Going beyond Agile Adoption

Okay, so your delivery organization is cycling through Scrum effectively.  Defects are down, velocity is stabilising, ceremonies run like clockwork, teams have deep backlogs and a sense of achievement permeates the office. So as the program winds down through its closing gates, is it time to put up your feet and soak up the glory?

The answer unfortunately is an emphatic no!

The "agile adoption" bit was just the start of an extended process of organizational transformation and change.

"Why?", you ask, cringing at the thought of many hours of workshops and reviews that you had to endure in the face of overwhelming workloads, which kept you in the office will into the night on most workdays.

"Building agility into an organization" is very different from "adopting agile" for your product or service delivery teams. During the period of adopting agile, we very often hear our coaches say, "It's about being agile, not just doing agile!" 

How many really understand the difference? I have noticed that most, including agile coaches just pay lip service to truly "being agile", elevating it to a vision, rather than a goal.

"Doing agile", is about the mechanics of agile - the three roles, the three ceremonies, the three artifacts.

"Being agile", is about internalization and institutionalization - the mental and physical restructuring for adaptability and survivability in the face of relentless change.

"Go that! But how is that any different from what I am already doing?", you hear, as you survey the faces turned up at you from their comfortable perches around the conference room, as someone enters with a tray of biscuits and steaming hot cups of coffee from the Starbucks in the lobby of All Seasons Place just across the street.

Here is a picture I often use to explain what exactly is "being agile".

Rally Software, in their "Rally Survival Guide" puts it quite neatly as:

Building agility into your organization means sensing, creating and adapting to change: quickly and confidently. You need execution agility to make speed and performance your competitive advantage. You need portfolio agility to create opportunities with focus and insight into your organization's highest-value initiatives. You need business agility to take a disciplined approach to managing change, building responsiveness into your organization's DNA.

Got it?

1. Execution agility
2. Portfolio agility
3. Business agility

Or as I use it - Level 1, Level 2 and Level 3 - derived from the existing hierarchical nature of most commercial organizations.

I would ordinarily like to divide it further by splitting up portfolio to product/service/client to create four levels and business to business, executive and board, but then a lot of the firms we have worked with prefer to keep it three level so lets just stick with that standard.

So what is each level?

Over the next few blogs, I will develop the practice at each level, giving work streams, phases/stages, and deliverables.