Top 10 Ways to Fail in Enterprise Agile Transformation
As we all know, market research pioneers such as Deloitte, Gartner and McKinsey have been busy checking the pulse on Agile adoption by enterprises continuously over the past several years. We know with high confidence that close to 90% of organization have declared interest, have considered or already have been through an organizational Agile Transformation.
Cloud computing has been lowering the barriers of entry for small companies and start ups – all using Agile methodologies – allowing them to pop up everywhere in the market. These small contenders’ aggregated impact has not only carved away a considerable amount of revenue from the big players, but also put many of them into financial distress with some going through financial restructuring (which is a fancy way of saying “they are going bankrupt”).
Enterprises, faced with this growing threat, soon discovered that the flock of little players are extremely adaptable to market changes and shifting customer demands and can respond to them at unprecedented speed.
Agile adoption and transformation soon changed from a question of “if” to a question of “how”. The “how” part though, turned out to be quite a challenge as the roadmap for the organizational transformation proved to be as diverse as the organizational cultures that need to change, in order to embrace Agile methodologies.
Executives, coming from a traditional leadership approach, were not savvy on the Agile values and had trouble envisioning the new model in a way that would serve as a guiding light for the rest of the organization.
As a result, despite of the market-wide adoption of Agile methodologies, relatively few of them have experienced the true flexibility and maximum market agility that would result in significant growth in their competitive market positioning and quality and / or price advantage that is expected as major outcomes of this change.
Some of the key factors behind these failures are:
- Lack of Agile education and in-house knowledge
As obvious as it may sound as a key pre-requisite, a surprisingly high number of enterprises do not go through a comprehensive training in Agile methodologies across all ranks.
From the C-Suite to the junior staff are partially trained or have “some ideas” about what Agile is but their knowledge is just enough to open doors to their and misinterpretation and creating a “Fake Agile” transformation, leading to a messy confusion and ultimately failed transformation effort.
- Lack of Executive Leadership and Support
An Agile Transformation is a major cultural change in an enterprise, encompassing the entire organizational chart and propagating through the elemental existence of the corporation.
Such major cultural shift needs tremendous support and ownership from the executive level to not only foster and spearhead the change, but also support the teams through the shift they need to go through affecting their ways of working and their internal and external relationships.
- Lack of Middle-Management Support
Middle-Managers are the closest to the teams involved in value creation and delivery pipelines in an organization. During an Agile Transformation they need to ensure that the workstreams stay active and functional while teams are going through this major transition. That creates a lot of stress on them and their direct reports which needs continuous support and inspiration and guidance to complete. These managers need to be prepared and trained and supported by Senior Management into owning the change and sharing the organization vision on the path and expected outcomes of this transformation.
- Lack of Employee Support
Employees take care of the customers and through that take care of well-being and growth of the organization. They are the building components of the systems and without their participation in the cultural shift, no Agile Transformation would succeed. They have to embrace the hardship of a period of extra efforts that is needed to manifest the needed change while keeping the value delivery pipelines active and isolating customers from any turbulences during the organizational transformation.
Employees need the enterprise leadership and their managers to support them with the needed training and continuous support in every aspect of their roles and responsibilities, to enable them to own their share of change and give them the stamina and focus to step successfully through it.
- Not having the Roadmaps and OKRs
An Agile Transformation is a major journey for the entire corporate tribe and as is the case with any such long trips, without a Roadmap the entire group can get lost and end up somewhere that has no real Agile attributes.
The High Level (Strategic) Roadmap and Corporate Level OKRs should be established by the well-trained and coached C-Suite and their Senior Management team, and then each department will need their Detailed (Tactical) Roadmaps and OKRs to show them each stage of their journey and how to established the needed checkpoints to pause and review their transition from their last starting point to their latest position and to adjust and re-align their efforts for the next stage to ensure they know where they need to go and have a way to find their way to it.
Enterprises should consider the true meaning of incremental change, allowing the organization to take smaller steps throughout the journey and have many inspection and adaptation checkpoint to look back and use the feedback to re-calibrate their efforts towards a better targeted next milestone.
