Chapter 9
Sizing Up Your Organization
IN THIS CHAPTER
Accepting transformation as radical change
Grasping the challenges you’re likely to face
Getting to know your organization’s existing culture
Preparing for a cultural overhaul
In many organizations, people think of enterprise agility as a bunch of new roles and practices. They spend most of their time transitioning people to new roles and having them adopt agile practices, such as writing user stories and conducting 15-minute stand-up meetings. Such an approach doesn’t really address the biggest hurdle most organizations face. Enterprise agility is a radical organizational change. It requires the people in your organization think about their work in an entirely new way and act accordingly. They need to change ingrained behaviors and interact differently. This is a much larger challenge, and it’s one your organization should immediately start to tackle.
From the outset, start to think about your organization’s culture and its tolerance for big changes. Almost every organization can make big changes, including yours. You just need to know how tall of a mountain you’re climbing, what the obstacles are along the way, and how to avoid or overcome these obstacles. This chapter helps you identify your organization’s culture to better determine if you are ready for a big change, and then provides you with a starting point for making that change.
Agilebots Transform! Committing to Radical Change
Transformation means dramatic change. Enterprise agile transformation involves radical change in how an organization is structured and managed, how its people think and interact, how information flows, and how the organization responds to change and engages in innovation. As with most endeavors that require radical change, the most difficult challenge is to accept and embrace all that’s required to make the change. Your entire organization must commit to no less than transformation.
A transformation is not a quick fix; it’s a long and hard transition to get your organization where you want it to be. If you’re unprepared or don’t commit fully, you’ll stumble through the transformation and gain only a small fraction of the potential benefit.
One of the biggest mistakes organizations make when trying to improve their enterprise agility is to underestimate the effort required to make lasting changes. To avoid this common pitfall, prepare everyone at the very beginning for a long change process, as I explain in Chapter 10. Encourage everyone in your organization to think about the transition as though he or she is packing for a long trip. If employees start out thinking that the transition will take only a few days or a couple of weeks, you’re likely to experience one of the following outcomes:
- They’ll short-change the transformation by declaring victory after only a few process improvements.
- They’ll become overwhelmed by the change and quickly run out of steam.
Approach your enterprise agile transformation as you would a physical fitness routine. Can you imagine saying, “Of course I’m committed to better fitness, but I’m not ready to give up sweets,” or “I’m ready for the change, but I don’t have the time to exercise every day”? Achieving an aggressive health and fitness goal involves changing routines, working out, adjusting your diet, giving up bad habits, reducing stress, and so on. If you take only one or two of those steps, you’ll get some benefit, but you won’t achieve your goal.
Don’t try to shoehorn agile into how your organization already operates. For example, I once worked for an organization that started its transformation to enterprise agility by saying, “Of course we want to be agile, but we can’t combine our quality assurance team with our developers. They report to different managers.” Another organization said, “Yes, we want to give agile a try, but we still need to work with scheduled milestones. That way, there’s plenty of time for testing.” That’s not transformation. Following such an approach, the most you can hope for is a few positive agile-like changes; you won’t achieve a true transformation.
Understanding What Culture Is and Why It’s So Difficult to Change
Have you ever started working at an organization and been told, “This is how we do things here”? Maybe you made a mistake, and a colleague or supervisor said, “This is not how we work.”
Now imagine if you responded, “Well, maybe we should change how we do things.” How do you think that would be received by your coworkers? It’s a safe bet most people working with you would find that attitude jarring, bordering on hostile.
That’s what culture is — shared, deeply ingrained assumptions and beliefs that control the thoughts and behaviors of individuals in a group. Culture is at the very core of what makes a particular organization unique. The managers, business analysts, and project managers have all accepted that these practices (often referred to as success patterns) are the way to succeed in the organization. Fortunately, although these assumptions, beliefs, and success patterns are deeply ingrained, they’re also learned, so they can be unlearned and replaced. But it’s not easy.
