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.