The Fundamentals of Agile Transformation

Change must be performed holistically – Culture, Structure and Practices support each other. However, it is easier to cultivate a healthy culture with good practices, and to facilitate good practices in a firm structure. Thus focusing first on forming teams and governing the flow of value should expedite the organizational shift.

Team Requirements

• Scrum requires cross-functional teams, comprising developers and testers.
• The Product Owner or Governance Board must provide the team with a product backlog.
• The team must commit to a list of deliverables, and stabilize the velocity of delivery.
• The team needs everything necessary to deliver on its commitments, including available resources. If the team lacks necessary resources (or structure), the company will track work and not value.
• Build a rational delivery framework.

Practicing Agile in a weak Agile structure will not deliver full value. Solid practices and a healthy culture emerge only within a rational delivery framework.

Practice the Basics

Successful transformations require solid fundamentals, such as clarity, accountability and metrics. To ensure agility, firms must minimize the dependencies and the coordination points between teams. The enterprise requires clarity, i.e. a clear backlog, team accountability, and a means to measure progress. Clarity is required to create products that satisfy customers. An enterprise needs governance, structure, and metrics, in order to prioritize the value of its activities. And teams require autonomy with minimal dependencies between them.

Assign Product Ownership

Agile requires ownership of the product vision, by either the Product Owner or a Governance Board, comprising the CIO or CDO, portfolio managers, program managers, project managers and BAs. Failure to satisfy the client almost always results from difficulties to form a prioritized product backlog.

Avoid These Organizational Barriers to Agile

• Matrix organizations. The team needs the power, to add value, and functional managers pull power from the team.
• Non-instantly available resources. Agility requires a strategy for shared resources.
• Unbalanced capacity and demand. Practicing Lean techniques can remove the waste (muda, mura and muri) that impedes agility. The weakest link or scarcest resource limits the speed of value delivery.
• Limited access to domain expertise.
• Large products with diverse technology stacks.
• Shared requirements between teams.
• Technical debt and defects.
• Low cohesion and tight coupling. Coordination points between teams represent dependencies.

Chart the agile transformation

(From Mike Cottemeyer’s slide show.)

Original slice – Ad-Hoc / Low Trust: large batch size, highly dependent teams, static models, DevOps uncoordinated.

Phase one – Early Lean/Agile / Becoming Predictable: modest batch size, highly coupled teams, partially dynamic models, DevOps partially coordinated.

Phase two – Late Lean/Agile / Predictable: medium batch size, partially decoupled teams, partially dynamic models, DevOps partially coordinated.

Phase three – Agile: small batch size, mostly decoupled teams, mostly dynamic models, DevOps mostly coordinated.

Phase four – Early Lean Startup: small batch size, near total decoupling, nearly dynamic models, DevOps nearly coordinated.

Phase five – Established Lean Startup: very small batch size, fully independent teams, fully dynamic models, DevOps fully coordinated.

Create Executive Pull

Clarify the vision, to create executive pull. Implement from the lower left (Lean/Agile), but lead from the upper right (Lean Startup). To move to Lean Startup mode, the goals is to reduce batch size, decouple teams, use dynamic software models, fully coordinate DevOps, reduce governance, and increase team independence and funding.

Build Trust

First adopt a Lean/Agile governance framework, to increase predictability and trust. Institute strong product ownership with solid practices.

Stabilize Velocity and Decrease Batch Size

Remove wasteful activities and reduce batch size incrementally. Adaptability increases with smaller batch sizes. Work to maintain a stable velocity of backlog completion. Balance demand, and stop over committing.

Acknowledge Governance Deficits

Often productive Agile teams expose gaps in the clarity and vision of executive leadership – specifically when team productivity exceeds the ability of the Governance Board to maintain a product backlog.

Create DevOps

To deliver flexibility, drive Agile transformation in software-defined applications and infrastructure. To drive rapid, continuous incremental development of applications and services develop a DevOps capability – bring development and operations together in a coordinated way.

Configure Dynamically

Move away from static to dynamic models, to deal with the rapidly changing demands of digital business and the need to scale systems up (or down) rapidly. Digital business needs rules, models and code that can dynamically assemble and configure all of the elements needed including the network and application.

Decouple Teams

To continue the evolution, make fully decoupled, independent teams and move to dynamic computing models. Amazon has formed teams around services, allowing new applications to consume services independently. The Recommendation Engine, for example, became an independent service which other Amazon products use.

What do you think?

What does your organizational structure look like? How do you form project teams? In which quadrant is your enterprise?

See also:
Agile Transformation… (1/4) – Theory of Transformation
Agile Transformation… (2/4) – The Fundamentals of Agile Transformation
Agile Transformation… (4/4) – Develop an Agile Transformation Roadmap

References:
Cottemeyer, Mike, 29 October 2014, Why Agile is Failing in Large Enterprises & What You Can Do About It, Tampa Bay Agile Meetup presentation, hosted by Valpak Manufacturing Center, St. Petersburg, FL.

Green, Chloe, 8 October 2014, Gartner Identifies Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends 2015.

About Dan & Agile and Beyond:

Dan Feldman is the creator and host of the Agile and Beyond podcast. With Agile practitioners, design thinkers, team builders, organization designers, entrepreneurs, and visionaries, he explores the future of work, education, and society. With the digital age demanding greater collaboration, enhanced creativity, and heightened agility, he examines avant-garde, responsive, collaborative team and organization designs as well as the shifts in our individual and collective perception of experience and purpose. Tune in!

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