Tuesday 19 June 2012

Retrospective on Agile Transformations: Challenges to Adoption - Bottom-up Approach


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.

 

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