We're All in This Together. Surviving Agile Disruption
According to one of my favorite book "The Lean startup" by Eric Ries the difference between a Startup and a mature organization is their ability to Fail Fast
Disrupt or be disrupted , it's all come to this. Suddenly, many organizations heading for an Agile attack. Our responsibility beeing Agile Coaches and Scrum masters to mention that this is just an experiment that's taking place in you, your team and your organization. Your traditional world around you will still be available. I'm not even sure how to present it . Imagine the NY Giants are moving to Dallas and the Dallas Cowboys moving to New York just for one season or Americans having to drive on the left side for one year and use metric system in construction just in Miami for a month or making McDonald's French Fries out of quinoa for a month of September ( it's already bad taste in my mouth ...)
Being Agile is simple, but many organizations experience different challenges than others. The adoption to be Agile is a journey that is best undertaken with both eyes open. There are soo many ugly disconnects between what adopting organization currently practice with their current culture and the new "practices" being adopted.
Many organizations want to go through Agile transformation because the numbers and hard facts are very convincing and they can't ignore them any longer . In any traditional hierarchical organizations moving through Agile transformation that has command and control cultures without C-level support is guaranteed failure —PERIOD. The decision and drive to change how the organization operates has to come from the top down.
Once you, your team and your organization begin breathing again, we'll be wondering what we did to one of the great pillars of Traditional Project management society. Unfortunately , the more mature an organization gets, the less effective it becomes at failing. I think this alone is the reason why mature organization seems so stupid at times besides their fallacy of the perfect plan.
Besides the Soviet Union and some old very fashioned VC requires tree-five-year plans to forecast complete unknowns.
Organizations should not blindly follow repeatable results. Excellence is only with repeatable success. Nevertheless, even though the results of our software product are not repeatable, Product success is repeatable!!!!!
Stay Agile my friends,.
Chief Transformation Officer | Enterprise Agility Coach | Change Orchestrator
7 年Like the article Alek. "The decision and drive to change how the organization operates has to come from the top down." This is absolutely true, but the other side of that equation is leading a critical mass of the people to take up a leadership role in driving change. Only having one or the other also results in failure.
Independent Lean-Agile Coach Consultant
7 年Good article Aleksandr. I find it interesting that many corporations and the former Soviet Union have something in common: 3-5 year plan-driven economies. I am sure Frederick Winslow Taylor would be proud! ;-)
CTO. Author. Explorer.
8 年Nice article. Absolutely agree that without leadership support it's a joke. Pity many ignore that and try to do what the can (fiddle with isolated team-level practices, for example) instead of doing what's needed to be done. A good series of analogies w.r.t. what it takes to switch to a new mindset. I have another good one for you though: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFzDaBzBlL0.
Agile AI Coach (Actual Practice) Enterprise Agile Coach | Organizational Change leader | Executive Coach | Trainer | Facilitator | Atlassian Expert
8 年It is the 'How' the organization being 'Agile'. And it's the 'Who' that doing it.But, the most imported key Is that not only the mind set makes Agile so productive it's the freedom of creativity that takes it to the next level and really innovative. Otherwise, the organization can fallback again to it's Havelly paste to do Agile.