Thinking of a top-down agile transformation? Think again…
by Mark McKee, 15 April 2022
It’s no surprise that highly successful firms don’t have a lot of waiting time in the process for getting new products from idea to market. They will most likely have trialed it out with a sub-set of customers to gain feedback, adjusting as they go before rolling out to the wider customer base. Larger firms I’ve worked with, both as a senior manager, and now as a consultant, are having to adapt to being leaner and working within value streams. It’s simply a matter of survival in the digital age. Doesn’t the old model of command and control from management down to staff seem like the equivalent of using a fax machine to conduct a real-time chat?
Perhaps you’ve experienced what can often happen in larger firms? Pockets of agile teams work almost underground and go as far as they can within their organisational constraints but often end up frustrated due to dependent teams and management fiefdoms not being aligned to outcomes and value.
Jonathan Smart puts it well in his excellent book, Sooner Safer Happier, that a top-down transformation is not the way to go; better to conduct smaller experiments to build up confidence and learnings that can then expand. A mandated transformation from top management makes people feel that change is being imposed upon them, engendering resistance from the start. Instead, find the people who are already doing it and empower them to make the changes to spread out business agility. Notice that this is about the business, not the myth that agile is for IT. Today IT is the business, so everyone must be part of delighting customers with products they want to come back for more of.
Leaders have a huge responsibility to promote a culture of learning, where people know they won’t be punished for their experiments not working perfectly all of the time, then providing the support to remove the impediments that are getting in the way of a more agile culture. Often people simply don’t know what good looks like, but it can be remarkable how a few changes like these bring a huge amount of creativity and innovation for teams:
- Organising around value streams
- Binning requirements documents in favour of epics and user stories
- Talking about what problem needs to be solved instead of dictating solutions
What comes next?
Listening to people who know what good looks like helps. I’ve seen ‘agile experts’ who are only book-smart and don’t listen to what problems you are seeking to solve. They may love to tell you what is in an agile blueprint, but the fact is there isn’t one. Every organisation has its own unique culture and challenges and this must be handled sensitively. By trying out in a small-scale you will gain the momentum from the ground-up and people will feel part of taking this forward once their learnings come back.
A culture of innovation is a great thing to incubate. There is no greater cudos for a leader to have been at the helm of freeing people up to make those innovations happen. It won’t solve your technical debt problems (that is a whole different topic!) but in terms of giving people a vision for the future, what could be more exciting to be part of than a learning and innovative organisation?
Find out more
If this was helpful, you may also like:
- Agile ways of working
- Product owner excellence, logic and truth values
- Project manager, (please) reinvent thyself
- Digital survival guide
Talk to us to find out more.
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Thanks for your blog, nice to read. Do not stop.