From the course: Agile Foundations

Start an agile transformation

From the course: Agile Foundations

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Start an agile transformation

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- With any large organizational change, it's difficult to see where to start. Some organizations want to start from the bottom up. They want to train their employees and just get started with Scrum, XP, or Kanban. Other organizations want to start from the top down. They want their executives and managers to understand the change and create new budgets for agile teams. Both of these approaches have their own advantages and disadvantages. Starting from the bottom up will get you going pretty quickly, but you might run into trouble with executive support. On the other hand, starting from the top down could get you a lot of executive support, but the teams might not know much about the agile mindset. You might be surprised to hear that a lot of agile transformations fail before they even get started. That's because a lot of organizations have a culture which has a hard time embracing big changes. An organizational culture is an unseen and unspoken way of working. You might hear employees say something like, that's not the way we do things here. These rules might not be written down, they're just understood as being part of the organization. One of the most common types of organizational culture is the control culture. This is the culture that's based on a hierarchy of different supervisors, directors, and executives. Everyone in these organizations knows exactly who they work for and knows who works for them. If you fit neatly into an organizational chart, then you're usually part of a control culture. A control culture wants predictability. That's because each manager is responsible for the people that work for them. If there's a lot of uncertainty, then it gets difficult to make predictions. That's why a lot of control cultures have a very strong project management office. The PMO likes to divide work into predictable projects. Each one will have its own scope, budget, and schedule. This common type of organization will have a really hard time embracing some of the radical changes that are part of an agile mindset. So the first thing you want to do is figure out if your organization has a strong control culture. If it does, then recognize that most of your organization will push back against many of the core parts of an agile mindset. If this happens, usually your best approach is to create an entirely separate team within your organization. One company that I work with actually put their agile team in an entirely different building and then isolated them on their own two floors. That gave them full ownership of their product. Then the executives checked out if this team delivered better than the rest of the organization. When a company decides to make an organizational change, it could take five or 10 years to make this transformation. This is a huge commitment, so it's better to understand the big changes before you get started.

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