If there is no struggle, there is no progress.
—Frederick Douglass
You should now have both a theoretical and a practical understanding of agile management. And perhaps you are feeling so positive about it that you are considering implementing it in your own organization. How do you do that? How do you ensure that your organization is built to last? And what should you be looking out for? That’s the story of this final chapter.
14.1 Agile Managing: Back to the Core
You may think, however, as you come to the end of this book, that it is all rather obvious. Great! Because the best thing that can happen is that this book, very quickly, makes itself redundant. In essence, agile management is pure logic and is not rocket science. It goes back to the basics of entrepreneurship.
But, in this last chapter, you might find it useful to see all the ducks lined up in a row; to have a summary of everything you have read so far. First; in most markets, there is an increased degree of volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. And Darwinism applies not only to organisms, but also to organizations: adaptivity (or adaptability) is necessary in order to survive. It is about responding with speed and nimbleness, about being responsive. Many organizations are hindered by their traditional hierarchical structures, lack of internal collaboration, and a tendency to stick to fixed patterns of behavior. But also, because there is such a fear of failure and a too-heavy focus on predictable results, not enough experimentation is done.
Agile management offers the solution: an approach based on the empirical cycle of the scientific method. This has been used within organizations for over a hundred years, visible as the Toyota Production System, agile development, and the Lean Startup.
Agile management is based on eight principles. Creating value for internal and external customers has the highest priority, and that requires a deep understanding of their wants, needs, and behavior. Forming multidisciplinary teams around customers and their behavior is another important factor in this. Empowerment and facilitation are important, in order to optimally motivate these teams to perform. Leadership must find a good balance between teams enjoying autonomy, while being effectively aligned with each other. Teams should work physically in their own spaces, and communication within and between teams should, as much as possible, be face-to-face and visual. Learning through experimentation is paramount to this overall process. This is done in small “projects” with short iterations, thereby achieving maximum speed and flexibility. Finally, teams and team members should be fully transparent in their operations and activities in order to ensure accountability and make continuous improvement possible. This way of working has a number of fixed roles, such as the product owner, agile coach and—at larger organizations—an agile manager.
Within agile management, the Think–Do–Learn process is central. This is a continuously repeating cycle built upon short iterations. The cycle focuses on continuously improving performance for your internal or external customers. The Think stage is all about setting a flexible schedule based on priorities: what improvements will make the most impact in proportion to the effort? If you’re an agile management first-timer, that to-do list of improvements stems from internal analysis of value streams or processes, or from the customer journey of your customers. Thereafter, the to-do list comes primarily from the insights gleaned from previous iterations. These insights are made more accurate and effective by using hypotheses and metrics.
The Do stage is where you actually get started. Here you build more and more of your products, services, and customer experiences. You get to use the 80/20 rule by working with Minimum Viable Products. In each iteration, you deliver something that really works, which can then be offered to your customers to test whether this meets their needs.
The results of those tests you evaluate in the Learn phase, in which you use your hypotheses and the information gained from voice of the customer sources. Based on your analysis, you can now determine whether your results can become your new default approach, whether you need to start looking for a better alternative, or that you basically have to ditch everything and start anew. Additionally, you can also evaluate at the meta-level to see where improvement opportunities lie in the team’s methods.
Briefly, this is what agile management is all about. It lets you transform your organization, making it fast, smart, and nimble. But which approach should you choose for a successful implementation? Here are the Do’s and Don’ts.
14.2 Ensuring Successful Transformation
The art of change management has been covered by many good books. Therefore, rather than go into it in-depth, we’ll take a look at just a few of the most-important aspects.
No Blueprint
Perhaps you are now looking at the contents of this book as if they are the components of a model kit called agile management. And maybe you now feel ready to glue all the parts of the kit together. Unfortunately, however, there are no standard building instructions you can follow. The way you implement agile management depends on the specific circumstances in your organization. The form in which agile management is applied varies widely, from organization to organization, and there really is no such thing as the ideal theoretical model. As the old saying goes, many roads lead to Rome. So you will have to use your common sense to determine what does and does not fit your organization. Think of it as a kind of Barbapapa, an adaptable set of eight agile principles that can be translated to the needs and situation of your organization.
