How do you know if your company is ready for an Agile Transformation?

The Direction with Heart Coaches approach to Agile Transformations.

There are several articles out in the wild talking about all the “rules” of agile transformations. I wanted to share some thoughts about agile transformations, now that I have been involved in them for a while. Maybe this will help, or maybe it will make you pull your hair out.

Agile transformations aren’t a one-day or even one-month event; they are journeys. There are certainly some lovely destinations along the way, but often they don’t have a clear ending. It’s muddy and sometimes not very pretty, especially for those transformations that fail. And yes, transformations can and do fail regularly. I have seen teams start and stop trying to transform multiple times before things fall into place for the transformation to happen (or not).

One of the many problems I see is the team’s make-up. Teams that are too big, too small, or with members working on different kinds of work. One set of workers is developing, while another is testing. I also regularly see teams that have “shared” people, so they are working part-time for two or more teams and often spread too thin because they are the experts.?

I have also seen teams made up of vendors, a variety of vendors from different parts of the planet, so they are not only not talking to one another about the work, they are completely siloed from parts of the team.

So how do you know if your company or team is ready for an agile transformation?

Is your leadership ready to give up command and control and top-down management? I would recommend that the leaders need to be prepared before we even start working with the teams. They need to be ready to give up control and allow their teams the autonomy they need to be agile. More often than not, what I have observed is that leaders come to me and say, “Make my team agile.” That is not how this works.

Leaders need to be agile first. If your leaders aren’t ready for this change, asking the teams to change is, frankly, rather hypocritical in my mind. On top of that, who wants to be part of a team that is forced into being agile because someone said so, especially if the team is working well together at that moment?

If the leader isn’t leading by example, they can’t expect their team to be on board with the transformation. Often, leaders are where I see the transformations begin and end. I confess that I have a bias about this. I don’t see leaders stopping agile transformations on purpose; they are doing the best they can in the ever-changing business landscape. However, change is required at all levels of the organization, not just at the team level, to have a successful transformation, and it starts with leaders willing to do the hard work of change first.

Next up! Do you have persistent teams? Is your team made up of 3-10 people? Are they all working on the same kind of work? Is everyone on the team able to do all the types of work that are required by the team? Can your team members do both development and testing (or all parts of the required work)? If not, this is a great place to stop attempting a transformation and start working on getting your teams the skills they need to be successful in agile.

You can restructure your teams so that the team is persistent and right-sized. Make sure that they aren’t made up of “parts of people” on the team. People don’t come in “parts,” so don’t make them try to work that way. One of the agile principles is sustainability; if you are asking people to work on multiple teams, you may not be ready for an agile transformation.

Another failure I have witnessed is too many changes unloaded on the team all at once. This almost always results in a failed agile transformation. It also impacts the team’s ability to do their day-to-day job and their ability to complete their work.

You NEED the roles of Product Owner and Scrum Master. And it cannot be one person. I have seen all kinds of nuttiness around the PO and Scrum Master roles—all rolled into one, people doing regular work on the team and then also doing these roles as well. Now, I am not against a Scrum Master coaching more than one team because I think that’s possible, but please, not more than two, or max three, if they are well-developed and highly experienced teams. In the beginning, the Scrum Master should be doing more than just facilitating the ceremonies; they should be training the team and helping the PO grow. Having these roles move around from team to team is also not great.

A team goes through many cycles as they move from strangers to a team. The cycles are well laid out in Tuckman’s model of Forming, Storming, Norming, Performing, and Adjourning. When the team is forming, having an experienced guiding hand in a good Scrum Master can make a huge difference. And having an experienced PO can create an even better experience for helping the group grow into a team.?

Please keep in mind if the team has members coming in and out, the team will get stuck in the forming stage and never be able to move onto the other stages and we want our teams to make to at least the norming stage!

It's okay if the Scrum Master or PO are not experienced at first, but if they don’t have an experienced mentor to work with, watch over them, come to meetings, and provide feedback, we have a situation, Houston. Failure to launch is a likely outcome.

So, if at this point you have a leader who is ready to give up command and control, persistent teams that are all working on the same kind of work, and a Scrum Master and PO lined up, you could be ready to move into an Agile Transformation. Note the “could be.”

As an experienced Agile Coach, I always start by doing a listening tour of the teams that I am working with. I attend their meetings (as much a fly on the wall as possible), and I have one-on-ones with all the team members and leaders. This can go on from a couple of weeks to more than a month, because if I am going to ask for hard changes, the teams need to trust that the things I am asking them to do have their best interests at heart.? Without the relationship, another failure to launch is likely eminent.

Once I know their workflows (even if I am not a developer), and I see the level of psychological safety on their teams, I start checking in with the team about some small changes we can make to start moving toward either psychological safety or agile. Each item is viewed as an experiment, checking in often to see if it’s working for the team. Is this fast? Nope. Is it efficient? Probably not. Is it effective? More than likely.

So, the reality is that there are a LOT of moving parts in an Agile Transformation, and not every organization and team is ready to transform—and that’s okay! Forced transformations are not okay; they rarely work, and you usually end up with a bigger mess than when you started.

There are many things you can start to work on as a manager or as a grassroots team that wants to start experimenting. From my perspective, a really great place to start is working on having an agile mindset!

?Samantha Sieverling - Senior Agile Coach Logic20/20, Inc.