greater face-to-face communication.

4. Meticulous Agile framework implementation: Fourth principle in Agile manifesto says "Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project.", hence close cooperation between business and development is the very foundation of Agile. If the development team is Agile, but the management isn’t ready to invest time and effort in daily communication and regular feedback, then this approach is of no use. We can't implement Agile by using some of it's practices while ignoring the rest. I have worked with number of teams that call themselves Agile, but in reality the only Agile thing they did was having daily stand-ups which are actually short meetings where attendees commonly participate in while standing.

5. Safe to fail environment and mutual respect Companies With a safe to fail environment encourage innovation and creativity to emerge. At the same time mutual respect within the team strengthens trust, empathy and team bonding. When organization suffers attrition frequently employees won't be around long enough to build a culture of mutual respect and trust.Before commencing Agile transformation we need to ensure presence of few long term employees to anchor the team and an organization wide commitment to create a culture of mutual respect and trust.  

6. Conscientious Team augmentation: Team members should be chosen with great care, Agile team members should be collaborative and self-organized. There are developers who like the idea of quietly solving problems; they even may not like to work in close collaboration with other developers or even worse case customers. Bringing them in and getting them to collaborate is a difficult transformation by itself. If you have a developer who is not interested in collaboration put serious effort to change his perspective, if that is not possible put effort to get him off the team. Reed Hastings (CEO, Netflix) said "Do not tolerate brilliant jerks. The cost to team work is too high".