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Change is hard. Even with trained teams, it will take a couple of iterations before they start to feel confident and a year and a half for the agile mindset to seep into the organization culture.
Traditional organizational constructs and mindsets will have a tendency to still frame expectations in terms of waterfall, even when they don't mean to. Watch out for the temptation of ...
Planning out a full year of projects. Agile recognizes that change is a constant. Binding discrete units of change to time-limited budgets forces us to make early roadmap commitments, thereby reducing agility. Focus instead on velocity (predictability of team throughput), which allows you to compare expected throughput to the overall size of the backlog. Scope is managed by continual backlog prioritization and refinement.
Maximizing utilization. Delivering on a cadence requires a capacity margin. Although a team should fill its sprint backlog only to 70%, it will operate at 100% and deliver more reliably given the buffer.
Creating specification hand-offs. Lightweight business cases, prioritized just in time, will be elaborated through decentralized, "rolling wave" planning and face-to-face conversations between the Product Owner and agile team.
Treating the backlog as items that can be ordered from a menu. Close collaboration between the business and the implementation team (by dedicating a skilled Product Owner to one or two agile teams) is key for success.
Pressuring to overcommit. See "maximizing utilization", above.
Controlling progress through milestones. See "planning out a full year of projects", above. The reliability of far-reaching, waterfall-style milestones is statistically unproven and anecdotally demoralizing. The short cadence of sprints and product increments provide frequent, objective measurements and milestones for progress visibility and "rolling wave" planning.
John Kotter has studied large-scale transformation of 100s of organizations over many years, and extensively documented the behaviors that separate the successes from the failures.
The 8 Big Mistakes
Allowing too much complacency. Urgency starts at the top and must be sufficiently reinforced to get people at all levels looking for ways they can move towards the available opportunities.
Failure to create a sufficiently powerful guiding coalition.
Underestimating the power of vision.
Under-communicating the vision by 10-100X.
Permitting obstacles to block the new vision.
Failure to create short term wins.
Declaring victory too soon.
Neglecting to anchor change firmly in the organization's culture.
The 8 Accelerators for Change
Create a sense of urgency. Identify, discuss, and constantly reinforce the crisis and the opportunities.
Establish a guiding coalition. Put together a group with the authority to lead the change. This empowered group is a network that operates in parallel with the traditional hierarchy of the organization.
Create a strategic vision to guide the change and initiatives to achieve it.
Enlist a volunteer army. The guiding coalition needs to communicate and model the vision in such a way as to motivate others to want to be a part of it.
Enable action, including risk taking, by removing barriers (such as structures which undermine the vision).
Generate short-term wins and reward those who made the wins happen.
Sustain acceleration. Reinforce the sense of urgency; use the credibility earned to change the structures and policies that do not fit the transformative vision; and hire, promote, and develop those that can implement the change.
Normalize change in the culture by articulating the connections between the new behaviors and the organization's success.
Change is about vision, opportunity, agility, inspired action, and celebration—not project management, budget reviews, reporting relationships, compensation, and accountability to a plan. Most organizations begin as change-oriented networks which only later form into hierarchies in order to manage growth and ensure efficiency. And while hierarchies effectively steer the day-to-day procedures of organizations and make incremental changes to deal with predictable adjustments, their structure does not promote volunteerism, organic risk-taking and experimentation, and cultural shifts that embrace change. This is why empowering a guiding coalition (mentioned above) and encouraging a network of motivated change agents to grow up around it is so very important.
A guiding coalition (GC) for change is ...
Made up of people that executive leadership trusts. (The core group might be hand-picked while applications may be solicited for the remaining positions.)
Sufficiently small to maintain group trust and tight communication.
Representative of a broad range of skills and the hierarchy's levels and departments, including a few outstanding leaders and managers.
The change network ...
Made up of focused, committed, and passionate contributors.
Drives problem solving, collaboration, and creativity.
Mimics the enterprise in its entrepreneurial phase and therefore must stay dynamic, coalescing and disbanding initiatives as needed.
While the Guiding Coalition is created, blessed, and supported by the executives, the network that grows up around it does not report into the hierarchy (like a task group would). This network is a second organizational operating system, working alongside the hierarchy as an equal. The two systems must be inseparable, constantly sharing information and activity. The network is populated by engaged contributors at all levels of the organization. Because they are the people with the relevant information, connections, and motivation to execute the change strategy, strategic initiatives such as work streams and tiger teams are passed over to them. The network cannot be viewed as a rogue operation. It must be treated as a legitimate part of the organization, or the hierarchy will crush it.
For introductory steps to adopt Agile, go here.
Article [free]: "Accelerate!" by John Kotter, in the Harvard Business Review.
Book [paid]: "Accelerate", book by John Kotter.
Book [paid]: "Leading Change", book by John Kotter.