At an annual leadership summit of a $100 billion conglomerate, the chief executive exhorted the groups top managers and its 600,000 employees to be more agile both at a strategic and an organizational level, and identify opportunities with a sense of urgency.
Quite obviously, the Chief did not have Scrum or any of the many other Agile Methodologies in mind. So what exactly did he mean by encouraging his managers to be agile at the "strategic and organizational levels"?
At the strategic level, it simply means the nimble-footed capacity of the organization to seek new paths, or new opportunities to expand and seed new businesses in a fast changing environment. That implies an evolved and facilitating leadership style, the availability and quick access to capital, as well as a deep tolerance for entrepreneurial experimentation and failure.
At the organizational level, it meant creating the necessary structure and culture that nurtures merit and entrepreneurship, one that is alert to the subtle and not-so-subtle changes in the competitive environment, and has developed the capacity to dynamically orient and adapt to change using a bottom-up approach. It means staying on top of emerging business technologies while blurring the boundaries between departments, verticals and businesses.
At the team level, it implies adopting one or the other suitable Agile Methodology. At this level, the practice is fairly developed, though because of its narrow organizational scope, 75% of organizations will not succeed in getting the benefits that they hope will materialize from the transition.
Does an Agile Transformation change organizations as we know it and the manner in which it operates?
Yes! Fundamental to this change is inculcating the leadership ability and organizational capacities for complexity management. It also implies deconstructing the hierarchy into sets of self-organizing, independent team nodes, and then to single-person nodes and allowing the organization to rebuild into a network structure through emergence. Part of the existing hierarchy - the bureaucracy needed for due diligence and governance - will continue to co-exist, in parallel with the network, with formal or informal linkages between the two structures.
What is that and what does it entail?
It challenges the common understanding that a few people at the top of the organization will have all the solutions, the only solutions, which they will then give to other people who are in charge of implementing it. It implied that the organization was heavily dependent on the limited cognitive and information processing capability of a few people at the top of the hierarchy. It also reduced the capacity of the majority of the organization's members to act autonomously, innovate and respond to local level information.
To overcome that, transformation programs have to be done at three levels - team, business and strategy. Each of these work-streams will progress through three overlapping stages in the preliminary phase with the objective of resolving and streamlining communication and coordination issues at functional interfaces while teams transition to one or the other established agile methodology.
All post agile transition surveys point to one fact - that the ability to change organizational culture is the biggest stumbling block - much more than a general resistance to change. If that be the case, the attempt to change the culture of just one or two of the many business functions will result in failure. This is simply because, the targets of a Level 1 transition (usually technical teams) are not the repository of organizational culture. If one has to overcome the culture barrier, the scope of the Agile initiative would necessarily have to be organization wide.
Yet, it cannot all be done at once. It requires careful choreographing the progress of the initiative taking intangibles such as competence of individuals, availability of key personnel and the incidence of critical events. This single failure to make the scope of Agile initiatives organization wide is what makes Agile fragile.
And what is often forgotten in the hurly-burly of an Agile transition is the end objective of the program
In qualitative terms, it is about adaptability, business sustainability, managing business complexity, and making strategy everyone everyday business and creating the requisite structure that facilitates it.
In quantitative terms, it is primarily about a quantum jump in revenue or other hard metric. If an Agile transformation does not result in a 30-40 % or greater jump in revenue, with an ROI period of less than 12 months, rest assured, it can safely be classified a failure.
It appears to work for a while, and everyone is excited. Then the cracks appear, projects or teams are given a "one-off exception" to drop agile temporarily and return once their project or other such activity is completed.
That is classic fragile Agile. And unfortunately, in a majority of the cases, this fragmentation is usually facilitated by the executive suite.
Quite obviously, the Chief did not have Scrum or any of the many other Agile Methodologies in mind. So what exactly did he mean by encouraging his managers to be agile at the "strategic and organizational levels"?
At the strategic level, it simply means the nimble-footed capacity of the organization to seek new paths, or new opportunities to expand and seed new businesses in a fast changing environment. That implies an evolved and facilitating leadership style, the availability and quick access to capital, as well as a deep tolerance for entrepreneurial experimentation and failure.
At the organizational level, it meant creating the necessary structure and culture that nurtures merit and entrepreneurship, one that is alert to the subtle and not-so-subtle changes in the competitive environment, and has developed the capacity to dynamically orient and adapt to change using a bottom-up approach. It means staying on top of emerging business technologies while blurring the boundaries between departments, verticals and businesses.
At the team level, it implies adopting one or the other suitable Agile Methodology. At this level, the practice is fairly developed, though because of its narrow organizational scope, 75% of organizations will not succeed in getting the benefits that they hope will materialize from the transition.
Does an Agile Transformation change organizations as we know it and the manner in which it operates?
Yes! Fundamental to this change is inculcating the leadership ability and organizational capacities for complexity management. It also implies deconstructing the hierarchy into sets of self-organizing, independent team nodes, and then to single-person nodes and allowing the organization to rebuild into a network structure through emergence. Part of the existing hierarchy - the bureaucracy needed for due diligence and governance - will continue to co-exist, in parallel with the network, with formal or informal linkages between the two structures.
What is that and what does it entail?
It challenges the common understanding that a few people at the top of the organization will have all the solutions, the only solutions, which they will then give to other people who are in charge of implementing it. It implied that the organization was heavily dependent on the limited cognitive and information processing capability of a few people at the top of the hierarchy. It also reduced the capacity of the majority of the organization's members to act autonomously, innovate and respond to local level information.
To overcome that, transformation programs have to be done at three levels - team, business and strategy. Each of these work-streams will progress through three overlapping stages in the preliminary phase with the objective of resolving and streamlining communication and coordination issues at functional interfaces while teams transition to one or the other established agile methodology.
All post agile transition surveys point to one fact - that the ability to change organizational culture is the biggest stumbling block - much more than a general resistance to change. If that be the case, the attempt to change the culture of just one or two of the many business functions will result in failure. This is simply because, the targets of a Level 1 transition (usually technical teams) are not the repository of organizational culture. If one has to overcome the culture barrier, the scope of the Agile initiative would necessarily have to be organization wide.
Yet, it cannot all be done at once. It requires careful choreographing the progress of the initiative taking intangibles such as competence of individuals, availability of key personnel and the incidence of critical events. This single failure to make the scope of Agile initiatives organization wide is what makes Agile fragile.
And what is often forgotten in the hurly-burly of an Agile transition is the end objective of the program
In qualitative terms, it is about adaptability, business sustainability, managing business complexity, and making strategy everyone everyday business and creating the requisite structure that facilitates it.
In quantitative terms, it is primarily about a quantum jump in revenue or other hard metric. If an Agile transformation does not result in a 30-40 % or greater jump in revenue, with an ROI period of less than 12 months, rest assured, it can safely be classified a failure.
It appears to work for a while, and everyone is excited. Then the cracks appear, projects or teams are given a "one-off exception" to drop agile temporarily and return once their project or other such activity is completed.
That is classic fragile Agile. And unfortunately, in a majority of the cases, this fragmentation is usually facilitated by the executive suite.
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