Executive Commitment

“Is Commitment a direction to be pursued as long as it works for you or a direction to be pursued until it works for you?” –Anonymous

Getting executive commitment is crucial for Agile transformation success. The process is long and road mines will await you surely. It will be of utmost importance to have the executive team still supporting the initiative when things get tough and the pressure to get product out increases.

I have found that it’s not hard to “sell” Agile to the executive team: what is there not to like? The value proposition of Agile sells itself and all CEO hears from others outside the company is “you have to go Agile”. So on the face of it everything looks good and executive team is all in agreement that Agile is the way to go.

When I presented Agile to execs few months ago I took a different approach. Well, I had to do the selling part, not without it, but most important I have described all the challenges and obstacles we anticipate having in our way to become Agile:

1. Shared resources (PO/UxD/Architects),
2. PO availability to the team (considering other responsibilities of Product Manager)
3. Leading virtual teams
4. Too often/uncontrolled changes in direction
5. Inability to decide on priorities in timely fashion
…and the list goes on

One thing Agile does quickly and without a facelift is exposing existing problems in the organization, and when a company embarks on Agile transformation path these problems have to be dealt with, breaking status quo and being painful to resolve at times. For example, if the company has a problem on deciding on priorities prior to Agile, the problem will not be resolved just by going Agile. Agile will show the way if you will, but the company will have to address the issue immediately.

Although I still got a green light from execs, the real test of executive commitment will be when the push comes to shove.

Vision Matters

"Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?" [asked Alice] "That depends a good deal on where you want to get to," said the Cat. "I don't much care where--" said Alice. "Then it doesn't matter which way you go," said the Cat. "

--Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

It's easy to become cynical of company’s vision or mission statements: they usually sound either a mouthful that no one can understand without a transcript or too “motherhood and apple pie” that no one can relate to. Yet, vision matters. If you don’t know where you want to be, how can you prioritize and make decisions along the way? And… by the way… along the way WHERE?

Take one of the most successful companies you know and try to guess what their vision is. You might not guess the right wording but I bet you’ll get close. The reason for that is simple: these companies got THERE by taking specific actions and making specific decisions that have aligned with the company’s vision and brought them closer to achieving it.

Having a vision is crucial – everyone in the organization has to know what the desired end result is and why we are going through this transformation. When a decision has to be made, an approach chosen or a conflict resolved, having vision will be a guiding force for you. Test your decisions binary, in a vacuum: will it bring you closer to achieving the goal or not? Then add the context.

The vision format that worked great for us was one we borrowed from Coca Cola:

Our vision is: [A high level statement goes here]. In order to achieve this vision we’ve set clear goals:
[Supporting goals go here.]
This format allows avoiding a mouthful by stating one short summarizing statement and “delegating” details to the goals. Next key point is for goals to keep good balance between being too concrete vs. being too general. At this stage do not plant Agile concepts in, remember – Agile is a means to an end, so concentrate on an end when composing a vision statement.
Next comes not less important part – planning for communication. While freshly created vision statement resonates well with all the participants in long brainstorming session, you should expect that coming out of that meeting your vision statement might not be as clear to the rest of the group. For each goal provide meaningful explanation in simpler terms and list everyday activities that will help you achieve this goal. These will not appear on the vision statement poster, but will be communicated by you to the rest of the group.

Many researchers in field of leadership have concluded that vision is one of the key components that a true leader must possess. While having a vision statement does not make you visionary in one day it does help motivating people around you, and in Agile transformation you’ll need it.

Hiring a coach

Agile coaching is a hot topic now – great opportunity for anyone who is in software or management consulting business to capitalize on on this new “trend”. How do you choose a coach that is right for you? To answer this question let’s focus on what we are trying to achieve. We need a coach to accompany our Agile transformation because we do not have enough expertise in-house – sounds like a good reason to hire a consultant. Our initial thought was to find a coach who has “done it” with companies of our size and with similar transformation context. We were focusing on challenges this coach had with other teams and whether he/she was successful to address these challenges, and how creative he/she was in addressing them. Here are some good questions to ask the candidate:

1. How would you address the limited shared resources situation, knowing that company cannot hire additional personnel? Specifically, how would you suggest dealing with 1 UX Designer serving simultaneously 3-4 teams? How about Product Owner serving 2-3 teams?
2. Pure SCRUM promotes approach of evolving architecture, while focusing on juiciest features. This is one area where we will not follow the guideline and would take RUP based approach, investing in architecture in the beginning. How would you approach this kind of projects, knowing this constraint?
3. Would you engage offshore team in pilot projects? If yes, would you try to co-locate or to mix teams (current model is mixed/extended teams)?

