Leading an Agile Transformation

I have written on this basic topic many times before, but I want to start a series, and start putting things together. To create something useful, in a bigger way, for those on this path.

Who leads the Agile Transformation?

Everyone does.

Really everyone must lead. Everyone must, in some way, be offering help that makes this happen.

And, in some cases, the key person at first is the ScrumMaster (eg, of the first agile team), and Agile Coach, or a key manager.

What is an Agile Transformation?

This is actually a difficult question to answer well.

Why?

Because each situation is different, is one reason. Because an agile transformation is a journey. Because the high-level goals seem rather vague to many people (even though top-level managers are quite used to these high-level goals being vague).

Here are some key things that are typically involved in an agile transformation:

• adding more agile teams
• getting the agile teams set up better
• changing the broader organization to work well with the agile teams (and maybe changing the agile teams to work better with other parts of the organization)
• making the whole organization agile (which is always more than just having good agile teams)
• changing the culture or mindset of all the people connected to the agile teams, so that they naturally arrive at "agile-friendly" adjustments to day-to-day problems
• making adjustments so that we achieve real business agility. (Problem: business agility is a bit of a buzzword, not well defined, and defined often by a many different people differently. We will discuss it more later.) Often these changes are thought of as changes to "the current processes".
• usually "scaling" is involved, by which I mean having commonly 3 teams work closely together on a big project. (Note: "Scaling" is also used to mean other things.)
• making changes to other people, departments, processes, etc to work better with agile (Ex: changes to HR, Finance, Operations, Implementation, Product Management, etc.) [The third bullet above is general, this one is more specific to each Department.]

Can the Agile Transformation come along with other Big Changes

Isn't it always fun when they capitalize Big Changes?

Of course, as some of you surely know, often other big changes are happening at the same time, either internally or externally.

Examples:

• Re-position the corporate IT strategy
• Address Technical Debt in a much more meaningful way than before
• Merger with another organization
• Responding to Covid and Work-from-Home issues
• Changing the business model to be more innovation-oriented
• Trying to overcome old issues, such as the divide between Business and Technology
• Trying to respond more quickly to one or more key business challenges

As hinted by at least the last item, sometimes "become more agile" is needed to deal with one or more of the issues just listed.

First Step

Finally, a bit of advice.

"Agile Transformation" is almost always too amorphous, too fuzzy, too undefined.

So, if you want to be the leader or you are asked to be a leader, you must take responsibility to define it. And help other people (often including your boss) understand it, understand what your role will be, and understand how we should judge success or "failure." (Note: some level of failure is necessary for learning to occur, and whenever you learn a new skill set (eg, agile transformation), some level of failure will happen.)

You will have to be more specific than I was above. You must address the specific situation you are in (or your organization or line-of-business is in).

Two things you must say: We will have a concept of agile transformation, and an action list (product backlog) of things we want to do about it. We expect both of these to change with time.

They will change because we got some things done, because of learning (eg, about agile), and because your organization will be seen in a new, different situation in time (mostly independent of agile).

Second Step

Three things to realize:

1. You are not the first person to attempt an agile transformation. And probably not the first person in your industry to do so.
2. You have never done this before! (Well, have you really done this before? Successfully?)
3. Lots of good people have "failed" at agile transformation.

Let us chuckle about the second item. You have done something, at least a little bit, like this. At the very least, you or someone thinks you might be the right person to lead this.

But, you definitely have not done it in this case, and this case is always notably different than all prior cases. One reason is that the people are different (yes, maybe you have some of the same people, but still the group of people are different).

Easy to fail

Yep. It is easy to fail at agile transformation.

And failure comes in several flavors. And you cannot control it that much.

Let's talk about that next time.

Conclusion for this time

My main advice from this session:

Learn about it (lots to learn).

Define it for your specific situation. Which includes a product backlog of work.

Start to judge what kind of jungle you've thrown yourself into. And think about what you have and what you don't have to fight your way, in a fun way, through the jungle.

No worries! More help is coming!