Agile Transformation Part 2: Execution

In our third AgileBeyondTech article, Richard Hillsley looks at Mindera’s approach to adopting agile methodologies across software development.

Improving agile ways of working is much more about forming better habits than adherence to doctrine.

Change can be difficult, particularly when it involves people. When changing to more agile ways of software engineering, we must take people with us. To make the transition easier, at Mindera, we focus on identifying the required ‘shifts’ that are needed, then look for candidate projects or teams where improvements can be tried, tested, and embedded.

This could involve shifting to a more participatory management style, to a product mindset, or to adaptive planning techniques. Alternatively, it may demand more technical changes, such as deploying a more modular architecture (allowing for more significant decoupling and autonomy) or an improved CICD pipeline.

Where we see results, we double down to amplify these successes to encourage broader adoption. It’s tantamount to finding quick wins, which quickly builds trust and confidence and gets the flywheel of change turning.

Choosing pilots

Let’s say we diagnose six key shifts required for a company on its agile journey. We pick one, start there, and use it as an incubator – a pilot.

We refer to these candidate projects or teams as ‘pilots’. This is an intentional term to permit a degree of latitude and forgiveness from management and to be able to experiment with introducing improvements, accepting that we might not get things exactly right the first time. We talk about ‘shifts’ because it’s rarely a binary change that’s at stake. Improving agile ways of working is much more about forming better habits than adherence to doctrine.

Having formed a baseline diagnosis of an organisation with our agile maturity assessment framework, we work with our partners to create an agile enablement plan. This is structured in the form of recommended shifts to move away from current practices and capabilities to new ones that will help unlock greater agility. There may be prioritisation and dependencies between the transitions, which we cater for and advise on.

Creating a virtuous circle

Let’s say we diagnose six key shifts required for a company on its agile methodology adoption journey. A pilot could be a new project, a particular initiative (an epic) on a team’s backlog, or a department or process within the organisation where we apply concerted effort to affect change. We pick one, start there, and use it as an incubator – a pilot. We apply some guiding rules that help us to identify suitable pilots, including:

Willingness of the people involved – an open mindset and, ideally, some previous agile methodology experience is preferable.
Inherent risk of the project or the work the team conducts – low risk is preferable, certainly for the first few pilots.
Inherent complexity of the planned shift – something that takes a few months rather than years is preferable, so we can quickly demonstrate results or fail-fast and try something else.

The aim of each pilot is to eat the elephant one bite at a time. We use pilots to target some areas of improvement rather than trying to fix everything all at once. In all but the simplest organisations, it’s unlikely we’ll achieve all the required shifts in a single pilot. But the discipline of being focussed, picking candidates with a good chance of success, allows us to evidence results and then expand.

Through careful publicity of positive results, enabled by a comms plan and support from an internal comms team and the agile transformation sponsors, this approach creates buy-in and a ‘pull’ from other teams from the organisation at large, who want to get in on the act. This creates a virtuous circle.

Organisational change support

Equipping the organisation with the skills required to foster agility is key to successful agile journeys. It’s crucial to train and coach people alongside the growing adoption of new ways of working, which are activities that run alongside the pilots. Typically, this involves internal training, which Mindera often manages. We have developed a suite of agile training courses that are more immersive and experiential than the textbook courses you can find elsewhere, and we often tailor these depending on client circumstances.

Training needs to begin at the start of the change journey and then gradually expand, immersing more and more people from the organisation as pilots ramp up. We focus on helping organisations become self-sufficient, which can also see us assisting with the interview process for scrum masters and agile methodology coaches.

We see our role as a guiding hand enacted through the centre of enablement (CoE), a small team of experienced agile practitioners. The CoE is there to:

Identify the pilots
Facilitate and support each pilot (bootstrapping)
Coordinate the journey
Coordinate comms
Resolve organisational impediments
Track and report progress to the sponsors

The CoE meets on a regular basis. Of course, the team eats its own dog food by running a backlog, operating sprints with sprint goals, showcasing results, reflecting (agile retrospectives) on what worked well and what didn’t, and then adapting.

Agile champions

We’ll always find that there are a few people in the organisation who are natural champions for agile ways of working. There are likely to be pockets of knowledge and experience, or at least optimism and a willingness to invest time and energy to improve things. Identifying and promoting these people as agile champions is another tactic that drives good results.

These people often have all the right ideas, but may have lacked agency to effect change. So the presence of external expertise from a company like Mindera is often the necessary catalyst. Some of these people may well be members of the agile CoE, and very often, they’ll be intrinsic to the pilots in guiding change and helping to evangelise.

Measuring Progress

Back in the previous article, we talked about the importance of aligning on the ‘why change’, and it’s at this time that we define some key metrics. The role of the CoE is then to track whether those metrics are improving. For the most part, this is collectively evidenced from the pilots, for example:

How quickly is change (value) released?
Is change more predictable?
Has quality improved?
Are team members happier?

Making the transition to agile methodologies through pilots is a very practical approach of patiently iterating and gradually seeding change into an organisation from the ground up. In our experience, it’s the best way to succeed with enterprise agility. And because markets don’t stand still, neither should you, so it’s vital to commit to continual learning and improvement to maintain and boost agility constantly, helping future-proof your organisation.

It’s vital to commit to continual learning and improvement to maintain and boost agility constantly, helping future-proof your organisation.

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Key takeaways

To make the agile transition easier, first identify the required ‘shifts’ that are needed, then look for candidate or ‘pilot’ projects or teams where improvements can be tried, tested, and embedded.
Having formed a baseline diagnosis of an organisation through an agile maturity assessment framework, create an agile enablement plan structured in the form of recommended shifts to new practices and capabilities that unlock greater agility.
Careful publicity of positive results, enabled by a comms plan and support from an internal comms team and the agile transformation sponsors, creates buy-in from other teams from the organisation who want to get in on the act. This creates a virtuous circle.
Equipping the organisation with the skills required to foster agility is key to successful agile journeys. It’s crucial to train and coach people alongside the growing adoption of new ways of working, which are activities that run alongside the pilots.
It’s important to define key metrics that enable pilots to be monitored to assess progress so that improvements can be made if necessary to optimise agility, with learnings carried forward.

About the author

Mindera’s Managing Director, Technology Leader and Advisor, Richard Hilsley specialises in strategy, business development and transformation.