Trying it out is not the same as adopting it. The cultural transformation of a company towards an Agile culture is not within the reach of every organization. Depending on your sector of activity, your customers or your competitors, agility may be necessary to stand out from the crowd, but it may also be inappropriate.
Indeed, adopting an Agile methodology for a company is not just about learning new working practices. It is above all a cultural change, and a profound, counterintuitive and sometimes even painful organizational transformation that must be achieved.
Find out in this article how to adopt an Agile culture gradually, and what can motivate an organization to such a cultural transformation.
Moving from an existing organizational culture to an Agile culture
If the above title doesn’t express the difficulty sufficiently, please understand that such a profound organizational change can’t be achieved overnight.
Changing corporate culture takes time and effort, both to understand and to disabuse oneself of what has always been known and applied within an organization. But in 2022, adopting an Agile methodology is no longer as big a leap into the fog as it was in the early 2000s. Many companies can testify to the benefits of adopting an agile methodology, whether on the customer or supplier side.
Gone are the days when we could only refer to the SCRUM method, since there are now almost thirty of them!
A) Convincing management
The drive to transform an organization’s culture towards greater agility is not necessarily ordered from the highest hierarchical level downwards.
In fact, the demand for organizational transformation can come from several parties within the same company, but also from several factors outside the company, and ultimately convince management to change its vision and organizational culture.
1- Agility driven by internal factors
Whether it’s a question of tech resources, project managers, business analysts or sales people, the desire to move from an organization to an Agile method can arise from any of these sides, one after the other or even at the same time.
Examples:
- project and development teams find their responsiveness hampered by cumbersome processes,
- the different levels of hierarchy required to validate work slow down the resources mobilized for a site, job or assignment,
- the repetition of previous failures due to the work organization in place reveals a flaw in a procedure to be followed,
- sales reps see their sales arguments “swept aside” by their customers and prospects, due to their lack of agility, and too long a time-to-market…
If these few signals were not enough, the warnings identified by the market could turn out to have a greater impact.
2- Agility driven by external factors
Sometimes it doesn’t take much to make the shift to agility, if you listen to your customers and their needs, your prospects and your market.
Examples:
- your customers have become Agile, and are looking for Agile suppliers who best match their new working methods ,
- your agile competitors are more competitive, more responsive and closer to their customers than you are,
- Time to Market without agility is slower than that offered by your competitors,
- the customer does not want to reduce his room for manoeuvre throughout the development of his project…
There are always elements that can tip the balance for good or ill, and fads that pass as quickly as they arrive.
It’s these kinds of realities that generally speak most loudly to business leaders, customers and the market. The consistency between the service proposition and market expectations must be in phase, so your arguments will gain consistency and resonance enough to be considered and reconsidered if necessary.
Once convinced of the benefits of an agile method for their organization, management will then need to put in place an adoption and deployment strategy for their teams, and will need to demonstrate their agility, no pun intended.
It will also have to prepare a comprehensive support method , ideally participative, so that each employee is convinced and then trained, and so that they gradually adopt a new work culture, a new organization, and new mechanisms.
B) Convincing managers
After management, the second point of resistance will be for managers, who may initially see agility as a loss of power, both in terms of decision-making and in terms of responsibility and steering the ship.
These brakes are normal reactions when they are perceived as obstacles to carrying out their work, and are often taken as a disqualification or demotion.
Fortunately, an Agile method represents an opportunity for managers to change their posture. By enabling employees to work more flexibly, and allowing them to make their own decisions, a virtuous circle will gradually be established between day-to-day comfort and short-term objectives, between the manager’s confidence and a common goal that the teams on board will understand on their own, if they are convinced of it – a condition dependent on the fact that the example is set by their hierarchy.
By seeing the short-term benefits, managers will be able to gradually move away from a control-based mindset, bringing more value to employees instead.
By supporting and training them on an ongoing basis, breaking down barriers between departments, integrating a personal development program or, more simply, by listening more carefully, the change process will be conducive to the adoption of each employee, including managers.
Managers have a key role to play in this organizational transformation, as they are the link between management and employees. They are the ones in direct contact with practice on the one hand, and theory on the other. Charged with the mission of supporting and committing to this agile transformation, managers must therefore embody the change desired by management, and demonstrate the values of agility to begin the agile transformation process, but must also maintain it to sustain it.
However, change doesn’t have to come from management alone, since Agile teams integrate all the resources of an organization.
