Challenges to Adoption - Bottom-up Approach
Agile principles and values often easily adopted by development teams
if provided effective coaching. These teams also understand and adopts the
technical excellence practices e.g. XP (TDD, Pair Programming, CI etc.) with
some initial resistance and start seeing their benefits sooner rather than
later experiencing considerable improvement in quality of deliverable,
customer satisfactions and timeliness of deliverable. Teams starts getting
quite motivated by delivering right business value to its customers with
quality software and people see a very positive buzz around them. Although this
initial initiative gives lots of agile buzz within an organization but still
its benefits are limited as rest of the business (Sales, HR, Finance, sometime
even Product design) doesn’t join this agile journey. Slowly-slowly the fizz goes
out of this agile initiative as team starts getting demotivated due to
non-involvement of other organization functions and little or no
commitment seen from middle management and CxO layer. Senior and Middle
Management often don’t get the new management paradigm that is required for an
enterprise agile transformation. The main bottleneck is actually around their experience of power that is almost exclusively around the
notion of being in charge, whereas, in new way of working power shifts from the
notion of “being in charge” to the notion of “being connected”. This means that
you don’t have to be in charge to exercise power.
Bringing management layer part
of overall agile transformation enables a leaner organization that multi-fold
the benefits of agile in a large organization. Once management joins the agile
transformation journey, bringing other functions to join becomes little easier.
