Agile Transformation 1: Laying the Foundations

Once upon a time, ‘agile’ was the new game in town. Championed by software engineering teams as a better way to organise themselves, it started to gain traction and become more widely adopted. Of course, it’s not hard to see why. Teams felt more empowered and in control to plan and deliver their work, providing room for requirements to firm up, for complexity to emerge, and quality not to be forsaken – all things that more traditional left-to-right ‘waterfall’ based techniques have consistently failed to cater for adequately.

Today, agile development is widely adopted, but, despite its relative simplicity and intuitiveness, it remains challenging for many organisations to grasp fully. This is particularly the case for large organisations, where bureaucracy and politics tend to get in the way. Enter ‘agile transformation’ as the buzzwords to cut through it all. You need a concerted effort, a step-change to completely rethink the system of work from top to bottom to get real results, right? Well, sort of…

Transformation or transition – What's the difference?

At Mindera, we prefer to talk about agile ways of working rather than agile development per se, and it’s true that organisations need to look much wider than just the software engineering teams. Instilling an agile culture calls for a more holistic approach to rethink portfolio planning and funding, adjust mindsets from certainty to hypotheses, different leadership behaviours, and so on. Transformation is an apt description, although we prefer the word ‘transition’ – the process of changing from one state or condition to another.

Transformation is about becoming different. Transition is about becoming better – taking steps to greater agility and fostering a culture of continuous improvement. It’s a subtly in language that helps avoid the disillusionment that so often accompanies a grand transformation, which can promise so much, yet often comes up short.

This is hardly surprising when your typical transformation programme has a set budget and timeframe. It’s high stakes, yet sponsors and senior stakeholders are prone to sitting back expecting it to be ‘done to them’, not appreciating that they are often part of the problem. This point is expanded upon in detail in the article Twenty Top Fails in Executive Agile Leadership and is well worth a read. Transitioning to agile ways of working is a softer approach, less top-down and showy.

Where to start

Any journey begins with knowing where to start from, and agile adoption is no different. Mindera has developed an agile maturity assessment framework, honed from years of experience in the field. It operates holistically at the enterprise level and is built on five pillars: Strategy, Culture, Process, Structure and Technology. Each comprises multiple attributes or characteristics that form the basis of assessment and allow maturity ratings to be derived. Aggregated together across the five pillars, you obtain an overall maturity score.

Our maturity assessments are conducted from a blend of stakeholder interviews, background reading, and live observation, and really help diagnose problems and prioritise areas for driving systemic improvements in agile, helping to inform an optimal pathway for transition. It offers evidence and visibility on why certain areas need more help, others less attention, and is very useful as a tool for periodic analysis, tracking ways of working improvements are being made.

Conducting an agile maturity assessment is an ideal starting point for aligning stakeholders and building consensus on the need for change.

Securing sponsorship

Fundamentally, senior executives must face up to and embrace the question of “why change?” to sponsor agile adoption across an organisation and truly drive the transition. We always spend a lot of time coming back to the ‘why’ when we help our clients with agile, very much like Simon Sinek’s seminal TED talk echoes.

Sponsorship for agile transformation, or agile transition, must come from the top as, most often, the things that need addressing are fundamental to the organisation itself. There is a degree of organisation rewiring required, for example, in organisation structure and reporting lines, funding mechanisms, reporting, governance, people capability – even core values. The job of an exec sponsor is to help appreciate these things and unblock them.

This is no easy task, and the key to success lies in choosing your battles, knowing where the boundaries are, and how far it’s possible to push them. Again, this is why we avoid the word ‘transformation’ and prefer to think about transitioning to more agile ways of working, viewing the organisation as a product to which incremental improvements or new versions can be made.

Enabling agility

A key ingredient to successful agile adoption at scale is having experienced change agents to guide, coach and facilitate. An effective catalyst comes from forming a centre of enablement (CoE) – a small team of experienced agile practitioners who can understand the big picture and orchestrate activities in a way that is coherent and brings people along on the journey. A big part of this is handling resistance and organisational entropy, gradual regression back to old but familiar ways of working that can feel strangely comforting when people are faced with changes in processes and behaviours that are often deeply ingrained.

Change is hard. It’s easy to talk about wanting, but difficult to accept that as an individual, you’re part of making it happen, especially when it means giving up aspects of yourself that have been traditionally associated with power and control, and rewarded as such. Agile transformation is deeply psychological and talks to the culture of an organisation. It’s common for the CoE to spend considerable time coaching the Exec team.

A lot of organisations claim to work in an agile way, but with further exposure to day-to-day working practises, this is often not implemented or followed correctly, leading to increased re-work and delays in delivery. This is where Mindera’s agile leaders can help suggest improved ways of working to boost agility within our clients and promote doing things in the most efficient way possible to maximise the delivery of successful customer outcomes.

Executing change

So, with a clear diagnosis of the current state of your organisation along with the key areas to address, senior sponsorship secured, and a small but experienced enabling function (CoE) in place, how is agile transformation practically executed? The answer lies at the grass-root level, which we explain in our next article…

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Key takeaways

• Although agile development is widely adopted, despite its relative simplicity and intuitiveness, it remains challenging for many organisations to grasp fully. This is particularly the case for large organisations.
• Instilling an agile culture calls for a holistic approach to rethink portfolio planning and funding, adjust mindsets from certainty to hypotheses, different leadership behaviours, and so on.
• Transitioning rather than transforming means taking steps to greater agility and fostering a culture of continuous improvement. This helps avoid the disillusionment that so often accompanies a grand transformation, which can promise so much, yet often comes up short.
• Conducting an agile maturity assessment is an ideal starting point for aligning stakeholders and building consensus on the need for change.
• Sponsorship for agile transformation, or agile transition, must come from the top as, most often, the things that need addressing are fundamental to the organisation itself.
• An effective catalyst for agile adoption is forming a centre of enablement (CoE) – a small team of experienced agile practitioners who can understand the big picture and orchestrate activities in a way that is coherent and brings people along on the journey.

About the author

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