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BSH Home Appliances Group
10 Blind Spots in Agile Transformation
Agile by itself is a popular and a fancy recipe for those who want to become much more adaptive and flexible to stay in the game. It proposes achieving faster time to market, better innovation and higher customer satisfaction while empowering your employees on decision making and action taking. But, unfortunately, a significant amount of transformation attempts do not achieve these outcomes and turn into a struggling transformation story that causes bigger conflicts and disengagements in the company. When the story goes in this way then; people, process or management culture of the company become a root cause of failure. However, the underlying problem is that large companies are not built to operate in agile because efficiency and revenue oriented thinking require standardization, risk aversion, command and control management, common thinking and execution to keep the execution on track. In contrast, customer and innovation-oriented companies seek for diverse thinking, continuous feedback, empowerment, self-organization and ability to rapidly configure strategy, process and structures. Because they believe efficiency and revenue are not the goals of the company, they are the results of customer centricity empowerment.
So, implementing a successful Agile Transformation not only requires an intense execution but also requires consistent shared ownership and openness to experiment new things.
Here are ten major points you need to consider while driving your Agile Transformation:
1. Lack of alignment on the purpose and the definition of agile:
‘Purpose’ by itself is the answer to a single question: ‘Why am I doing this?’. And ‘WHY’ is the only question that derives other questions. So setting a clear definition of WHY will help other people to understand ‘why are they doing this?’ and ‘what is expected from them? And What is my accountability to make it happen?. The alignment on the expectation and accountability will answer most of the questions and demystify your transformation ambition and goals.
2. Focusing on doing agile rather than being agile
Contradicting to the common view, Agile is not only about principles and practices or Scrum, Kanban…etc. It’s also about leadership, culture, accountability and customer centricity. So for sure, you should consider the right tools and practices for your organizational needs and dynamics but also should show a big focus on the role of leadership and agile mind-set growth. According to the 10thAnnual State of Agile Survey, focusing on being agile offers significantly better (15x) business results compared to focusing on doing agile.
3. Driving change without changing the existing operating model
Driving a massive change without changing your organizations feel makes people like a rat in a maze.
4. Ignoring cultural paradigms
Agile transformation also means transforming your culture. And culture means the way you act, react and interact with others. So if you ignore your culture, then failure is obvious. As Roger Connor-the author of Change the Culture Change the Game said ‘culture lives in our experiences and beliefs.’ So if you want to change the results of your company, then you need to change the experiences that create the beliefs of the people. Otherwise pushing actions may create short term outputs but will never provide sustainable long term changes and outcomes.
5. Not having shared ownership for the change management strategy
Commitment is the only thing that creates an action. So having committed people on-boarded and providing a clear vision/ strategy is one of the critical enablers of execution. Transformation is not about transition; it is not a state change by keeping your traditional habits. It is a change like riding a bicycle with a new steer which makes you going left while steering right. So keeping the right balance with your commitments and making people fully engaged is essential to achieve shared success. Also constantly sensing or probing the stakeholders’ perception and setting up the right engagement approach will help you to seize what is going well and what’s going wrong
6. Building the competencies on time, on place
Competency is the ability to do something successfully or efficiently. So you should make sure that right competencies are involved or ready to be grown. Identifying the needs, building the theoretical and practical knowledge at the front, being clear about the roles/expectations from them and providing an overarching coaching service for the whole stakeholders will make it easy and will create a sustainable pace of execution. Otherwise, you will need lots of pitstops to rectify the decisions and regulate yourself that may cause disengagement, scepticism and lack of commitment of your stakeholders.
7. Lack of transparency and common definition of success
Definition of the Done concept is one of the core artefacts of Scrum. So if you want to make sure that transformation is proceeding on the right path and pace, then you should define a standard definition of success with your stakeholders for all of your transformation deliverables. And then making the outcomes fully transparent with successes and learning will increase the credibility of change management and also provide dedicated support from the organization.
8. Setting the right governance for making it stick
Leading a Business Agility transformation takes planning, time and effort and often represents a large investment. For the change to provide lasting value, it is important to “make it stick” and avoid falling back into old patterns and behaviours. So setting up the right governance for keeping the new mindset alive, incentivizing the desired culture, empowering teams to own it and also supporting the change with the new management approach will make it stick.
9. Not having a capable technological infrastructure to support transformation
Technology Agility evolves the technical culture, processes and tools toward quality and efficiency. Building trust and collaboration, minimizing waste and creating effective feedback loops are vital aspects in meeting the overall goal of delivering business value more quickly. You should consider the technological needs and capabilities to enable an effectively working agile mind-set.
10. Missing the customer feedback while making your decisions
Being a customer-focused organization where decisions about the products are made based on aligning customer needs and wants with the overall goals of the organization. To achieve this, users and customers are engaged early and often, the “voice of the customer” is made real and is used throughout the product development process, and feedback from users and customers is incorporated and helps drive product decisions. To get the customer a seat at the table, the organization should use various techniques including user personas, journey maps, product experiments (minimum viable products and prototypes), customer interviews and focus groups.
Finally, agile companies are adaptive, innovative and flexible to restructure every piece of their way of working. And this power comes from awareness and influence, not command nor control. Leaders should focus on creating an environment of clarity, trust, and common purpose, so members know what the company stands for and how it intends to fulfil its promise to customers. And then leaders should get out of the way.
