When implementing Agile, should we use different strategies in different companies?
Yes and no!
I have participated in implementing Agile in several companies and they were all very different, some were small and fairly new (less than 10 years old) and some were big and huge. I have even tried to implement Agile in part of an organization.
It is in general easier to implement Agile in small and new organizations, people are more use to changes and they all have more than one competence, old and big organizations often have specialized roles and several processes in place to handle handovers and different stages in the implementation phases.
I have never been in an organization where everyone was positive to the Agile transformation, there is always someone who either do not see the need or do not understand or trust the outcome of the change; if you want to succeed with an Agile transformation, people need to understand that they need to change and improve how they work, the time where we kept the same job forever and never needed to change is long gone!
I always say that we need the CEO to support an Agile transformation if we want to succeed, an Agile transformation is a traditional change management project and it needs top management support to succeed. The companies where we were implementing Agile in part of the organization, was when we only had support up to a certain level in the organization, the challenge is if we have dependencies to other part of the organization or if the KPI etc. is designed in a way that makes our Agile life hard to manage.
I believe we need to treat all Agile transformations differently, but with most of the same ingredients:
- We need a steering committee who can help with communication and solving the obstacles we find in the transformation
- We need Agile education and Agile Coaches to raise the knowledge level in the organization and
- We need to build continuously learning into the company’s DNA
I was in a company where we used to say, “Assumptions is the mother of all fuckups”, in any Agile transformation there is a very strong need for communication and alignment, and it needs to be constant and for a very long time. I always say that when you start to work with Agile, you sign up for continuously learning, i.e. the need for communication and alignment will never end.
When you start to work with Agile, you often find several obstacles that prevent the teams from doing their jobs the best possible way, some obstacles can be solved by the team, but in many cases, the team need help from top level management to solve the challenges and in some cases a change in the organizational structure is needed – which is not so strange, most organizations are build to optimize waterfall projects.
The entire organization needs to learn about Agile, and we need to boost the learning. If Agile mean’s Scrum (and Kanban), you need to educate Scrum Masters, Product Owners, teams and managers, and you will increase the learning process if you also have Agile Coaches to help the teams, SM, PO and managers and build CoP across the organization. You can also use Agile Coaches to help the steering committee and to help people understand the purpose of why we do as we do, i.e. if team members does not understand why they have daily standup, they will soon build resistance or have pseudo daily.
I was once in a company where I was facilitating a monthly learning session, we use to have internal resources talking about how they were working, or we got inspiration from external speakers, i.e. one session was about a new testing tool and how the team was using it, this created a lot of learnings across the teams afterwards; some of our external speakers was about how they were using Agile in their company or we had speakers from “?redev Developer Conference” to inspire our teams, and not all of the speakers were for developers, we also had other type of speakers to inspire us!
Encourage learning is important, encourage CoP, monthly inspiration etc. will help a lot, in one of the companies I worked for, we use to have creative Friday once a month, we changed that to creative week twice a year with a huge success, the teams created a lot of new ideas for our backlog or they were building automatic testing systems to make the building environment even better.
An Agile transformation is not done in 5 minutes (i.e. Scrum in 5 minutes), but it is not rocket science, it is a mindset change and requires the right support and time to make the transformation succeed!
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