During the implementation, you will encounter challenges: part-time workers, home workers, flexible workplaces, physical limitations in your office space, several office locations, long-term sick, managers, and employees who can’t or don’t want to participate and so on. The practice is naturally unruly. Focus, then, on what can be done and strive for the maximum possible. Better to do something small, very well, than something big badly. Whatever you do, work with fixed, short iterations, time-box all your discussions and meetings, and make minor improvements based on backlogs and agreed roles. That is the basic approach, the minimum. Keep in mind that impossibilities are sometimes illusory: something might seem impossible because the people involved are looking through a lens of limiting beliefs. Be prepared for it to get worse before it gets better, but research shows you can trust that it will improve rapidly (if you’re doubtful, try Googling “Satir curve”).69
So be proactive and use the resources in this book to arrive at a creative solution, the way the A-Team always managed to save the direst situation. Then, like Hannibal Smith, you can say to your A(gile) team, “I love it when a plan comes together.”
Changing, Out of Urgency, and Ambition
For many people in your organization, transitioning to agile management will entail uncertainty. Some people do not like change, some cannot change—or both. You take them out of their comfort zone and that produces tension. It helps to appeal to a sense of urgency and ambition in these individuals, as you can see in Figure 14.1. Try to make the problems that arise explicit, and specific to the individual concerned, and then show them what it can bring them; answer their “What’s in it for me?” questions.
Figure 14.1 Make the urgency and ambition of the change clear
The sense of urgency is, therefore, the pain the organization feels in the current situation, such as increased competition, declining profit, and customer dissatisfaction. Often, this means that it is the organization’s fixed strategies that threaten its future existence. For ambition is really all about inspiration. This may concern a major strategic opportunity, within one or more quadrants of the Ansoff matrix (see section 9.1). Or it might be about a visionary, energizing purpose in the future, also known as a BHAG (Big Hairy Audacious Goal)1 or the “Why.”2 Here are a few quick examples: Henry Ford wanted to make the car available to everyone; Facebook is committed to an open and connected world; Google wants to organize the world’s information to make it universally accessible and useful; SpaceX wants to make it possible to visit Mars and even live there. Now, of course, comes the “million-dollar question”: do you know what you want to achieve with your own organization?
If your urgency and ambition are clear and obvious, you can then explain exactly what is holding the organization back (see section 7.4). And, naturally enough, what the solution is: transformation into an agile management organization. Once again we look to visualization for clarity, for instance with a so-called transformation storymap. That is a drawing or animation of the journey from the current situation to the desired situation and the problems to be overcome en route.
Agile-Change to an Agile Organization
Flexibility is essential and applies to both the content and the form, the way you go about it. You could call it an agile implementation of agile management. In other words, apply the principles of agile management also to your approach to change; practice what you preach. Create a multidisciplinary change team, your “guiding coalition,”72 which also will function via sprints and backlogs. Communicate, within and outside this team, as much as possible face-to-face and visually. Immerse yourself in the personas of your “change target groups” and their customer journeys within your change process. Take small steps that bring them something tangible. Measure the impact and evaluate the result, and so learn how to perform the next step even better. And keep Willy Brandt’s wisdom in mind: “Small steps are better than no steps.”
It is, therefore, sensible to start small, with an experiment, a pilot; for instance, by highlighting a specific, discrete customer process, one that is clear and easily defined, and then set a small agile team to work on it. Don’t start half-hearted, by splitting their time between the new agile project and their current responsibilities. They need to go at it full-on, preferably in a designated war room. There’s no place for doubt and faint hearts. You should not change your whole organization at once, but where you choose to do it, you have to do it completely. On a small scale, you’ll gain experience and achieve rapid, repeated success that you can use as evidence to convince the rest of the people in your organization that this is an attractive option for them too. Then you can involve other teams step-by-step. As agile’s reputation grows within the organization, it will spread like a virus, until you achieve “critical mass” and its full speed ahead.