- Not transforming entire ecosystems in the enterprise
Many enterprises confuse the concept of incremental change with creating isolated Agile islands surrounded with an ocean of traditional corporate ways of working and running the business. Such islands, even at the highest level of Agility and speed in responding to changes, have limited ability to contribute to the Agility of an enterprise and providing a better service to customers. Their flexibility and market response ability is hampered by the rigid structure they still exists between how they are participating in value creation and how the outcome of their efforts are finally delivered to the customers.
For an organization to use the incremental Agile Transformation, a detailed upfront assessment need to be done to identify the Value Delivery Ecosystems (Value Streams and their entire support environment), and plan for their needed Agile Transformation work to establish true Agility from ideation to delivery and avoid creating isolated Agile islands.
- Not focusing on Value Delivery to Customers
The modern 21st century business models consider the core of an enterprise’s mission as delivering the best value to the customers. Organizations no longer adhere to the outdated idea that a corporation’s first priority is to raise the stock price for the shareholders. That comes automatically as the result of true focus on best efforts in value delivery to customers, which raises the revenue and customer sentiment level in the market towards the enterprise.
The ultimate goal of the Agile Transformation is to raise the enterprise’s ability in doing so. All the training, planning, support, hardship of keeping the delivery pipelines functional while embracing the new approach converges to this main outcome. As a result, every step taken in the entire Agile Transformation must transparently relate to this outcome and at any point in time, we should be able to envision how our efforts are going to benefit the customers once they are implemented.
When it comes to decide between options and alternative during the Agile Transformation, we should use this evaluation approach to identify the next best choice that would align with providing the higher value to the customers at the end.
- Not establishing Transparency and Trust
An Agile Enterprise creates transparency in all ranks and streams on how the organization is serving customer. This organization allows the entire organizational chart to be trusted with their efforts in maintaining the needed transparency top-to-bottom and across the Value Streams.
One key factor is to create the safe environment where teams are not pushed to constantly provide better results without providing them with the support, they need in removing impediments from the paths, and affording them with the resources they need to function. Teams are also not overgrown into slow and rigid brigades, no longer capable of coordinating and self organizing quickly in response to market changes.
- Not decentralizing Decision Makings as much as possible.
The traditional 20th century mindset expected the enterprise leaders to make all the decision from the 10,000 feet viewpoint. The failures of past showed everyone that this essentially turns senior management into a major impediment to an enterprise’s Agility and quick market response and re-alignments.
Modern leadership understands that decision making must be delegated to where it is closest to its outcome and should be entrusted to the people who are closest to the work that is done. Executives and senior managers make the strategic decision that have long term or corporate wide impact. Middle-Managers and their team make decisions that have tactical, time-sensitive impact that manifests in their own domains.
- No looking at Agile as a state of being
Some enterprises perform Agile Transformation and put everyone through all the hardship of the comprehensive change only to let their guard down once the initial OKRs are achieved and assume that the Agility will continue automatically into the future.
These enterprise are soon faced with the harsh reality that the old rigid ways have a tendency to creep back into all of the pipelines and before they know, the obtained agility and flexibility that has been established through the organization wide journey will be lost, or worse turns into “fake agile” methodologies and the Agile Value Streams will be broken into isolated patches of Agile teams stuck in the mud of returned traditional ways.
Agile is a state of being in need of continued attention, promotion and safeguarding 24/7, top to the bottom and across all the teams. Enterprises need to establish the Agile Center of Excellence divisions at enterprise and also at Value Stream levels to ensure the best in-house Agile advocates (and external coaching service providers), keep the Agile lights on and provide an environment of learning and adapting to best practices and continuously monitor the Agile well being of teams and pipelines and step in to help whenever teams are facing obstacles and need support.
The Enterprise Agile Center of Excellence team is made of the C-Suite and senior management as the key guardians of the outcome of the enterprise effort in Agile Transformation and are ultimate owners of its existence and progress across the organization.
Exclusive pmmagazine.net 💬
