Agile
The hard sell
A question that regularly pops up in the Agile community is how to convince people (often upper management) to go Agile. While this is a valuable question to answer, there is an even more important question:
How do we convince people that an Agile transformation of a sizable organization is an ongoing effort and not something that can be completed in a year or two? And how do we do that up front while still convincing them that going Agile is a good idea?
I believe this is necessary to avoid losing momentum after implementing the very visible practices at the team level (typically Scrum). Whether you focus on the rest of the organization sequentially or in parallel, the changes to management mindset, organization structures, competences, culture, governance etc etc. will take longer, have greater impact and be less visible. The problem is that these changes are much harder to explain and will significantly affect those you try to convince – now it’s suddenly about them changing and not only deciding whether others should change.
Find an answer to this question and you will have done your organization a favor of tremendous proportions. Alternatively, you risk ending up in the dreaded “Agile reboot scenario” after a few years.
2 COMMENTS
Hi Tom,
what a great article.
for me there is also another part to the shell when it comes to start up for the upper management.
For well established business who never worked with Agile before, it its not hard for them to agree on that changes in the business happens rapidly. so what they do it planning long term operational and IT changes, they make a big road map, and then they start a pile of individuel project which are trying to deliver the requirements made up “years” ago.
through out these project, the business is changing, and so are the road map and goals do to competitors and customer behavior – so what happens is that the upper management will look on the road map and make adjustments to what is in scoop for future project – the existing project will be asked to make sure they can be aligned with the new future road map, which often comes out as a project 2.0 starting up after end of project 1.0.
by doing so, the business will (in my opinion of view) always be 2 steps behind. even that the business are in control of ongoing and future project planed in the business overall road.
Agile used as a operational tool will make sure that the business have a setup where you can adjust to changes from competitors and customer behavior in a speed which you rarely see in other models.
When this is addressed to the upper management, and explain that its better to plan changes in frames om 2-4 weeks with Agile, they often see the point, but rarely commit to make such a huge change to the way they use to work.
can you share some of your thoughts to that challenge?
Hi Mads,
Thanks for the kind words.
I think it is necessary to have a discussion with management at all levels about the purpose of going Agile, preferably up front, early on and then at appropriate intervals 🙂 Usually they will easily see the point in principles like reducing time-to-market, delivering value early, continuous feedback-loops etc. and be more inclined to changing the business side of things to fully benefit.
The problem occurs if this discussion doesn’t happen and Agile is only sold on a promise of increasing productivity at a team level. This should always be seen as a by-product and not a goal to be pursued in its own right because it will lead to all sorts of problems (but that might be a topic for an entire blog post of its own).
All in all, I think the biggest mistake made when selling Agile to any company/organization, is downplaying how profoundly it will change everything. I believe that the benefits are so convincing that the truth can and should be told.
Cheers,
– Tom