A “Must-Win Battle”
Dwight Eisenhower once sighed: “I have two kinds of problems, the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are not urgent.” In order to prioritize his tasks, he developed the—now famous—urgent/important matrix and tried to focus on issues that were important, but were not urgent. So you can move forward in a structured way. That can be achieved, for example by positioning the transformation in your change communication as a must-win battle.73 This is a fight that, in not more than the next two years, your organization must absolutely win to achieve its strategic goals. In other words, a concrete and realizable initiative that makes a significant difference to your customers and gives everyone involved a lot of energy—and so merits and receives all the attention and resources of the organization.
It demands that you create and maintain momentum. To sustain the change, during transformation, you need to constantly communicate about urgency and ambition, about the obstacles and solutions, the “heroes” in your organization and their enormous commitment and effort. And unequivocally celebrate your successes. Given it will deliver favorable ROI, a smart step is to make costs and revenues transparent. The key messages need to be communicated daily, via all relevant channels, to your target change-population. And do not only transmit, but also seek dialogue: in meetings, workshops, demos, company events, and other gatherings, and during walk-in advice sessions and spontaneous conversations. Encourage employees to blog and participate in discussions on your intranet forum. Visits to companies which have successfully become “agile” are very useful, as is creating a company “library” of books, films, and articles about agile management.
Securing Each Step Forward
If you have created urgency and ambition, have formed a guiding coalition, communicated about momentum and, with small steps, have extended the agile management approach, it is important now to secure this position. Think of it as a rock climber who, as he gets higher, secures his rope to an anchor point on the cliff. You thus, ensure that employees cannot fall back into their old behaviors and that they feel safe in the new situation.
This can be realized in different ways. Firstly, you need to ensure that the leaders in your organization consistently display exemplary behavior (“walk the talk”). They should be the bearers of the new agile management culture and, both explicitly and implicitly, make clear what is desirable and what is not. Secondly, it is useful to get everyone involved trained and certified for their specific role in the agile management process. And, in addition, they should also be coached while at work in the application of what they have learned. Thirdly, you must structure the organization’s governance to feed into the agile principles. The necessary tools can be found in Chapter 8: this is about organizing the Think–Do–Learn process, working in sprints, and holding meetings like the daily standup, review and retrospective, and also about HRM instruments like the reviews. You monitor this by defining KPIs, measuring them, and reporting on them. You can also regularly hold a surprise audit. And, of course, you also have to adapt your organizational structure, as you saw in the ING case.
But be careful that you don’t push too hard. This can best be illustrated using Newton’s second law: F = ma, where F is force, m is mass, and a is acceleration. Put differently, this reads: a = F/m. So, if you want to accelerate (a), it is tempting to put in more and more force (F). However, beyond a certain point, working harder can be counterproductive to the intended change. It is better to reduce the mass (m) of your organization by introducing a certain “lightness” in its processes, staffing, governance, etc.
You’ve almost come to the end of this book. Hopefully, it has inspired you to get started with agile management and offers you plenty of tools to do so. Remember that it probably will not go easily in the beginning. So start looking for the believers within your organization and, together, start an agile management movement. A movement that inspires and enthuses by showing the strengths of agile management and that it really works.
Learn to love failing. Just as in agile management itself, you have to dare to experiment during its implementation, only then can you learn from your successes and failures. Become an entrepreneur who does first, and only later asks for permission (or apologizes).
You may regret what you did, but never what you did not.
When was the last time you did something for the first time?
By reading this chapter, you’ll have discovered the following:
• There is no theoretical ideal model for an agile management organization. The point is to apply the eight agile management principles. The specific situation of your organization is unique, so you need to be flexible with its implementation.
• To successfully realize the transformation to an agile organization, it’s best to work in a multidisciplinary change team of believers. That team should frequently communicate the urgency, ambition, and obstacles—and why agile management is the best solution.
• Change is best done incrementally. You apply agile management principles to the implementation of agile management. By achieving regular successes, you can extend the approach into the rest of the organization.
• To sustain the changes, you must show leadership by example and you must invest in training and coaching. Also, you must ensure the governance of your organization matches, supports, and encourages agile management.
References
1. Collins, J., and Porras, J. (1994). Built to Last. William Collins.
2. Sinek, S. (2011). Start with Why. London: Portfolio.