Last week I was discussing with my brother, who works as
chemical engineer and is now preparing to pass his exam for a Lean Six Sigma Green
Belt Certification.
He’s studying mainly about Lean production and I was
explaining him how Agile has its roots in the Lean principles and disciplines
and how essential is Lean thinking and Lean management approach to support an Agile
SW development.
My brother is a clever guy: so he understood very well that
embracing Lean means much more than the mere application of a number of practices.
So is for Agile SW development.
He’s maybe a little too clever to ask me something like: “You
say that you’re an experienced Agile and Lean coach: so what do you think it is
needed for an organization to really leverage on Agile and Lean to deliver
quality products in an effective way? What do you think are the key ingredients
to have a successful enterprise transformation?”
Cheeky enough, isn’t it?
But somehow he forced me to step back, reflect, gather my
thoughts and summarize my experience and learning from the last 3 years.
Here comes then a list of 12 tips as outcome of that
exercise, which I intend to share with you in a series of posts. I will start
with the first three today:
- Why?
Before exploring how to implement
an enterprise transformation to an Agile organization, the first step is about
asking yourself “Why?” What is the need behind? What is the goal you intend to
achieve? There must be a clear need for any improvement change: imagine how crucial
it is to start off such a dramatic change. The “Why?” must be clearly
understood and the vision for the change communicated and shared to align the
whole organization. Otherwise you’re doomed to fail even before starting (more
about Why Agile? here)
- The approach
Due to what we said above, it is
easy to understand that any successful Agile transformation implies a top-down
approach, in terms of Company values, Management culture, Vision, Business
goals and above all senior management support: you cannot do anything
otherwise. However, changing an organization (irrespective whether big or small) into being Agile is not like the nth Change Program to be deployed with
targets to comply with and a well-defined plan to stick to. There are aspects that
need to emerge bottom-up, like practices to be selected by empowered and
self-organized teams. So an Agile transformation is a sandwich
transformation: you need 2 equally big slices of bread and both are essential.
- Training managers
Given the importance of the
top-down part in the enterprise change, the very first step is training
managers, for them to understand the why, be able to share and communicate the
Vision, embrace Agile values and be ready to support people with a new
leadership style. Many times this critical step is down prioritize, if not even
neglected. It is too easy to fall into temptation that becoming an Agile
organization means making Scrum teams work and that managers, well, they are
clever enough that can handle themselves or can get it with a short summary
from a developer attending a Scrum course: being
a manager in an Agile organization is a totally different job and requires
new tools which must be learnt and cannot be improvised.
How do you see yourself and your story compared to these
three items?
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