You need to be careful not to rush them, and to set up a medium-term transformation, rather than something radical that would be badly perceived because of its suddenness and the size of the project. By adapting to the maturity of teams, agility will bear its first fruits if it is implemented gently and progressively, rather than strictly and brutally.
C) Convincing employees
In order to avoid an internal outcry, managers will need to be very educational and patient, and gradually win the support of all employees, managers and management.
Cultural transformation, put in these terms, can be perceived as violent. Whether it’s a change of tools, a change of methods, new software or a new organization, each individual is more or less tolerant of change, and accepts it with varying degrees of delay. What never changes, however, is the human being, and his or her ability to adapt.
Cultural change can therefore be approached from this angle: by evoking the fundamental values of Agility, we can make them understand the real usefulness of adopting this agile method. In any case, before you can get collective support, you’ll need to win majority support, which in turn comes from the addition of individual memberships.
This acceptance means that the removal of barriers leads to a change in behavior towards Agility. This acceptance of the idea of implementing the Agile method, and the personal understanding of its usefulness and daily use, will therefore lead to the employee’s willingness to be supported in a change of culture.
In the absence of work on the culture itself and on behaviors, teams will tend to gradually revert to a classic development model, the one employees have always known. This trend can be reversed with the help of agile ambassadors* and coaches* to support managers and teams in their cultural transformation.
An Agile coach is an outsider who supports managers in their cultural transformation, so that they themselves can become imbued with Agile values and practices.
An Agile ambassador is an in-house person who fully embraces the method, and who can more easily pass on the Agile codes to his or her colleagues, with a jargon closer to their own, internal legitimacy and possible proximity to others.
D) Convincing development teams
This is perhaps the part of the company that will be least resistant to organizational change. Fundamentally, what will change for developers may be the division of tasks between “coding”, “testing” and “integration”.
Depending on the size of the team, the Agile method defined, the level of seniority of each developer and the specializations of each, we’ll probably have to reshuffle the deck a little to adapt the methodology to the resources rather than the resources to the methodology.
After all, it’s quite common for the Scrum Master to be the Tech Lead of the team. Although there is theoretically no designated leader in the team, it is highly likely that there is a natural leader in the team. The difficulties that may arise from this horizontality of tasks and responsibilities could offend the most experienced, and put pressure on the latest recruit with a junior profile.
So how do you get them to work together, in the same way, on the same subjects, with the same level of responsibility?
Here’s the first gap between theory and practice, which requires some minor readjustments.
So that no one loses responsibility, skills or time spent on production, it’s still possible to assign a developer to what he knows best, and/or to the mission for which he feels most comfortable.
As a result, two developers will be able to take charge of the “test” part, while two others will be full “integration” and finally two others full “code”.
Otherwise, with an equal level of skills, everyone will be able to vary their tasks between code, test and integration, and will be able to increase their competence in actions they are not used to doing.
Each team has its own particularity, each team its own adjustments, and each project its own agility. So, strictly speaking, agility is like “finding your method in the Agile method “.
It’s complex to apply an Agile method to the letter, to 100% of its definition.
E) Maintain the gains made, by involving each Agile member in a sustainable way
Once everyone is on board, and the majority are convinced of the benefits of implementing an Agile method, it’s time to stay the course, and that’s the second part of the challenge linked to the organizational and cultural transformation of the company.
You’ve probably heard the old adage: “If it ain’t broke, it ain’t broke”.
Naturalness is the way employees have always worked. And it’s not the same for everyone, since everyone has his or her own background, professional experience, convictions and ability to adapt.
If moving forward towards the unfamiliar takes a long time, going back towards the familiar can be very quick. So it’s a question of keeping everyone on the same terms, except that managers and the highest levels of decision-making serve as an example, and can’t themselves take a step backwards, in which case all the efforts made will be swept away in a time that would make Usain Bolt pale.
Conclusion
Of course, adopting an Agile methodology is not suitable for every industry, every organization, and sometimes even every management style.
Adopting a methodology remains a choice that must be adapted to your business.
For example, in the construction industry, where we work according to a classic “V-cycle” methodology, you will have :
- Your budget (maximum)
- Your building plans
- The calendar
- Delivery
By the time you’ve built the first floors of your building, it’ll be too late to add two more levels of underground parking.
Whereas when delivering software or a web site, for example, and using an Agile method, you can add functionalities during development that you didn’t think of when you were designing it.
The whole package can even be included in your original budget, with or without the replacement of certain functions, or by extending your budget and/or the delivery time of the finished product.
