Why You Should Manage Your Agile/Digital Transformation

Agile Transformations are messy and represent difficult and significant changes to the way you run your organization, they are not just a technology thing.

They can be made even more difficult when you bring on outside Agile ‘experts’, most of whom have zero experience working in Agile and are going to focus on the frameworks they have certifications in and not on the broader change management efforts you need to undertake.

Their focus will be on getting your organization ‘Doing Agile’ which means everyone goes through the motions of the framework and not much else will change. And you receive zero value from your investment. It’s like buying a car with no engine, it looks good in the driveway but you can’t drive it anywhere.

Having worked in Agile for many years before becoming a coach I can emphatically tell you that understanding how to be Agile is situational to each organization and can’t be found in the frameworks that Agile experts will bring into your organization.

The most successful Agile organizations I worked for didn’t engage in outside Agile coaches, instead, we worked internally and with our leadership to define what Agile was and how it would work. We focused on developing a mindset about how we would work in a fast and incremental fashion and then made incremental changes and kept asking ourselves is what we are going Agile?

It had nothing to do with doing Scrum or any of the other Agile frameworks that support an operational approach to implementing Agile. These frameworks lack any of the organizational change management components that are required to succeed in creating a new cultural mindset around working differently.

To function they assume you have made all of the necessary organizational changes needed to support the framework, which never happens.

Because Agile isn’t just about changing how you develop software, it’s about changing everything else in your organization associated with developing software. If you are waterfall today you know that your entire organization from Finance to Customer Service is touched in some way by this delivery model.

Moving to Agile is no different, it’s not a project that you start and then 9 months later you are Agile. Instead, it’s a long-term change to develop your new normal, so everything that is involved in a waterfall delivery approach is now going to be involved and changed to support an Agile delivery model.

Before you start down the road of making a large investment in Agile coaches to support your transition to Agile, I suggest you consider managing it yourself with support from my SoundAgile Transformation Journey Roadmap.

With SoundAgile Transformation Journey Roadmap, you can obtain years of Agile experience with videos, facilitated workshops, and plenty of supporting artifacts that will provide you with everything you need to confidently start your transformation.

When clients ask coaches how they should do something a common refrain is ‘This is your journey you tell me’.

Take the right step and do it yourself from the beginning.