Many organizations start by trying to scratch and claw their way through the agile practices, changing the way a few teams work. All their effort goes into implementing specific agile practices, such as standing up during meetings and creating new user stories (common agile practices described in Chapter 1), but these practices only scratch the surface; they don’t change the thinking and behaviors required to stimulate innovation and achieve continuous competitive advantage.
Understanding why culture is so entrenched
In his book Organizational Culture and Leadership, Edgar Schein presents culture as three levels of stacked assumptions (see Figure 9-1):
- Artifacts: Subtle expressions of values, such as the organization’s dress code, workspace, hours, posters, and even its perks, such as flextime or free coffee.
- Espoused values: The organization’s values, as expressed in its mission statement, vision statement, and goals. These values reflect the way the organization wants to be perceived.
- Underlying beliefs: The thoughts, feelings, perceptions, and beliefs that employees share without explicitly talking about them. For example, everyone in the organization may value creativity and innovation over predictability or the organization may have an unspoken bias against women in leadership positions.
FIGURE 9-1: Three levels of assumptions about organizational culture.
You can usually sense an organization’s culture when you first step into its office space. A high-tech business in Silicon Valley has a vastly different feel from that of a top law firm in Chicago. The tech business is likely to have large, shared workspaces. You’ll probably see bicycles in the hallways, toys on desks, and people walking around in jeans. At the law firm, on the other hand, you’ll likely see orderly desks, people in suits, large windows overlooking the city, and a tone that’s more “professional.”
Schein groups assumptions into three levels to shed light on why culture is so entrenched and how challenging it can be to change an organization’s culture. The most deeply rooted beliefs may be buried under layers of everyday assumptions. An organization can’t change its culture simply by revising its mission statement or putting a new organizational framework in place. Changing culture involves changing deeply engrained mindsets.
Avoiding the common mistake of trying to make agile fit your organization
Do not try and bend the spoon. That’s impossible. Instead … only try to realize the truth. There is no spoon … it is not the spoon that bends, it is only yourself.
—Spoon Boy in The Matrix
When large organizations start an agile transformation they often try to bend agile to fit their reality instead of changing their organization to fit agile. Here’s an example:
In many organizations, management defines the product and hands the developers a detailed list of work requirements. The idea is that the more detailed the list of requirements, the more likely the customer will be satisfied with the result. In agile, on the other hand, the developer may start with a user story that describes what the user needs; for example, “As a shopper, I want to avoid having to wait in line to check out.” The developer is given the creative freedom to come up with a solution.
However, when some companies embark on their agile transformation, they write user stories that read more like work requirements, which completely eliminates the main benefit of the user story.
In this example, the organization adopted the agile practice of user stories, but it changed that practice to conform with the organization’s culture (a need to be told what to do). Instead of bending to the spoon, they bent the spoon.
As you educate and train people in your organization, spend time both on training people what to do and on explaining the reasons why they’re being instructed to do things a certain way. When people understand the why behind the what, they’re more likely to “get it.” Otherwise, they’ll just go through the motions. For example, if people understand that user stories are supposed to give the developer more creative freedom, they’re less likely to write user stories that read like requirements.
Identifying Your Organization’s Culture Type
One of the first steps in changing anything is to identify what you’re changing. You need to know what you have to work with. In the case of transforming corporate culture, you first need to recognize the nature of the existing culture.
Thankfully, William Schneider’s book The Reengineering Alternative serves as a great resource for identifying organizational culture types. In his book, Schneider presents the following four culture types (see Figure 9-2):
- Control
- Collaboration
- Cultivation
- Competence
FIGURE 9-2: Four organizational culture types.
In his book, Schneider provides a questionnaire you can pass around your organization to help determine which of the categories best describes your organization.
In this section, I describe each of the four types, so you can figure out which of the categories best describe your organization’s culture. Your organization’s culture may fit in more than one category. It may value competence highly, but also value collaboration, for example. Also, different divisions or departments in your organization may fit in different categories; for example, your warehouse may operate in a culture of collaboration, while sales functions more in a culture of control, and the overall organization operates mostly in the spirit of cultivation.
