12 critical elements in achieving agility
Over the next 12 weeks, I’m publishing one article per week highlighting 12 critical aspects of helping an organization achieve true and lasting change. Truly changing the DNA of an organization, its culture and ways of working, is literally like trying to change your own DNA. It will be equally painful so be forewarned. This is why 70%, or more, of organizational transformation efforts fail and will continue to do so.
So why embark on a digital or agile cultural transformation? Because one, it’s a survival imperative and two, the true rewards will be far greater than the measurable improved financials. Those asking for the change need to be highly aware of the support they must provide and must be committed to being actively involved. Those entrusted, or voluntold, with leading the change must be even MORE educated, experienced, and committed.
- Leadership: Experienced transformation leadership using constantly evolving plans. A clear vision and reason for change must be constantly communicated. The vision drumbeat. Start with why!
- Individuals: It’s not one (1) transformation! It’s thousands. Plan to meet each person where THEY are, not where you want them to be. The heartbeat.
- Adoption: It’s not transformation, it’s gradual adoption. It can take people up to a year, or more, to unlearn current habits that have been reinforced their entire lives. “The backward bicycle: What it takes to unlearn…”, ICCE
- Unique: There is no one plan that will work everywhere. There is no one approach that will work for every team. This topic will tie back to experienced leadership using evolving plans.
- Respect: Not everyone will welcome or want change. Not everyone will stay. Allow people to make their choices but stay committed to the vision. That’s mutual respect.
- Budget: Plan, budget, and provide the resources necessary to ensure everyone’s questions can be heard and answered and everyone has the opportunity to learn and apply. DO NOT FOOL YOURSELF that change will be easy, methodical, or cheap. Invest wisely but invest! Those leading the change need a budget and flexibility for face-2-face sessions, new tools, external training, and occasionally temp help (contractors, consultants) to address skill or capacity gaps and opportunities as they emerge. And be prepared to invest for many years depending on many factors. Your employee base, complexity of your business products and services, landscape of your operations, etc. You’re far better off to spend the right amount than underfund it have the effort be ineffective.
- Patience: Be prepared to go at the pace people, teams, managers, and leaders are ready and willing to absorb or tolerate. Closely tied to adoption not transformation #3 above.
- Value: Digital Transformation and organizational agility are not about technology. You must lead with a deep understanding of the intended business value and then reverse engineer and align the internal workflows, technical and security eco-systems, and compliance and regulatory policies to the user experiences. This is not a quick-fix or magic bullet. It’s the hard work required to truly understand how we deliver value and empower our teams to manage and improve operations, product development, and service delivery incrementally.
- HR: The organizations HR programs, processes, policies, and practices will either allow, encourage, support, and accelerate the journey, or they will prevent it from truly happening. At the end of the year, are people recognized and rewarded for their teams performance? Are managers and leaders held accountable for changing the culture and their own methods to foster an agile culture?
- Unknowns: Stop using a rigid project management methodology for digital products, services, solutions, and applications. I’ve been doing formal project management since the late 1980’s and I lived the pain of the 2000’s trying to follow project management in ever increasingly complex digital solutions. You will never, never, know what the final design needs to look like, the exact cost, nor the exact timeline to truly delight one or more target markets, segments, or personas. The organization must shift to an incremental funding model that allows for incremental ideal exploration, experimentation and emerging design (think human-centered design thinking), emerging architecture and incremental agile development using modern development methods and tailored deployment pipelines. The process is known up front, the outputs (final design) are not.
- Finance: Finance and accounting will have to change. But first build the delivery model you want, then engineer the finance, procurement, contracting and accounting systems AROUND the future agile value delivery model.
- Transparency. As long as there are people there will be hidden agendas. As much as it pains me to acknowledge it, I must. But we must still seek to create transparency in all things. Work transparency from the teams role up to strategy via stories, features, epics, capabilities, themes or whatever you want to call them. Strategic goals must be cascaded down BUT use PULL (think Lean) systems that decompose long range visions into smaller and smaller chunks of ‘value’ (not work), and then the reverse transparency will ensure alignment, progress, and reporting are all accounted for (governance and risk management are built in). Both teams and leadership must work in parallel (top-down and bottom-up <– Pro-tip: Put the teams on top!) and seek the alignment via the very structure of enterprise agility, cascading backlogs, lean portfolio management, and ever emerging and evolving product and service roadmaps.
Each week I’ll dive deeper into one of the 12 critical aspects in achieving agility. I’ll share common barriers and offer tactics to overcome, and I’ll anchor the article with real-world experiences.
All of the topics above are interconnected in multiple ways. True organizational agility is like a 3D spider web. All strands support and affect the others and the overall effectiveness of the entire structure. There are big anchoring strands, like Lean, pull, value, and customer centric, and CI-CD, and there are smaller connecting strands like scrum, daily standups, the tools used, etc.
Until then, below are some sources of insight into transformation failures which is one of our best sources of how to guide your organization towards success.
- What Causes Over 70% of Transformation Programmes to Fail?, Richard Keenlyside published on LinkedIn
- Why Transformation Efforts Fail, Harvard Business Review
- Why Transformations Fail and What You Can Do About It, Forbes
- Perspectives on Transformation, McKinsey & Company
Robert Wallace first published this article on LinkedIn here.
Talk to the expert
Robert Wallace
Director of Enterprise Agility
Robert.Wallace@trissential.com
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