Agile transformation is the sustained organization-wide process of helping individuals and organizations undergo the necessary mindset shift to reap the full benefits of agility.
Why is transformation necessary?
Agile is not merely a process: doing the steps does not guarantee you the results. With Agile, you aren’t baking a cake; you’re starting a movement. Getting many people to work together effectively requires a code of ethics – even if informal – to understand what is possible and what is acceptable.
When everyone is working under the same code of ethics, as in, say, a traditional business – where what is being produced, how, by what means and for how much are all established – then there is no need for transformation. What makes Agile transformation necessary for traditional business is the constant state of change and volatility in the market, as well as the democratization of value definition and delivery. Startups can compete with conglomerations on speed and quality, because big corporations are unable to pivot before windows of opportunity close. Smaller, more nimble companies are able to pursue these opportunities and create new, disruptive markets. By transforming the entire organization to be more Agile, big companies can retain competitive advantage
Some people grasp this, but most businesses don’t understand how much change is required. While more and more people are shifting their mindset to Agile, most have not had this same shift and are incapable of making the fine distinctions that set Agile apart from other value delivery methods.
Is transforming to Agile necessary?
In this Forbes article “Why Agile is Eating the World,” Steve Denning puts it this way: “Agile organizations are connecting everyone and everything, everywhere, all the time. They are capable of delivering instant, intimate, frictionless value on a large scale… Continuing the management practices and structures of the lumbering industrial giants of the 20th Century won’t cut the mustard.”
In other words, Agile transformation is necessary for organizations to thrive in today’s markets and into the future.
Agile Transformation Strategy
Your transformation strategy will need to address your specific needs. By first establishing where you are in your agility across a wide range of roles, workflow processes, product performance, understanding of your market and customers, and much more, you will be in a better position to answer the question, “Why does my organization need to transform to be more Agile?”
Some of our clients have identified the following whys for their own organizations, which you may find helpful:
- We can’t get value out the door quickly.
- Product performance has been underwhelming and we don’t have a process for integrating feedback into a product.
- We can’t keep pace with the changing technology and with evolving customer demands.
Looking at this list, we see that organizations are really seeking to retain market resilience. Because so much changes so quickly, today’s businesses need to develop a capability for learning and adapting with equal speed.
Your strategy and vision for the transformation will be guided by the near-term goals you set, and as you meet those goals, your strategy will evolve. You will need to consider:
- The timeline for achieving certain key milestones
- Where you would like to see quick wins first, with which to build momentum for the transformation initiative
- What technology will enable you to achieve your goals, and where your technology stack is today
- What product lines work for your future state, which will need to be evolved, and which you will need to sunset
- A communication and change management process to gain and maintain momentum and to facilitate feedback loops
- Whether to bring in external support in the form of training, coaching, consulting and change management
- How to maintain profitability in the midst of the change
- So much more…
Agile Transformation Roadmap
Every transformation is different, but a typical roadmap for transformation will have several common features:
- Analysis of where the organization is today – technologically, culturally, in the market, etc.
- Discovery of where the organization would like to be at some point in the future
- An area of the business where they can pilot a mini-transformation, from which to gain learning
- A vision to guide the transformation
- Governance as guard rails for the initiation
- A communication strategy for those affected directly as well as indirect effects the rest of the organization may see
- A change management strategy for working with and supporting the individuals and teams who will be living and working within the parameters of the pilot
- A high-level plan for what training, coaching, and consulting will be provided to these individuals and teams to make the intended initiative results stick
Waterfall to Agile Transformation
If Agile is the new way of working, we can think of the old way of working as “traditional”. You will also see and hear the word “waterfall” a lot. Not long ago, waterfall was an innovation, the first iteration of a consistent process for developing software.
The name “waterfall” is based on the thinking behind visualizations of value delivery like this one.
Early on, Scrum allowed teams to do the impossible: release value to end users within one sprint, with the typical sprint being two weeks. Even if that were inflated to four weeks or eight, delivering anything of value to an end user in anything short of six months to a year was just not possible.
Agile thinking is the difference. The traditional assumption is that a finished product would be delivered at the end of the whole process. But in Scrum – which is not synonymous with Agile but simply one approach to it – an increment of customer value would be delivered at the end of the sprint. It’s up to the team, working with the product owner, to decide what increment would be delivered. It could be a login screen for what will eventually be a website. The hard work is not in the delivery itself, but in figuring out how to break big work into small batches.
Waterfall thinking is the opposite: you design everything up front, including all of the controls in the iron triangle, and execute the plan without making any changes. We see the result of this strategy everywhere: The project goes out of scope, over budget, or takes too long. No one uses the features, because no one bothered to ask which features to make. Predictability and flexibility of the product is nil. And, up until people got tired of it, this was just the way software was developed. Many organizations still use this delivery method today.
Agile isn’t for every type of organization. For example, Agile is not suitable in stable and highly predictable environments where new knowledge isn’t being created and where the horizon of what is known is far away and wide. Unfortunately, this describes very few industries anymore. Agile is necessary in today’s VUCA world: volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous.