Each one of these cultures has strengths and weaknesses. One culture may readily accept change, while another fights even the most sensible change but is highly efficient. The key is to understand the various cultures at work in your organization, so you can more easily determine the changes required to transform your organization’s mindset and anticipate the challenges in making these changes.
Running with the wolf pack in a control culture
The control culture has a tendency to be very authoritarian. Think of it as a wolf pack. Alpha managers set the direction for the entire organization with beta managers following closely behind to keep the rest of the organization moving in the same direction.
These companies tend to have a conservative management style and put a lot of emphasis on hierarchy. Everyone knows his place in the pecking order.
Emphasizing compliance
A control culture emphasizes compliance. The role of the individual is to comply with the requirements stipulated by that person’s supervisor. The head of the organization communicates a vision and delegates to others who are responsible for bringing that vision to fruition. Some people in the organization, typically project managers and quality assurance people, make sure everyone follows along and that the resulting product conforms to the vision.
A control culture prefers that individuals stay within their functional areas. People don’t usually move around much. If you’re a project manager, then you’re unlikely to ever move into another area, such as marketing or human resources. Roles and titles tend to determine the pecking order. Directors have authority over managers, and managers have authority over supervisors.
Seeking certainty with decisions
With so much emphasis on compliance, decision-making in this culture has a tendency to be very methodical … and slow. The highest levels push for certainty and demand accountability. Although the C-suite leaders and directors may not micromanage, they want reports showing that decisions are being made and their directives are being carried out. They want to know that their employees have “signed off” and taken responsibility for their decisions.
Favoring big systems
Organizations with a control culture tend to be conservative. The rhythm of the organization favors order and certainty, and they rely on large management systems that ensure predictable outcomes. Many of them follow variations of the Rational Unified Process (RUP) — a software delivery framework that has a predictable lifecycle and many building blocks. (Several of the enterprise agile frameworks come from contributors to RUP.) An agile framework, such as the Scaled Agile Framework® (SAFe®), has a built-in advantage in organizations with a control culture; it plays well with organizations that tend to like large complex frameworks with a lot of roles and clear lines of responsibility. These control cultures also tend to like the top-down alignment you see in SAFe.
If you’re in a strong control culture, try to be aware of how your organization deals with big changes. Fight the urge to go big just because you’re a big organization. Remember that agile is not about changing everyone’s roles. It’s about changing a larger organizational mindset. Looking for another big system maybe not be enough to change how people think about their work.
Effecting change in a control culture
The best way to make big changes in a control culture is to get someone at a high level to sponsor the change. Think of this sponsor as the driver of change. Without a sponsor, conducting an agile transformation will be very difficult, if not impossible, in a control culture.
Unfortunately, control cultures put so much emphasis on certainty that recruiting high-level sponsors becomes a huge challenge. Big changes involve a high level of uncertainty. The most common motivation for control cultures to make big, risky changes is when they have no viable alternative — when their backs are against the wall, sometimes when it’s too late.
Rising with your ability in a competence culture
The competence culture, prevalent in software development companies, develops a hierarchy that’s based on expertise. In a typical competence culture, a group of software developers creates a tool that becomes popular, and these developers become de facto managers. Because they were developers, they invest all their effort into making sure everyone conforms to their views of technical excellence.
The leadership focus in a competence culture is about setting standards and creating tasks. Leaders delegate tasks based on each employee’s perceived competence level, resulting in a task-driven approach to management. As a result, people tend to specialize, which leads to the creation of deeply ingrained silos.
Living in the matrix
Organizations with a strong competence culture have a tendency to be set up like a matrix, with each person having two or more managers. For example, an analyst may have a department manager, such as a manager who oversees testing or analysis, and a project manager who’s responsible for delivering a certain product. They approach any big change or challenge like engineers, breaking it down into tasks and distributing the tasks to various specialists. In a competence culture, managing the organization is like handling an engineering problem.
