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Enterprise Agile adoption

Xavier Albaladejo

Limits and levers

Agile Spain Conference

December 2015 v2.0

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PMA

Postgrado en

Métodos Ágiles

Xavier coordinates a Postgraduate in Agile Methods at La

Salle, he is Certified Scrum Practitioner, Certied LeSS

Practitioner, founder of proyectosagiles.org and Agile

Barcelona and he has been president of Agile Spain.

Bio

His work as Agile Expert en AXA MedLA IT (Mediterranean-

Latin-American Region) consist on introducing Agile as part

of Digital transformation in the countries of this region, with

the aim of increasing their speed and flexibility to adapt to

customer needs.

Xavier Albaladejo specialty is organizational transformation

based on Agile-Lean principles.

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?

Why are you reaching limits in your Agile

adoption? Why will it not work?

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Everyone is pursuing his/her own priorities. People work for

themselves, not for the global objective.

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There are managers (in Business and in IT) who have no interest in changing.

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Culture In certain areas is not collaborative by Command & Control.

Some managers are afraid of loosing control of the situation and putting into risk their

own personal interests.

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A lot of groups / areas / departments are needed to achieve a Business objective

and there are many dependences between them.

They are plenty of complex processes, forced conformance, validation gates, ….

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They are lack of engineering practices and tools to allow faster changes with quality,

in order to quickly check their impact in customers / end users.

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People don’t really know what is Agile about, the implied cultural change and the needed re-

organization (in order to quickly launch products and adjust them to the market).

And if they ‘d know this, it’s possible that they’d get mentally stuck because of the changes to be

done.

It is not very clear the “what, how and who” of an Agile transformation. “Traditional” trainings are not

helping very much in your real world and they are not enough to change behaviors.

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Transformation

Change Management

Culture

Organization & processes

Levers

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Agile levers

Is there a powerful purpose for the change in your organization? What problems /

pains to they have? Are they economic issues? To be the first in the market, to

survive, …? What is the urgency of this change?

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Agile levers

There are many things to be aligned, so you need high level sponsors that also set

priorities in the change and explain what it is about.

As Agile is for improving company results, a key sponsor must be placed in the

Business side in order to act as the ultimate lever for the whole organization.

It’s essential that these sponsors have a idiosyncrasy that is aligned with Agile

(collaborative and open minded – test&learn) and they give example of behavior.

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Agile levers

High Management transformation needs of specialized coaching, coaches who

talk their language, who know how to take advantage of the organization and

hierarchy in order to get results, experienced in creating a strategy on cultural

change management and organization re-desing.

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Agile levers

When starting introducing Agile, it’s important to identify the right people, early

adopters / volunteers that will ensure success and will act as “social “ ambassadors

by telling the benefits, showing results, why their life have improved.

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Agile levers

Coaching is a fast and secure change approach (not only in practices and

techniques but also in the way of thinking and working as a team).

It’s also needed specific coaching in engineering practices and automation in order

to get early feedback.

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Agile levers

In order to develop products in an agile, fast

and flexible way, you have to create

autonomous teams that include all end-to-end

skills, so simplifying processes. This re-

organization fosters cultural change (by

changing roles and aligning goals).

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Agile levers

You have to set new

collaboration principles with your

providers in order to create more

transparency, work as a team

and jointly improve.

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Agile levers

Team work is a differential factor of more

competitive companies. In the start of a

cultural shift, you have to asses the

adherence to teamwork principles and

establish mechanisms/practices in order

to reinforce them.

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Agile levers

Managers should be more systemic and

oriented to grow their people (in

competences and empowering them). To

achieve this, a system of 360 feedback

should be in place as well as give them

methods for working in their improvement

areas.

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Agile levers

You should ensure that time for learning

exists and that this knowledge is spread

among all teams.

You should create a bottom-up improvement

process in order the teams can continuously

identify what they need to run and be

efficient at an organizational level.

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Agile levers

It’s crucial to quickly validate your business

value hypotheses in your customers / real

users and nimbly incorporate this feedback

in order to adjust your product to the

market (thing that only you can achieve if

you have a simple organization, oriented to

business initiatives and with a culture of

teamwork)

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Next steps

Identify the levers for your limits.

Think on a strategy to create your

levers.

Identify the right people to involve that

will support you.

Create the context step by step, test

& learn. It will take time. Iterate!!