Agile has become a must-have component and there is a growing acceptance of its benefits. But implementing Agile is not easy for established companies.
Traditional companies are usually organised around its functions, siloed, structured hierarchy. Agile is a network of teams coming together to solve, complete a project operating in rapid learning and decision-making cycles. Traditional companies have a top-down approach, with decisions being taken by a top-level of senior executives and flow down the hierarchy. The Agile setup has a singular motive, the decisions are taken by the team closest to information. It can ideally combine speed and adaptability with stability and efficiency.
Agile transformation
An agile implementation across the organisation should be comprehensive and iterative ie., cover all the functions and capable of being adaptable.
There are many ways in which agile can be implemented
- All in - a commitment across the organisations and a series of waves of transformation.
- Step-wise - a systematic and more disciplined approach.
- emergent - essentially bottoms-up approach.
Many companies are born agile, especially in the IT sector. However, established companies must transform to adopt agility. They may vary in scope, pace and approach but there are two broad stages - aspire design and pilot, and scale and improve.
The first step is to aspire, design based on what is desired and do a pilot project, learn quickly and modify what is required. Once the model has proven itself, scale it up across the organisation.
Aspire, design and pilot
Agile starts with building
- the top management aspiration and understanding,
- creating a blueprint to identify how it will add value
- learning through pilots.
Top team aspiration
Top management must fully understand the benefits of the agile journey and a compelling aspiration is necessary for its success. No doubt adopting agile operations can solve many challenges but just the wish to address the challenges is not enough. A total commitment and a full understanding of strengths and challenges.
The best way to do this would be to visit top companies that have undergone this transformation and discuss in detail their journey and challenges during implementation, before launching the agile journey in the company.
Blueprint
Blueprint is more than a revised organisation chart and must provide a clear vision of how the new model would work. Agile fundamentally change the way work is accomplished and so it is necessary to identify changes to people, process and technology. It should give direction to the organisation to start testing the proposed design iteratively.
The first step in blueprinting is to identify where the value lies. This is based on understanding how value is created in the industry and in the organisation in particular which is linked to strategy.
Next is the structure. Blueprinting should create an organisation map showing how the individuals are grouped for doing work as well as a traditional organisational chart.
Agile teams are defined by outcomes and not by capabilities. Teams may use different models to achieve their task. There are three models which are most common.
- Cross-functional team: They have the knowledge and skills within and have projects that deliver solution end-end-end, products, services.
- self-managed teams: These teams are relatively stable over time, define best ways to set goals, prioritise activities and effort.
- Flow to work pools: Groups of individuals are assigned full time to different tasks based on priority.
Working in teams may be familiar, but working at the enterprise level it requires proper coordination and governance. The backbone should be the core processes, people elements and technology elements.
The final step is the implementation road map. This should give an overall view scope, pace and list of tasks.
Agile pilots. The purpose of the pilot is to demonstrate the agile view. It may be restricted to individual teams initially but may include multiple teams later to test the enterprise agility. The scope must be defined clearly. The way the pilot will be run should be outlined for the existing structure, process and people.
Scale and improve. Scaling is where most transformations fail. The leadership should have an iterative mindset. Key leaders must invest sufficient time and be willing to role model new behaviours. It should be understood that not everything is known at the beginning and adjustments must be made as the project gets underway.
Agile deployment and support. Scaling up requires more agile cells. The change should match the organisational context and aspiration. At some point, it would be necessary to rapidly adopt the agile model. The size and scope depending on context and aspiration. Resources to support new teams may limit the scale-up. Failure to support the team can cause delays and friction in the transformation.
Backbone transformation. The backbone determines how the decisions are made, how the manpower, budgets get deployed. This also requires suitable changes to scale up agile teams.
Capability accelerator. Successful scaling up requires new skills and mindsets. Many organisations require people to build new skills and capabilities. It requires trainers to retrain and reorganise staff make agile common to all and develop the right skills across the enterprises.
- First one needs to estimate the number of trainers required, hire and develop them, else it will cause a delay when the agile process is extended across the organisation.
- Next, the organisation must define agile roles along with success criteria.
- Third, learning and career paths must be set for all staff.
- Fourth continuous learning must be enabled and improvement across the organisation.
- Finally, design and run programs to raise agile skills and ensure proper onboarding.
Focus on culture and the change team
A culture and change team is essential to coordinate agile rollout. Emphasis should be on enabling other transformation elements, helping remove roadblocks and accelerate culture change.
Agile is a mindset and investing in culture and change should not be discounted. Without the right mindset, other parts of the agile system may be in place but will not see the benefits of this change.
Understanding transformation archetypes
The elements necessary for agile transformations have been discussed and what is to be understood is that it can be combined in different ways
Step-wise: Most common transformation types shows a clear difference between aspire, pilot phase and scaling phase. Companies may run multiple pilots before fully committing to agile rollout.
All-in: When a company gain strong conviction early on, they commit to moving the entire organisation to an agile model simultaneously. Leaders define plans to execute all the steps as quickly as possible. This type of transformation is very rare and it is more often for the change to proceed through several waves.
Emergent: It is impossible to plan out all the steps in detail right from the start. Instead, most organisations choose to progress their journey through a bottom-up approach. In this, leaders set a clear direction and effort is spent on building agile mindsets and capabilities among leaders.
Navigating an organisation to the agile model is not easy. the above discussion provides a guide.
The journey to an agile organization
by Daniel Brosseau, Sherina Ebrahim, Christopher Handscomb, and Shail Thaker McK 2019/05
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