Suppose you’re a quality assurance developer, and you report to a quality assurance manager and to a software development manager. Like everyone, you’re prone to gaming the system. You don’t like having two bosses asking you to perform different tasks, so you specialize in one area — quality assurance or software development. In other words, the company rewards employees for becoming highly competent specialists (though nobody in a leadership position is probably aware this is happening).
Managers within this culture tend to be professional, and a strong sense of meritocracy drives promotions. You can start as an intern and if you develop a high level of expertise, you’ll quickly move your way up through the organization.
Putting in the hours
Organizations with a competence culture have a tendency to operate at a really intense pace. They’re not always the easiest places to work.
Effecting change in a competence culture
Competence cultures can have a difficult time embracing an agile mindset, because agile teams favor generalization over specialization. On an agile team, you may have people who know how to both develop and test software. A product owner may also work in sales or marketing. (A product owner is a Scrum role responsible for representing the end user to determine what features will be in a product release.) You don’t see that kind of fluidity in a competence culture. In addition, agile promotes open communication and knowledge sharing, which contradicts what’s rewarded in the competence culture.
If you have a strong competence culture, you must find ways to encourage organizational learning; for example, you can create communities of practice (CoPs) in which different developers share their knowledge and expertise. These CoPs may meet every week or so to share their work and build up their organizational knowledge. Without some way for knowledge sharing, competence cultures will usually end up with superstar developers who jump from team to team.
In addition, competence cultures are likely to have some characteristics of a control culture, as well, such as top-down management. If your organization is a blend of competence and control cultures, you’ll also need to recruit a sponsor from a high level of leadership to drive your enterprise agile transformation.
Nurturing your interns in a cultivation culture
In a cultivation culture (the rarest of the four culture types), leaders focus on empowering and enabling people to become the best possible employees. The managers like to make sure everyone is happy being part of the organization.
These organizations have a tendency to be set up like an authority wheel with the employee in the center surrounded by managers and resources to support the employee’s success. Each manager is a spoke in the wheel.
In a cultivation culture, employees are encouraged to express themselves, so the culture places a lot of emphasis on employee surveys. These surveys enable managers to perform their primary function — employee development and growth. In this culture, managers want to bring someone into the organization, hold them up, and then build them up.
Using your smile, charm, and team-building skills
The leadership in a cultivation culture is typically based on how well you’re able to convince people to follow your lead. If you’re a charismatic person in a cultivation culture, you can become an authority very quickly — even if you’re someone who’s just started at the company in a low-level position. Managers focus on cultivating the strengths of other people, and they rise in the organization according to their ability to build teams and harness a team’s talent to solve a problem quickly.
Embracing generalists
A cultivation culture is a good culture to belong to if you’re a generalist. If someone with a problem knocks on your door, you never want to send him away disappointed. You solve the problem, refer him to someone else who can solve the problem, or assemble a team that’s qualified to solve the problem.
Other characteristics of a cultivation culture
In addition to favoring generalists and charismatic individuals, the cultivation culture has several other identifiable characteristics, including the following:
- The focus is on the people over the system. People who thrive in large, complex systems (typical of control cultures) and are unable to adapt generally do poorly in a cultivation culture.
- Departmental divisions are less relevant. Employees are encouraged to work together to solve problems, even if they have to consult with other departments.
- Employees are not always required to follow procedures. If an employee has a better way to achieve the same or a better outcome, he’s encouraged to do so.
- The organization is probably a fun place to work. Growth and development are encouraged, and employees are free to make mistakes on their paths to success.
- Decision-making relies on consensus. Decision-making can be difficult and slow, because it is highly participative and organic. As you can imagine, big groups of people can take a long time to achieve consensus.
True cultivation cultures are rare. Some organizations may think they have a cultivation culture, but if you look closely, you’ll see that they’re control cultures with a thin coating of people-focused practices.
Millennials and other people under the age of 30 tend to be successful in cultivation cultures, because they often require more cultivation, and they typically seek consensus when making decisions. Organizations run by young entrepreneurs often operate in a cultivation culture.
