Pattern for Agile Adoption

After leading a transformation for over a year I'd like to make one point. People often take Agile Transformation too lightly and think about it as yet another process being introduced into the Engineering organization. What I've experienced is that Agile Transformation is not much different than any other large-scale organizational change, and as such deserves to be managed accordingly. One has to consider that moving to agile is a significant mental shift in the way people approach problem solving and performing their daily jobs. People that are the core of the change process need to be well prepared and allowed to fail as they learn.
For us it took 1 year from introducing the idea to the management to starting with the 1st sprint. At times it seemed like we are dragging our feet, but in retrospective I can say it was worth investing all the time we spent learning the subject, talking to practitioners, analyzing applicability to our context and identifying obstacles, challenges and plans of attack. This due-diligence has paid off when we started the project.
If I would need to define a successful pattern for planning and managing Agile Transformation here would be the major steps in that pattern:
1. Get a focus group to self-learn Agile. The group has to include at least 1 member from each product development team (dev, qa, pm, ...)
2. Create a shared Vision (see my post “Vision matters”)
3. Focus group meets with practitioners, members attend events and share what they’ve learned
4. Information is digested, obstacles identified and plan of attack for these obstacles being developed
5. Propose a recommendation (go/no go)
6. Get Executive buy-in
7. Start with education for all relevant locations. I've held initial 2-day workshop for everyone, then invited coach to do SM and PO classes.
8. Spinoff teams on obstacles, challenges, processes identified in #4 above.
8. Hire a coach (see my post “Hiring a coach”)
9. Find a good pilot project (it's another topic on how to choose the right one)
10. Have coach facilitate 1st sprint
11. Communicate to the world about the progress

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.