This agile stuff is really looking good. Sign me up, bring in the coach, let’s get going. Whoa, slow down a bit there Peppy. Love the enthusiasm; have you counted the full cost? Do you understand what this is going to do to your organization? You can be sure it will not be the same. It may not bear any semblance at all to what you have today.
Many people go into an agile transformation understanding that they will be adopting new methods and tools but not understanding the impact it will have on their entire organization, both structurally and culturally. Agile done right will touch the entire value stream from inception to delivery and post-delivery. The goal of an agile transformation is becoming agile, not doing agile.
An agile organization can handle high change situations; it assesses new situations quickly and then acts fast to achieve its goals. This requires the agile organization to empower its teams to make decisions and act on them without layers of approvals. An agile organization has pushed decision making down to the level that is most able to make the best decision because they are closest to the problem. As long as they understand the larger objectives, they should be able to make the right decisions.
An agile organization is both consistent and adaptable. This is achieved by building self-sufficient teams who are capable of moving to wherever the work is needed. To the extent possible, they are interchangeable parts. They all know how to work with each other and with the rest of the value stream and they know how to use the tools to get the job done. There may be some storming and norming as they move to a new area, but they will soon be performing.
An agile organization adopts standards and processes to support and embrace speed, change, and consistency. The interchangeable teams described above require standards to achieve that capability. Standards in architectural design, UX design, testing and staging environments, coding practices, and systems development life cycle tools. The standards must be lightweight so the teams can use their best judgment to solve the problems they encounter, while maintaining a structure that others will be able to support.
An agile organization embraces implicit leadership. This is likely the biggest change for most organizations. As opposed to most leadership models where people with titles decide who will do what and how, with implicit leadership the teams self-organize and leadership emerges depending upon the situation. Implicit leadership is built on the servant leader model where the titled leaders focus on enabling the teams and clearing roadblocks.
One last word of caution concerning the transformation to agile. There will be people in your current organization who do not work well in an agile organization. Their personality or temperament simply doesn’t flourish with this kind of dispersed decision making. This is not to be critical of them, only to be real and recognize this situation. Not everyone flourishes in every organization. When an organization changes so dramatically, there will be some who don’t do well in the new culture. You need to be prepared to work with these individuals to find the right place for them to flourish.