Effecting change in a cultivation culture
People in a cultivation culture are more likely than those in other cultures to embrace change and adapt to new ideas, because change is part of the cultivation process. They have participatory meetings during which people talk about change, and after they reach consensus to make a change, they quickly embrace it.
Members of a cultivation culture tend to be more receptive to adopting an agile mindset. In many cases, as soon as the organization decides to transform, employees will self-organize into teams with a focus on learning more about agile. However, due to the slow decision-making process characteristic of the cultivation culture, expect to run into some delays.
Look to enterprise agile frameworks that focus on development practices and software craftsmanship. Some of these elements are in Large-Scale Scrum (LeSS), Disciplined Agile (DA), and the Spotify Engineering Culture. (See Part 2 for details about several of the more commonly used and useful enterprise agile frameworks.)
Working it out together in a collaboration culture
In a collaboration culture, leaders are team builders and coaches, and generalists are favored over specialists. Management style is democratic, but it’s not quite as fluid as in a cultivation culture. And while success in a cultivation culture is measured by how well you work with others, in a collaboration culture, success is often based on how long you’ve been with the company.
In a collaboration culture, the organization has less need to reach consensus when making decisions. Managers work closely together like a small group of friends to make decisions and to build and lead teams. Small clusters of coworkers are likely to form loose social networks.
Collaboration cultures are almost as scarce as cultivation cultures. You rarely see such a culture in software development organizations; it just doesn’t play to that industry’s leadership style. You see it more often in schools and professional training organizations.
Honoring the family
The big difference between the collaboration and the cultivation cultures is that the authority in collaborative cultures comes from long-term relationships. Organizations are run almost like a family business. The closer you are to people at the head of the organization, the more authority you have. The top people collaborate closely on the overall direction. Think of it like a classic crime family. You have a few older founders at the top and then their trusted group of friends and family all the way down.
These organizations tend to make decisions via brainstorming meetings and through some experimentation. They’re a little more open to change than the control or competence cultures, which helps when the organization is trying to embrace an agile mindset. If you have a collaborative culture, it’s usually easy for your organization to accept change.
However, some key components of an agile mindset may be difficult to adopt. An agile team must have the authority to pursue new ideas and make mistakes. That authority is pushed down to the team level. However, collaboration cultures tend to cluster the authority at a high level. They’re more democratic, but only slightly more.
Even with their family appeal and open collaboration, this culture has many of the same challenges as a classic control culture. You still have a concentration of authority that makes embracing an agile mindset more difficult.
Effecting change in a collaboration culture
Although a pure collaboration culture is rare, many organizations have some aspects of it. Typically, what happens is that a company starts as a family business or partnership and grows to become a large company in which that culture can no longer operate, but remnants of the culture still exist near the top.
When transitioning a collaboration culture to enterprise agility, I suggest the following:
- Look for key aspects of a collaboration culture to adopt. The collaboration culture has many characteristics that support an agile mindset, including collaborative teams, a preference for generalists over specialists, and a democratic management style. Leverage these characteristics as you move the organization to a more agile mindset.
- Recruit a sponsor from the top ranks. This is the same approach I recommend for control cultures. To get anything done in a collaboration culture, you must get leadership’s endorsement. They are the only ones with the authority to approve the change, and they need to loosen the reigns to give development teams more freedom to make decisions. More important, they’re the only people the rest of the organization will follow.
- Watch out for family arguments. When you’re transforming an organization with a collaborative culture into an agile enterprise, you may encounter competing visions among the “family members” regarding the end product — the organization’s structure and function after the transformation. When visions clash, you’re likely to get caught up in family squabbles that can slow and even undermine your efforts and make your job that much more difficult.
You’re unlikely to have an organization that’s large enough to deliver enterprise software but still runs like a family business. However, parts of your organization may have certain elements of this culture, so be prepared to address the challenges that this culture type presents.
