How do you achieve true agility across an enterprise?
"It takes a village to raise a child." Achieving true enterprise agility is surely not an easy path. It involves changes to existing structures, questioning traditional mind-sets, and envisioning a new way of delivering work. Planning and executing a process change for a single team with a handful of individuals and limited variables and risks is far less challenging when compared to coaching an enterprise with a few hundred or more individuals on a paradigm shift in their thought process and behavior. One can find countless case studies, articles, and journals on the Internet to support this claim. If an organization has an appetite for embracing agility and commits to the necessary steps required to establish a transformation mechanism to achieve the same, why does scaling an Agile behavior across the enterprise seem to become an insurmountable goal? More important, why does an organization so often lose focus from the goal of continuous improvement and quickly slip into an autopilot mode of rinsing and repeating the same tried and tested traditional mind-set that failed them in the first place?More than a decade of coaching and training several large organizations on all things Agile has led me to believe that achieving enterprise agility begins with asking the right questions. Such an approach may start with conducting initial assessments to understand an organization's readiness to adopt Agile as well as the current state of its use of methods. From a strategic standpoint, these would include interviewing key individuals and groups at various levels in the company on aspects such as: What is the business driver or need behind the organization's look at using Agile? What are the biggest challenges currently (i.e., what problem are they trying to solve)? At a tactical level, these assessments would focus on enquiring about aspects such as: How are the teams structured? What is the scope for the transformation (i.e., what teams may be looking at transitioning to using the Agile approach)? The output of such an assessment is usually a 360-degree view that can help one gauge whether an organization is truly ready for a paradigm shift in its strategy and tactics. Personally, this coaching technique has proven effective many times in leading organizations toward a thought process of self-discovery and helping them make conscious decisions to establish a realizable vision for transformation. Further, sustaining enterprise agility also requires creating a rational strategy to realize such a vision, regularly monitoring and evaluating the investments made for it and executing the strategy by efficiently managing project work and truly embracing Scrum values (i.e., focus, courage, openness, commitment, and respect).
A recipe for success
Organizations often seek out cookie-cutter strategies for process transformations and underestimate the role of valuable parameters such as culture/mind-set, nature of work, factory models (e.g., matrix versus project-centric or functional silos) when defining a vision for change. To sustain an enterprise-wide Agile transformation, it is critical that the company's leadership is educated on what they are getting into and what to expect along the way.Over the years, I have been asked many times whether there is a blueprint to structure an approach for scaling Agile adoption across an enterprise. Given below are a few Agile enablers that can be leveraged to coach an organization and manage expectations about the transformation journey.
Foundational training across the organization: A positive effort to create an improved business requires an organization to invest in its most valuable resource -- people. Effective foundational Agile training can develop people's potential and in turn generate improved behaviors and techniques to deliver a high-quality product. Hence, an organization's commitment to up-front training is extremely valuable and can prove to be an effective Agile enabler to promote a successful adoption. Also, top management should be trained effectively to back the Agile adoption and be able to remove blocks and foster creativity throughout the organization. It is critical that they understand their role and demonstrate the core Agile values in their behaviors.
Dedicated hands-on coaching: At a tactical level, engaging an Agile coach for hands-on coaching during project execution can prove highly beneficial during the initial few sprints/iterations. A team new to the process might struggle with getting the maximum value out of certain Agile mechanics (e.g., sprint/iteration planning, retrospective, release planning, story mapping, etc.). Hence, a seasoned coach can guide the team toward efficient use of the same. A coach can also help improve self-discipline in a team. For instance, the Agile Manifesto line "Working software over comprehensive documentation" demands that, ideally, a team should deliver working software or a completed product increment every sprint. So, establishing a clear Definition of Done for the team's sprint/iteration goal can enforce this value. A coach can assist the team in carving out such a definition, considering the nature of the team's work and its velocity.
From a strategic standpoint, a coach can assist middle management and senior leadership to build the necessary line of sight for future work required to ensure a continued flow of value to its customers. Additionally, coaching both core and extended team members on the benefits of structuring communication vehicles like Scrum of Scrums, Agile open forums (e.g., Hothouses, Open Spaces, Lean Coffees, etc.) can help an organization periodically gauge its Agile transformation maturity as well as effectively manage its leadership's expectations about the overall enterprise-wide changes.
Also, a team's engineering practices can set a benchmark for its success. For instance, often system testing, integration testing, and defect resolution can bleed over across sprints/iterations, thereby preventing teams from consistently delivering working software at the end of each sprint/iteration. Hence, coaching the team on certain technical practices (e.g., test-driven development, continuous integration, automated build deployments, and automated testing), as well as guiding them on how to craft user stories such that they are small enough to complete and deliver in a sprint/iteration or less and large enough to independently deliver business value (i.e., think INVEST criteria for user stories), can prove critical to completing a sprint/iteration successfully. Hence a coach's expertise can be pivotal to enabling Agile and ensuring sustainability.
Enabling and managing Agile projects through governance: Another key enabler to Agile adoption can be an enterprise-wide governance framework geared to manage Agile projects and drive Agile adoption on new initiatives by carefully assessing their characteristics (e.g., size, risk, complexity, business value, etc.) and providing guidance on whether the project is a good fit for Agile or not. Such a mechanism will encourage new projects to present themselves in ways that everyone (especially senior management) can understand. In essence, standardizing the dimensions on which new projects are assessed will establish a robust mechanism to effectively tie an organization's Agile transformation vision to its project management strategy.
So, is there a blueprint?
Every organization requires a different flavor of counseling when it comes to steering them toward a new way of doing work. Agile tactics focus on delivering incrementally, communicating daily, and increasing collaboration and feedback to help drive results and value to the customer. However, achieving enterprise agility requires an adaptive leadership style that consciously embraces ambiguity, takes risks that disrupt the status quo, institutes new management styles, and expedites decision making across the organization.In today's global business market, an organization should be able to adapt effectively and efficiently to unexpected changes in order to gain an edge over the competition. Hence, agility should be prioritized as an objective by all levels of an organization and fueled by the requisite processes, policies, and knowledge management techniques.
In a nutshell, there isn't a firm blueprint for achieving true enterprise agility. However, a strategy built on a logical thought process and executed with rational planning can certainly pave the way for success. Agile is a team process, and achieving true agility requires a team effort, no matter how large or small the scale.
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