Top 10 Executive Considerations in Transforming into an Agile Enterprise
Over the past 10 years, we have witnessed an accelerating rise in market disruptions introduced by companies that barely existed before that era.
These newcomers quickly turned into serious competitions by showing a degree of market adaptability and customer targeting precision that requires levels of agility that were not experienced, nor known, before.
Despite their small individual sizes, their aggregate effect has already carved away a significant chunk of larger players’ profit and has already pushed a number of them into financial trouble and even bankruptcy.
This is no longer a question of “If” enterprises should embrace Agile transition for all their relevant areas, but a question of “how” to perform that in the best way.
I have been an executive coach in enterprise Agile transitions and over the past decade I have helped, and coached enterprises achieve the required level of Agility to sharpen their competitive edge and extend their flexibility and innovative side to maintain their market position and build the needed capacity to explore opportunities and expand their market shares.
In this article I would like to share with you the top 10 considerations that I bring to my executive clients when we start the conversation on the evolutionary path of Agile transitions.
- Prepare to lead the charge, but do not do it alone.
Start by understanding and embrace Agile Principles and then start forming your Agile Transition Leadership team of C-Suite executives. Get everyone brought up in understanding of the Agile approach and how it relates and scales up to enterprise level through executive training workshops.
Treat the Agile Transition as an enterprise strategic initiative and develop that in programs for each major division and then break them down into transition portfolios for each department.
Allocate a Sr. management champion for each program and ask them to assign portfolio champion for each department. (Allow for their fulltime involvement in the transition timeframe to give your organization a higher chance of success).
- Form up your War Room
Get the entire Agile Transition Leadership group to work on creating the Enterprise Agile Centre of Excellence, to serve as your War Room during the transition, and as your Agile powerhouse after that in safeguarding what is achieved and to promote and raise the enterprise’s Agile Maturity level.
- Create your Agenda and Targets
Work with the team to construct and promote the Enterprise Scaled Agile Manifesto, your transformation Agenda in alignment with the enterprise strategic mission and tailored to a best fit for your enterprise’s future state. This Manifesto will serve as the compass to show the direction to each team, group, division and the entire and provide them with a goal to achieve.
- Draw your Roadmap
An Agile enterprise is one that is transformed into Agile in all its “relevant” areas, with enough flexibility created to allow for maximum agility in responding to market changes and new opportunities.
Agility corresponds directly to your innovative and experimental side where new ways and new products are tested in short delivery cycles and market feedback is collected as fast as possible, to allow for fast market discovery and closely matching customer delighting products.
Some areas of your enterprise may not benefit as much from innovations and experimentation, such as your accounting, compliance, or security departments. While certain teams in those areas would be responsible to learn, absorb or implement the newly mandated regulatory changes or new accounting models, there is much less need of experimentation in those areas compared to your market driven delivery pipelines.
- Visualize and synchronize your progress
There are many well-developed and time-tested software tools in the market that can be installed from scratch or as an addition / extension to your existing platforms, that will add the required transparency, collaboration, and synchronization among your Agile teams.
They also allow for the much-needed visibility on the progress and efficiency of your Agile transition across the entire enterprise. Use these tools to create the enterprise level “portfolio” items to show as deliverable items on a Portfolio Kanban board for visualization of their progress.
You can then ask your team to establish other Kanban board at department and further down at team levels to show backlogged items and their progress.
These tools allow you to create multi-level visualization of the progress and generate reports on them. They also serve as your radar to detect any slowdowns or impediments in-time and before they expand into a blockade of your transformation efforts.
- Differentiate Agile from Anarchy
There is nothing more dangerous that misunderstanding Agile for Anarchy and allowing the transformation to fall into chaos.
Moving from a heavily documented, gated and chain-approved delivery model into a flexible, low-document, quickly adaptable delivery pipeline has the high risk of teams adopting short-cuts instead of optimized approaches and sacrifice proper understanding of what market wants for delivering it faster.
The balancing point needs to be established by the teams, to form agreements on how much documentation is “just enough” and would enable the teams to track the historical evolution of their products’ incremental changes and interpolate that into the near future for where they should target next product increments.
- When in doubts, let Money lead the way
As the entire purpose of this transition is to establish a better way to raise corporate income through faster value delivery to the market, you can use the same perspective to prioritize the work that needs to be done.
See how much values will be created (or missed) if each deliverable item is delivered as planned (or delayed) within a certain timeframe. Naturally, you would like to mark those with highest potential revenue generation (or largest negative impact if delayed) as high priority / must-haves and rank them accordingly.
Let us not forget that Agile delivery would allow your enterprise to hit the market with exploratory products and services faster and let your teams collect market feedback much quicker.
This would convert your teams from market predictors to market explorers and allows for faster product re-alignments and value creation.
- Concentrate the transformation around Value Streams
Build your plan around your Value Streams’ transformation and its cascading effect toward your organization’s delivery pipelines.
Re-group your teams to serve the Value Streams that are evolved and integrate your DevOps teams into that. Bring the relevant people serving the same Value Stream into a closer team structure to create more independent, self-organizing teams who can react and retarget market quickly.
This is a needed transformation from the traditional multiple hand-offs working protocols which not only take much longer to respond to shifts in customer demand and appetite but has historically shown tendency to drop key features through the cracks and miss great market opportunities.
- Recruit for continued Agility
Your talent management (aka HR) department is responsible for keeping the teams’ strengths and expanding them by reaching out and attracting highly qualified practitioners from the market.
This means that your HR (from the executive level down to the associate recruiters) require to be onboarded with the Agile transformation and have become savvy in what constitutes a strong Agile practitioner in any area of expertise they are trying to attract talents for.
Such level of knowledge and experience is equally important across all organization ranks you are hiring for.
- Consider Agile as a State-of-Being
In the enterprise Agile transformation journey, the destination is a state-of-being and not just some milestone to get to and then leave behind.
The C-Suite should not only lead, but also embrace and own the transformation and turn it into a corporate cultural transformation.
Once it become the new culture, it would support the achieved state of Agility to survive and thrive into an ever-growing Agile Maturity, enjoyed by many corporate generations to come.
The Agile way of doing things is also a Lean approach which would trim down the wasteful and unnecessary (and quite outdated) extras and additionals in the enterprise everyday life, from shifting meetings into working sessions and focused stand ups through every process and sequence that is followed by the teams across the organization.
Conclusion
In Agile transformation of an enterprise, the leadership holds the keys to success or failure of the movement.
Almost in every story of a failed effort on Agile transformation there is evidence of missing leadership support, or even worse, leadership posing as the key impediment to success.
That is why, it is vital for the C-Suite to own and become the model that the enterprise needs to follow. Their collaboration as an Agile Leadership team serves as the North Star and compass for the rest of the organization to find their way and check their path, not only during the transformation, but also as an Agile enterprise.
Thank you
Arman Kamran
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