Laying the Groundwork for a Successful Transformation
In general, organizations fail to make real changes for three reasons:
- The organization’s leadership doesn’t fully understand the purpose of the change or appreciate its value, or they do a poor job of communicating it to others in the organization. As a result, they meet with a lot of resistance. After all, why would you change what you’re doing if you don’t think the change is necessary or beneficial?
- The organization’s leadership doesn’t have a clear vision of what the organization will look like after the change has been successfully implemented, or they have the wrong vision. In other words, they have no goal or the wrong goal. An example of a wrong goal in an agile transformation would be trying to maintain a strict top-down organizational structure to micromanage the development teams.
- The organization’s leadership doesn’t have a plan for implementing the transformation, so they fail to “pack for the long journey.” They expect the transformation to occur over days or weeks, when it requires months to years. As a result, they often give up prematurely before they have a chance to capitalize on the many benefits that the big change has to offer.
Note that none of these challenges references agile practices, such as user stories, 15-minute stand-up meetings, or planning poker (all described in Chapter 1). Adopting these practices is relatively easy. The difficult aspect of any agile transformation is not in changing what people do on a daily basis, but in changing the organization’s structure and the way it operates, and in changing how people approach their work and how they work together. Replacing a control culture that has clearly demarcated departmental boundaries with cross-functional, self-managed teams is much more challenging than having your developers play a round of planning poker to estimate their workloads.
In this section, I offer guidance on how to prepare the foundation for a successful enterprise agile transformation by avoiding these common mistakes.
Appreciating the value of an agile organization
People don’t change unless they have good reason to do so. I’ve seen many organizations fail to implement major change initiatives simply because management wasn’t fully convinced of their benefits or failed to communicate those benefits to the people in the organization who needed to implement the change. As a result, everyone made half-hearted or symbolic attempts to change, failed, and then concluded that the change was simply a bad idea.
Prior to embarking on your journey to transform your organization into an agile enterprise, make sure the benefits are clear in your own mind and in the minds of everyone in your organization who will be leading the change:
- Collaborative excellence: In agile enterprises, everyone, including management, employees, customers, and stakeholders, collaborates to create and deliver value. You don’t have just a few people at the top of the organization determining what’s best for the customer and the organization.
- Continuous improvement: Agile enterprises embrace continuous improvement in both the product and the process for creating it. Over time, the organization evolves, often with little, if any, management oversight.
- Improved transparency: Enterprise agility drives a culture of transparency that increases visibility of obstacles and dysfunction in both products and processes. After adopting an agile framework, you may be surprised at the number of problems your organization has. In most cases, the transformation didn’t create the problems, it merely exposed them.
- Increased business value: With enterprise agility, the entire organization focuses on delivering value to customers and to the organization. The emphasis is on eliminating or at least significantly reducing anything in the organization that doesn’t contribute value.
- Ability to exceed customer expectations: By involving customers in product development, the organization is better equipped to meet customer needs and exceed their expectations.
- Enhanced innovation: Enterprise agility encourages teams to experiment and to learn from success and failure, promoting a spirit of innovation that gives agile enterprises a competitive edge.
- Ability to adapt quickly to changing conditions: By localizing decision-making and accountability, teams can adapt more quickly to take advantage of emerging technologies and respond to changes in the marketplace. Enterprise agility essentially gives large organizations the agility often seen in startups and other small businesses.
Clarifying your vision
Before you try to initiate any big change, develop a clear vision of what your organization will look like or how it will operate differently after the change is in place. Your vision should include the purpose for making the change; for example, “To improve our product delivery agility, so we can deliver greater value to our customers faster.” Here’s one approach for developing a vision for enterprise agility:
Gather all stakeholders or reps from different stakeholder groups in a room for a brainstorming session.
This is a great opportunity to bring in people who are likely to resist change, so they have a voice, and you can address any concerns they may have.
Highlight the problems or limitations with the way your organization currently delivers value/product to customers.
Ask participants to point out other limitations or challenges in the current system.
