Hi everybody and welcome back!
Last week I had a deep talk with a colleague of mine. She is organizing the agile transformation for an established business right now. She was obviously taking the pro-agile-transformation role in the discussion. Everything else would seriously concern me: The leadership not being convinced of their own project? A template for a failing project. So I took up the and-yet-it-doesn't-solve-everything role. Three hours later, we departed and I felt like I really learnt something that I would like to share with you.
Just to get us all up to speed on the basics:
Why go Agile? (Not just a) answer for managers!
Let's establish three things:
(1) Time is an expensive and limited resource everywhere, but especially so in the higher management. Few people sit in the top of the pyramid and even their working hours per day are limited by hard facts, not the least of those being that a day only has 24 hours and an average body needs at least some sleep after all.
(2) Higher management has important jobs to do as well. Which, the rest of the organization typically only recognizes, if it is not done or done wrong.
(3) Things that an organization below top management cannot clarify on its own are being escalated to top management regularly for a decision making process. Mostly things are escalated because of a lack of responsibility and rarely out of a lack of information. Those are the worst time consumers: The necessary information needs to be presented by the one side and needs to be understood from the other side. Preparing a presentation as well as understanding it both takes serious time.
Combine those three facts above and we come to the conclusion: Because of (1) time is limited, having to spend less time on (3) settling issues in the organization leaves more time for (2) keeping the company as a whole thriving.
An agile transformation promises that: By shifting more responsibilities downwards into the teams, less time is consumed for unproductive work.
Translation for "unproductive work":
playing nanny (management perspective)
waiting for decisions by our bosses that have no clue anyhow (team perspective)
Agile transformation involves all
Shifting responsibility, and the power linked to it, downwards toward a self-organizing environment does impact everyone in the organization.
The teams on the base of the pyramid are in my experience eager to try it out as they initially see their rise in power. Though later in the article we will discuss some issues that come up with the rise in responsibility that threatens the deal from bottom up.
In my experience, the biggest doubts in an agile way are stemming from that feeling of a `loss of power` that is mostly felt in the middle management. It is usually easier to convince the top management to try out agile. If the middle management is not convinced enough though, it is threatened to fail.
Agile in itself is just a buzzword - you need to know your organization and find your goals as in every re-organisation
So what is an agile transformation? It's the way `from here` to an agile organization, of course!
What is an agile organization? This is where it becomes tricky and every organization needs to find his own goals and quantity ...3 kilos of commitment, please... of that goal, really.
Looking at typical established, large companies in highly regulated industries as cars, chemicals, industry? These are not very agile to begin with and good candidates for a first agile transformation in general.
Small companies and startups? Congratulations, you are typically already too agile. Wait, there is a `too agile`? Yes, there is. Ever seen those small startups that grew quicker than their organization managed to adapt? That is my take on a too-agile-company which is lacking the central governance to keep up performance and quality and leaving too much power/responsibility in each single hand.
With all that being said, lets come to step 1 of an agile transformation: Decide whether you want it
If shifting down responsibilities is a goal of yours, then an agile transformation might be something for you. If that is not what you are looking for, then you are not really looking for an agile transformation, but just a plain old agile transformation.
The rest of the goals you might want to add to your transformation/re-organisation is really up to you, but we will be having a look at what shifting down responsibilities entangles, next. Considering the length of this post though, it looks like we are splitting that into the next entry in this series.
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