The Critical Role of the CoE in the Rebirth of Agile

I know, I’m sick of talking about “Is Agile Dead” topics too. But I see glimmers of hope in the market. Friends who have been looking for a long time are getting jobs. Companies I know are changing the way they treat agile and their transformations.

And I’m seeing a trend that I hope is true. In my gut, I know it needs to be true.

The Advocates of Agile need to be centralized, not stuck in Technology.

Whether you call it an Agile CoE or a Lean Agile Center of Excellence or something else entirely, I’m talking about the advocates of agile, those who help define, educate, and instigate change for the sake of greater agility. (btw, I like "Enablement" over "Excellence")

To impact the whole company as they should, the Agile CoE needs to exist in a more centralized political center of the organization. This way they can advocate for agility everywhere, not just in how software is made, but true Business Agility.

Also, Project Management and Agile Ways of Working need to learn how to complement each other, or at least agree on common ground (product and customer driven strategies, short timelines, longstanding teams, etc.) and, dare I say, operate out of the same department. Instead of an Agile CoE, perhaps a good name for that is a Value Management Office?

Organic Transformative Progress

No singular strategy works for “agile transformations”. You can’t pick a framework, even SAFe, and be done. You can’t focus on training teams and be done. You can’t even educate your executives in agile and expect it to trickle down. And you definitely can’t overload an existing executive with the sole responsibility of advocating for change on their own. So, if an organization is still working on evolving to a more mature agile culture, there needs to be a central advocacy group who nurtures it and listens to what is needed before suggesting or taking action.

These advocates or people who run the Agile CoEs, Lean Agile Centers of Excellence, or Value Management Offices have a difficult job balancing what is best for the organization.

Strategic Considerations

It’s perhaps anti-agile and counterintuitive, but many things need to happen at once for an agile transformation to be most impactful and efficacious. The Agile CoE (or whatever you call it) should know the temperature of many things at once so they can decide where to invest more time and adjust. This tight feedback loop is critical. Otherwise, the company runs the risk of investing in an unbalanced way. Overtrained teams with not enough safety and support from the leaders does not work and the training will be wasted, for example.

At a high level then, what are the things that need balancing? What efforts are crucial to any transformation? (By the way, I also hate the word transformation because I know change never ends, but our industry recognizes this word to represent what companies need to do when they are early in their journey to becoming agile.)

Executive Support

We’ve all heard the term “top down” before. And to me, that means making sure the executives understand why agile is important. They don’t necessarily need to know everything, or even practice it everyday. But the more the better and there are some key concepts for them to understand. And most importantly, they need to be able to say “our company will be agile” to provide a foundation and motivation for those that might be resistant.

Key aspects and differences of the agile ways of working are crucial for a leader to know, so that, for example, old behaviors that conflict with the Agile Mindset do not continue. Important cultural shifts are hidden here like pushing responsibility and accountability into the teams and not expecting middle managers to be proxies that own the entire responsibility alone. Understanding the benefits of product prioritization and dynamic scope in efforts and not adhering to fixed scope and fixed timelines is another culture shift that takes time to change.

Strategic Alignment

The company has a vision. That vision needs to inspire a Product-led strategy to present a limited set of products and services to internal and external customers to fulfill that vision. The products are components of value streams that describe the end-to-end value delivery the company exists in to deliver to and delight customers. The value streams might influence the way the organization is shaped. And strategic short-term measures, perhaps Objectives and Key Results, should reflect the short- and long-term vision the company has in delivering value to customers. Every team in every department of the company should know how their work aligns to the OKRs, products, and vision of the company.

Training and Awareness

Training is a very specific word with baggage. Somehow, every person in the company needs to know how their role changes in order to support the strategic alignment mentioned above. In some cases, that will mean role-based training. In others, it may mean whole-team jumpstarts to provide a foundation of knowledge and a general direction for teams to gain momentum, then continue learning on their own. Managers will need direction too in how their jobs change, some more than others.

Coaching at different levels can be extremely effective, especially in short bursts directly for teams, teams of teams, and leaders.

The company should have regular communications about the whole-company shift that is happening, reminders about what services are offered to them, where they can learn more, and how expectations are changing. Creating awareness like this is important, even in small things like sharing success stories from around the company.

Reinforcement and Sustainability

Communities of Practice for different peer groups so they can learn from each other and request support as needed is a crucial part of leveraging a small number of people to help a large organization.

For the culture of a large organization to change, there must be an expectation that there will be lapses and setbacks. Delivering training once does not create lasting change. John Kotter suggests a “guiding coalition” of change agents, everywhere in the organization to help reinforce messages and be the eyes and ears in the field.

Then… Inspect and Adapt

If, as an Enterprise Agile Coach, I was invited to the Agile CoE to help figure out how to balance these very delicate and crucial aspects of where to invest in the transformation, I would look for leading indicators and proxies to help measure each of these components. There are layers of strategy inside each of the high level items listed above. Lean Portfolio Management and how strategic product decisions are made, for example, is a piece of strategic alignment.

I would pose ideas like “We will know the Executive Support component is working well when the following things are true…” and then would spend some of my time finding out in fact if those things were true, report back, and decide with the CoE if we needed to shift focus this quarter, for example, on helping coach or uplift that component of our transformation. It may take some time to identify the right indicators to build the right buttons, levers, and pulleys to help the CoE make decisions about what to do.

The Agile CoE’s backlog should look a lot like the Transformation Backlog that Fin Goulding talks about in the book Transformation Sprint, but it should be whatever makes most sense strategically for the organization, informed by the leading indicators and a balance of where more investment is required vs. where less time can be spent at the moment.

This just feels like common sense to me. You cannot change a company with only a top down strategy. You cannot change a company by only training the teams. And you cannot change a company by designing a better strategy without a great, balanced plan to execute it mindfully and delicately doing a little of each important thing at a time, then listening carefully for what to do next.

When coaching a team, a great agile coach will recognize that you must “meet the team where they are” which means to pay close attention to what they are doing well and where specifically they need help and nudge them in the right direction with the right attention to the right details.

The ideas above are no different. It’s just my thoughts on how to “meet a company where they are”.

I hope this helps someone somewhere who, like me, is passionate about helping companies on this journey to greater agility.

If you enjoyed this, please clap and share. It means a lot to know my work on this blog is read and used by agilists out there in the world.

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Hi, I’m Brian Link, an Enterprise Agile Coach who loves his job helping people. I call myself and my company the “Practical Agilist” because I pride myself on helping others distill down the complexity of the agile universe into easy to understand and simple common sense.

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