Present agile as a solution, pointing out specifically how it can address the limitations or challenges on the list.
Ask participants for their input. This is a good opportunity to identify any pockets of resistance you’re likely to encounter.
Ask participants to suggest vision statements that describe the way the organization needs to change to more effectively overcome the challenges it faces and to achieve its goal of increasing its enterprise agility.
Write down suggested vision statements on your whiteboard.
Engage the group in a discussion until you arrive at a general consensus on the vision statement.
Your goal is to walk out of the brainstorming meeting with a vision statement that everyone in the group accepts. An inability to reach consensus on the vision is usually a sign that your transformation will have a difficult time succeeding.
Starting without a clear vision guarantees failure. Many organizations don’t have a sense of their own culture. They can’t envision how agile will fit with their larger organizational mindset. They haven’t even considered whether their organization is open to change. Without a clear vision, you’re unlikely to be able to overcome the resistance that always accompanies a major change.
Planning for your transformation
After analyzing your existing culture and developing a clear vision of what you want your organization to look like after the change, you have points A and B — your point of departure and point of arrival. All you need now is a map (a plan) that connects the two points. In Chapter 10, I provide detailed guidance on how to develop a plan for implementing an enterprise agile transformation. Your plan may look something like this, which is based loosely on the six-step adoption plan for Large-Scale Scrum (LeSS), presented in Chapter 5:
Choose or develop your own enterprise agile framework.
See Chapters 4 to 8 to review the top five enterprise agile frameworks, and choose the framework that’s best suited to your organization’s existing culture. You generally want to choose the framework that you think your organization will transition to easiest.
Develop an overall strategy for implementing the change.
For example, many organizations start small, with a single product and two or three teams. After these teams have successfully adopted the new approach and are satisfied with the results, the change can be extended out to other products or product lines or to other teams.
Establish a time frame for implementing the change.
Keep in mind that large organizations tend to take a long time to adopt any new approach. Think in terms of months and years, not days and weeks.
Create a consensus document for everyone who will be involved in implementing the change.
Your consensus document must clearly describe the vision and provide all involved with a list of priorities they need to focus on when addressing their changes locally. (See Chapter 10 for details.)
Provide education and training to everyone in the organization who will be involved in and affected by the agile transformation.
Your approach to education and training depends on your strategy for implementing the change. If you’re planning to roll out the change to the entire organization, everyone needs to receive agile education and training. If you’re starting with one product and only a few teams, focus on training those who will be involved from the start.
Education and training are important in changing the way people in your organization think about the way they do their work. As they begin to understand and experience the benefits of enterprise agility, they will begin to share their experience with others in the organization, which will help drive the cultural change that delivers the greatest improvements.Build cross-functional teams.
The team is the fundamental unit in agile. Teams must be cross-functional, meaning they have all the knowledge and skills required (design, development, analysis, testing, and so forth) to deliver a product end-to-end to the customer.
Define “product.”
Your product is anything of value delivered to the customer. Identify the value you deliver to the customer and use it to formulate your definition of “product.” Everyone must agree on what the product is before your organization can begin to work on delivering it more effectively to the customer.
Define “done.”
The definition of “done” (DoD) is a term from Scrum software development that refers to a set of criteria that must be met for a product to be considered satisfactorily completed. For example, a DoD may state that “done” means a feature has been tested and successfully integrated into a working version of the product. Without an agreed-upon DoD, teams may never be able to tell when a product is ready for delivery.
Provide teams with the resources they need to complete their work.
In agile, the role of organizational leadership shifts from manager to leader-servant. Leadership sets the mission and overall vision, provides the teams with the resources they need, and then steps out of the way, trusting the teams to deliver the highest quality product to the customer.
In Scrum, teams conduct two-part sprint planning meetings where they first figure out what needs to be done and then determine how they will get it done. Approach your agile transformation plan the same way. First, figure out what your organization needs to do (or be) and then how your organization will do it (or be it). The vision statement describes what your organization must do. Your plan describes how to do it.