Is Your Organisation the Greatest Impediment to Agile?

In the last State of Agile Report; 51% of companies said the biggest impediment to adopting the Agile values was their organisational culture.

Agile transformations, ultimately, are delegated down to managers. That is typically what happens; a senior executive visits another company or reads Forbes or hears a podcast and thinks

"That sounds good. We should do that. I will put my top guy on it. Make it happen."

In the past, that is what happened with Rational Unified Process. That is what happened with Lean Six Sigma and that is what happens today with Agile.

Every once in a while, a senior engineer is promoted to a position of power and then Agile springs up organically. Product-centric delivery begins to take root and engineers migrate towards the project encouraged by the delivery, collaboration and new technologies.

They start to implement all of the practices and patterns that enable iterative engineering. Tentatively the team begins to reject some of the restrictive business practices and their independence is paid for using political capital by the senior engineer.

The Senior Engineer has enough relationships built in the business to clear a path for their team.

Soon, other senior managers, maybe a Head Of role, take notice and ask to replicate the success. Agile then becomes mandated, Scrum Masters are thrown at the departments, but not Product Owners, that remains a side of the desk activity.

Agile is supported within reason.

As we used to say in the military

You are allowed to think outside the box. But it needs to be inside my box.

Within an Agile transformation, typically the Nominated Delivery Person(Scrum Master / Technical PM / Product Owner) will have the power to do the following

• Institute agile ceremonies (everyone to the standup!)
• Trial agile tools (hello Jira my old friend!)
• Track agile metrics (Velocity looks good but let's really blow the balls off next sprint; go for 26 points instead of 23!)

However, despite this, the senior stakeholders will seek to maintain command and control through the use of traditional apparatus including the Steering Committee, funding requests, change control, risk logs and other stage-gate behaviours. At this point, the Nominated Delivery Person will seek the help of the Agile Coaches who then, in good coaching style, ask the business

"Why do you need these things?"

To which they will respond with

"We just do and we really need a bit more pragmatism about Agile."

Bonus points if Agile is said with scorn.

Ian Mitchell has produced an excellent summary of the Top 20 Agile Executive Leadership Fails and a key point that stands out

"The way executives personally interact with their organization must change too."

Executives must set the standard and weed out those ineffective managers who inhibit the release of business value. Many times Agile teams succeed in spite of the middle-management around them, not because of them.

If you are a Scrum Master or a Coach you should be constantly running the risk of antagonizing management by pushing for greater adoption of the Agile values. Be bold in defending your team. 

"No John, we won't fill in a risk log...because we manage risk through constant delivery of business value. If you want to lower risk start attending the Sprint Reviews to see the product."

Never forget, Agile succeeds bottom up, but it must be sponsored top down. 

Transforming a business is really transforming individuals; beginning with the most senior leaders and influencers.

Few of them, in my experience, have spent much time reflecting and understanding their own assumptions or the Agile values. The result is something that the psychologists Lisa Lahey and Robert Kegan have termed “immunity to change.”

If you maintain alignment with the Agile principles, you won't go far wrong.

How have you supported business transformations, tell us in the comments.

Steven Feeney is an Agile Coach, a former winner of Lean Startup London and a guest lecturer at the University of London.

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