Like with hiring any senior resource it’s important to look for behavioral patterns through thought process exposed while answering the questions.
Another important aspect that we felt was necessary is coach background. It’s definitely an advantage when the coach is coming from development background experienced in both Waterfall and Agile environments. This is because there will be a higher chance to ”click” with engineers on fresh Agile teams.

Ready? Set Goal!

For task force to be successful it has to have a clear goal. The goal is to assess feasibility of the change. This means the group will need to answer following questions:

Can agile address our problems? Remember, we are not doing the change for the sake of the change.

Are the benefits tangible? You should be able to look back and show that specific problems got addressed and you better off than you started.

Do benefits outweigh risks? Agile transformation is a change like any other organizational change, you should expect turnover associated with it, going slower before going faster and need to consider that many companies fail attempting to make such change.

Should we go by the book or pick and choose specific practices? There will be people (yourself included) who will be tempted by such approach, as it seems to mitigate some risks, but this needs to be carefully studied.

It’s important to understand that Agile is not a one size fits all, so no prescriptions for success could be found in the pure theory. Any organization attempting Agile transformation needs to become creative about addressing many challenges awaiting it. One great way of becoming creative is engaging with Agile practitioners and coaches, learning about their challenges and the ways they have addressed these challenges. Of course their situation and context could be very different from yours, but learning from their successes and failures could be very helpful.

Task Force (or "Back to School")

Congrats! You’ve found the right time and convinced your boss that the change is needed. What’s the next step? Ideally you’d like to have the entire Product Development organization buy in to this idea and start implementing the change right away. Unless your organization consists of two guys writing software in garage, this needs to be carefully planned. Good place to start is to create a task force: a group of people that would learn about Agile methodologies and frameworks, will meet with Agile practitioners and coaches, will assess the feasibility of applying Agile to your organization and will recommend a course of action for the company. There are few key factors to the task force’s success. First, you need to have representation from all the groups primarily affected by the change (Product Management, Development, QA). As you select task force members try to include people who may resist the change the most and are key to your organization (senior managers, key engineers etc). Change initiatives, as just as they could be, may cause higher rate of turnover and no one wants to lose key talent as the change is being implemented. Having key people and potential resisters on your team will help guarantee the success of the transformation to be. Next, make sure that you include people who are seen as leaders in their respective groups and would be able to communicate the vision and help get buy-in to the change. In general, smaller teams will get things done faster, so team of up to 5 people should suffice.

Good task force should have pre-defined goals, timeframe and approach for achieving these goals.

Failure? To Launch!

Sometimes we read or hear about some new direction in the way people do business and tell ourselves: "Only if we could implement this in our company!". Then we rush implementing this new way of doing business at 100 mph and find ourselves in worse spot than we started.

So how one makes the change, if he/she feels strong that this change is a must?

Well, one of the obstacles is awareness of the problem that the change needs to address. After years of doing things certain way many people might become blind to the root cause of problems they constantly facing and assume that these problems are inevitable. This leads to attempts of patching the current processes and creating new processes, often adding significant overheads but not addressing the core problems. Surprisingly (or not so…), this approach is usually acceptable by most stakeholders as it is associated with much lower risks than the complete makeover.

First step in any change initiative is raising the awareness of the problem and the urgency for a change. Now, no one will ever bless a change initiative if the sole reason for the change is making the change. Unfortunately, in many occasions a “systematic failure” needs to occur for everyone else to see that they way things are being done now cannot scale and for the company to thrive, change must happen. At that point people might not know what exactly needs to be changed, but they already know that they cannot continue doing business as usual. For the change evangelist this creates an opportunity not to be missed.

If not successful otherwise, use the momentum of the “systematic failure” to raise the awareness of the problem and urgency of a change. Your management will gladly let you lead the task force charged with analysis of the current methods and proposal for the change.