Leaders Don’t Think About Agile

This post on Linked In garnered over 6,000 views in just over a week's time and resulted in some great conversation, so I thought I’d re-post here. I’ll be sharing some additional stories related to what Leadership needs to do to better understand how they can gain significant benefits from greater agility in their organization.

This was the post…..

A while back I had a conversation with someone who specializes in helping organizations improve their software delivery capabilities, he told me that if he used the word Agile while talking to Sr. Leaders he would be walked out the door.

This is has stuck with me and my initial thought is still this — if Agile isn’t something you can talk about with Sr. Leadership regarding how it can improve an organizations’ ability to deliver software, then that provides us insight as to why so many Agile transformations fail to deliver any real value.

We simply don’t have Leadership buy-in to change the organization to support an Agile delivery model.

Instead, we are typically forced to make a waterfall organization, with annual funding cycles, and, with projects that have fixed budgets, scope, and dates look like they are agile by working in 2-week sprints and 12-week Program increments.

If you are a Leader who is already in a Transformation or thinking about doing it, stop and reconsider your approach. An Agile Transformation is not just a change to how your technology teams deliver work.

Rather it’s a systemic change that touches virtually every aspect of your organization, much like your current waterfall delivery model does.

You can receive value for your investment with just a focus on technology changes, but the real value is changing the entire organization to a point that you don’t say the word Agile, it just becomes how you operate in a new paradigm.