Agile Transformation - An Introduction

Introduction

Agile Transformation is a change in a firm’s culture and helps succeed in a rapidly changing, ambiguous and turbulent environment.

In the context of global markets today, transformation simply translates to a firm’s ability to respond to changing customer demands and maintain their exclusivity in service delivery. The rigidity in a firm’s structure limits its ability to be quick. This could result in impacting their ability to position their unique value proposition and therefore succumb to price war. Even if they manage to win this battle, irregularity in process and lack of standardization impacts margins due to higher cost of delivery. In many cases, mature firms today struggle to calibrate ROI on the tech assets built or invested.

To meet the shifting whims of the marketplace driven by the customer, firms have to be adaptable, nimble and ready to renew themselves and move from a waterfall to an agile culture. The goal is to breathe new life into the firm by creating an environment that embraces creativity and innovation, empowering employees and reducing unnecessary layers of management. It also means that the firm needs to shy away from traditional hierarchical set up of paper files moving up the value chain before it makes it to the doors of the customers. It acknowledges that not everything will be known or planned and the best way to implement agile transformation is - build as you go.

Rewiring the core processes and system of a firm, building new capabilities, moving people to new roles is transforming to an agile firm. Introducing agile in a firm helps increase the productivity of the teams and stay on top of its game. Building trust of the team members by getting rid of command and control culture and by introducing improved communication skills and collaboration is agile transformation.

Organizational Culture Change

A culture and change team is an essential coordinating element of an agile transformation. The transformation can be achieved by focusing on the below key points:

·      Renewed Focus on customer interaction

·      Reduction of processes and plan

·      Cross-functional or Self–organized teams

·      Embracing creativity and innovation

·      Removing layers of management

·      Increased collaboration

·      Ability to use technology platforms that are robust and yet dynamic

A comprehensive transformation touches every facet of the firm, including people, process, strategy, structure and technology.

People – Delayering firms and building a culture of self-motivated and accountable teams will foster growth and help firms thrive in challenging situations. Delayering will involve moving away from archaic title-based structures to specialty or skills specific roles. Managing this type of structure would require insightful leadership, that of mentoring business partners and business enablers. Imbibe a progressive self-directed and self-managed performance matrix. Above all, a firm’s ability to create an enriching experience for employees by setting up ‘incubators’ to nurture ideas from within the team.

Process – Recognize that the best plans can fail and the ability to respond to failures through risk mitigation is key. Plan ‘B’ is never a bad idea and in the true sense agile methodology is designed to identify the best steps and rapidly test the process by looking for solutions.

Strategy – A business operating model needs to focus on value creation at all levels in a way that it helps position a firm’s overall value proposition in the market. This basically hyperlinks to strategy.

Structure – Decision making should be simplified and streamlined. To do this, the roles and responsibilities of the teams should be well defined to support technical or functional needs. Introducing the scrum method and delayering firm’s hierarchy supports agility.

Technology – IT infrastructure should be appropriate to support an agile structure. To enable fast and continuous delivery, automation of the process is key. Professionals should have access to the right tools. Build out of simple solutions with larger impact to support the agile way of working is always recommended. Needless to say, not every technology that is high and mighty is the ‘right one’, for example – a small macro built can save the day! Staying watchful on the ROI while implementing a technology solution is key.

Role of an Agile Coach 

An agile coach is primarily responsible for the design of the agile process. They can be either employed full time or hired as consultants for a specific project. The need for an agile coach arises when a firm is transitioning from their existing operating methodology such as waterfall, into operating with the agile methodology principles. One key aspect of an agile coach is to help the firm and its key stakeholders in adapting to the agile mindset and function as a single team. An Agile coach is required to set the ground rules, regulations and create a winning strategy for the project.

Involving the expertize of an Agile coach will help direct the creation of key milestones for a transformation project plan that is based on agile methodology. He can help establish roadmap items for more effective project plans. The knowledge and experience of an Agile Coach will help ensure that the transformation runs smoothly.

Many a times firms fail during the transformation process as they do not have a clear roadmap, people naturally resist change, however it usually is a lack of clear direction.

Building an Agile Transformation Roadmap

Below are some important items to be included when creating an Agile Transformation Roadmap:

·      Align – Alignment, a critical first step, occurs when leaders understand the business goals of transformation and clearly articulate those goals.

·      Learn -Through training and guided practice with agile transformation coaching, teams and leadership are equipped with new techniques to understand how agile works. Process control is transferred to an empowered team and a culture of continuous improvement is introduced.

·      Predict - Teams solidify these newly learned practices and become more disciplined in their application. This allows leaders to get started in a predictable and iterative way, allowing them to make better predictive and informed business decisions. 

·      Accelerate - Once the process and controls are set within the team, the focus is then shifted to optimizing delivery models and shorten the time-to-market.

·      Adapt – Once ‘agile method’ becomes a way of life, teams are empowered and leadership can respond to the ever-changing demands of the market. At this stage, the firm achieves its true business agility.

Steps to achieving the milestones in the road map to agile transformation:

·      A plan on how to respond to change

·      Product and process plans

·      On-going coaching

·      Adaptation, inspection and reinforcement

·      Appropriate framework

·      Restructuring the firm

·      How to introduce agile adoption

Conducting smaller pilots of agile transformation proves to be more fruitful and effective instead of implementing it on the whole firm at once.

Forming smaller teams with identified team members who can dedicatedly work towards the set goals is key.

The leadership team should have an iterative approach and make sure repeated cycles of operations take place for desired results.

Team members should be given continual coaching and professional development to make the most of the transformation.

It’s best to completely move away from the waterfall approach and empower employees to work independently and solve problems themselves while also educating managers on how to evaluate and reward them.

KPI of an Agile Framework

As firms go to great lengths to create Agile environments, the need to evaluate and measure success is often desired.

Listed below are the most common ways in which Agile success is measured:

·      On-time or speed of delivery

·      Product Quality

·      Customer/User Satisfaction

·      Business value

·      Product scope (features, functionalities, requirements, etc.)

·      Process improvement

·      Project Visibility

·      Productivity

·      Predictability

Roles and Responsibilities in an Agile Team

Product Owner: A product owner is primarily responsible for setting the direction for product development or project progress. 

Team lead/Scrum master: The Team Lead ensures team coordination and supports the progress of the project between individual team members.

Development team members: The key responsibilities of the development team are to perform work sprints as per the requirements provided by the product owner and coordinated by the scrum master.

Stakeholders: Input from the stakeholders is key to direct the progress of the project in different directions to align product development with business goals, end-user expectations as well as addressing challenges facing the scrum development team.

Conclusion

To conclude agile transformation enables firms to be more proactive. ‘Do more with less’ and better serve the interests of their customers. To do it well, an agile transformation requires significant support, adequate resources and time, not to mention the commitment to stick it out when things get tough.

A successful agile transformation can revolutionize how a firm manages projects, addresses customer needs, and grows its business, which is why some firms are willing to take on the associated effort required to bring in the necessary results.