Agile Transformations

Recipes for agile transformation initiatives

Agile Transformations

Agile transformation is as an act of transforming an organization’s form or nature gradually. The new form is able to thrive in a flexible, collaborative, self-organizing, fast changing environment.

The Agile Manifesto values and principles can be taught and exercised throughout any type of organization as it is not limited to development teams.

The entire organization needs to understand the values and principles of an agile transformation to benefit from the rewards of achieving healthy agility. The cultural and organizational mindset shall change to one that embraces a culture of self-organization and collaboration.

Never forget the Agile Manifesto.

Read the second page. The 12 Agile Manifesto Principles identify your focus and improvement areas.

We are pragmatic engineers.

We collect first the low-hanging fruits.

First digital steps are often straightforward to implement. The return on investment is often calculated as a few weeks or months at most.

The First steps in the agile journey feel natural. The gains are visible for all involved parties.

Developing digital products with DevOps, Scrum and DecSecOps approaches are industry standard approaches.

The next iterations are often more challenging.

People like change. They seldom like to change.

Our approach to initiating and supporting an agile transformation is

Establish leadership situation awareness, discovery of weaknesses and kickoff of transformation
  • Conduct a Go And See - Gemba - to assess and understand your organization’s context and specific challenges.

  • Work with leadership to make those challenges visible and define steps to address them.

  • Identify urgency and core champions actively supporting the transformation.

  • Launch leadership teams and communities of practices to guide your organization’s transformation.

  • Enable leadership to deploy transformation incrementally and guide the scope and pace of change.

Organize your collaborators and workflow around your products and strategy
  • Design a custom transformation approach with immediately actionable steps.

  • Select a few pilot groups for launch and involve all participants – open space meeting, information radiators -.

  • Create a coherent, actionable backlog, which connects strategy to execution, so the entire organization is aligned around shared goals.

  • Identify indicators to measure progress.

  • Build team level backlogs so the entire organization is aligned around shared goals.

  • Work with leadership to discover and address organizational pain points and challenges.

Launch your teams
  • Train your pilot teams in the roles, artifacts, and events of Scrum and LeSS.

  • Embed coaches to support your teams become high-performing.

  • Establish team excellence and technical craftsmanship.

  • Use specific, demonstrable success to train, launch, and coach additional teams.

Build team sustainability
  • Build and extend communities of practice.

  • Nurture internal coaching capabilities to sustain your agile practice beyond the pilot.

  • Establish continuous improvement as culture in the organization.

  • Provide additional follow-up as needed to continue to build business agility.

Focus on product delivery
  • Value stream mapping and waste elimination.

  • Amplify learning.

  • Late decision-making.

  • Fast delivery - continuous integration, continuous delivery, continuous deployment, DevOps -.

  • Team empowerment and technical fluency. Professional teams are required for awesome products.

  • Built-in integrity.

  • View applications as a whole.

I am often surprised how reluctant organizations are to adopt new technologies and digital approaches.

None of them want to be laggards or late adaptors. And statistically, half of them are slower than average.

We reinforce learning theory, streamline how to apply agile principles and experiments, help you to develop a routine, promote awareness, boost ownership, facilitate barrier removal, and avoid painful or costly dead ends. Our goal is to shorten the learning curve and optimize human and financial investments. We truly believe in the first directive.

Regardless of what we discover, we understand and truly believe that everyone did the best job they could, given what they knew at the time, their skills and abilities, the resources available, and the situation at hand.