Agile Transformation vs Culture Shift

Over the years I have been involved in many different company Agile transformations. I’ve helped implement and coached organizations on SAFe, Scrum, Kanban, XP, and even one model that used nothing but index cards and cork board. While I was standing at the kitchen sink doing the dishes tonight, I was thinking about the differences between all of these and why some worked and others didn’t. Some organizations had great success and others didn’t. Here is what I’ve learned over the years.

Your Agile transformation has very little to do with process change and a whole lot to do with culture!

If you want your team, department, or organization to be more Agile, start with changing the culture and let the framework follow. Focus on these three things and let the culture dictate what framework to adopt (as long as it is working, of course). You don’t need to pick a model and try to force it to work. Focus on your culture first and foremost and I bet you’ll discover you land pretty close to an Agile framework that already exists.

1. Encourage Collaboration – Encourage teams to talk to each other. Have product people actively involved in the development lifecycle. Ask for feedback from key stakeholders on a regular basis. Ensure other departments like sales and marketing are in the loop and are ready to support what you’re doing. Make sure you are available to support other teams/departments as well. No one is smarter than everyone so get others involved.
   
2. Embrace Failure – Failure is great. Sure it can be a difficult pill to swallow at times but it can also be a blessing is disguise. Failure is a chance to start over with more information. Encourage people to try new things and if it fails, celebrate what they learned in the process. Every time I’ve seen an Agile transformation fail, this was lacking in the culture. If people didn’t follow the new process to a T, demoed something that wasn’t exactly what the stakeholders asked for, or pushed back on a deadline, they were fired. If you want to see your agile transformation fail, don’t embrace failure.
   
3. Leadership Matters the Most – I can’t stress this enough! Leadership buy-in and support is the most important aspect to any Agile transformation! Good leaders empower collaboration, inspire people to challenge “the way we’ve always done things,” and they build trust. Leaders need to be extremely passionate about building psychological safety for their teams, allows teams to experiment, and setting the tone of the culture. Leaders should be actively involved and modeling to the rest of the organization what they want to see more of. Have them show the rest of the organization what collaboration looks like. Model what gracefully failing looks like. If the leadership isn’t fully bought-in or doesn’t support the change in culture, you’re agile transformation will fail 100% of the time!

In most organizations the Agile transformations usually starts with the software development team and quickly spreads like wildfire throughout the entire company. People outside of software department start to see the benefits of the agile transformation and become intrigued. Don’t be surprised if other teams and departments start asking questions and eventually want you to help implement the same thing on their teams. Take advantage of this when/if it happens! Share your knowledge and remember the number one goal is the help the entire company succeed, not just your team.

An Agile transformation is more than just process change, it is a transformation of the culture of the organization. It all starts with leadership, trickles down to empowered, happy employees, and ends with actually meeting customer needs faster!