PART 1: Why are mindset and values important in Agile transformation?
Many people ask me about Agile transformation.
To introduce this topic, as first part, I propose you a quick synthesis of:
- What does being agile mean?
- Why do main companies want to adopt Agile?
- Why are Agile mindset and values important to Agile transformation?
My second article about frameworks and systemic approach in Agile transformation will come soon. Stay tuned!
What does being agile mean?
For starters, a reminder of what being agile means:- To be able to adapt to change.
- To put the users at the center of what we do and focus on users' problems to be solved.
- To foster collaboration and self-organization.
- To deliver earlier and regularly valuable and working increments of product.
- To maximise the value delivered to the users.
- To collect users' feedback regularly and adjust depending on.
- To reflect frequently and improve continuously.
- And so on.
Why do main companies want to adopt Agile?
It can serve multiple purposes:
- To be more resilient in order to survive particularly in time of crisis.
- To adapt to customers/users behavior change.
- To satisfy customers/users through early and continuous delivery of valuable and working products.
- To continuously improve customers/users satisfaction by being open to feedback and adjust depending on.
- To innovate in order to retain and to catch new customers/users.
- To be time-to-market and to remain competitive.
- To gain agility in ideation, decision and execution.
- To improve performance.
- And so on.
Why are Agile mindset and values important?
When we talk about Agile, we first talk about Agile mindset and Agile values. Because it's a way to focus on the prerequisites and establish better environment conditions necessary to implement Agile according to many years of experience. It's not just fancies of a group of people.
- Collaboration: If you have already managed projects or products you must know how silos or rigid contract relationships or lack of collaboration can be negative and blockers for a project or a product implementation.
- Collaboration with users: According to the Standish Group study, 45% of software features are never used because they do not match with users' expectations and needs. M. Pepy, ex president of SNCF company, explained that only 30% or 40% of digital applications are really used.
See article (in french): https://www.google.
So collaborating very closely with users allows us to ensure we respond to users' problems and to avoid this waste of time and money for companies.
- Trust & confidence relationship and transparency: Are you familiar with the watermelon effect? Watermelon is green on the outside and red on the inside. This symbol is usually used for relationships between companies and their outsourcing partners. But it also happens when team members are afraid to escalate problems on the project and instead show green KPI.
See article: https://www.linkedin.
In this case, you have to understand why it happens.
Transparency is necessary to have real status, to have a visibility of all impediments to be solved in order to manage correctly your activities. And to have transparency you need to create a relationship of trust and confidence. And of course, visual management can help.
- Individuals and interactions: Because building products around motivated and competent people works much better.
- Self-organization: In order to simplify and bring agility in the processes of decision and execution. It is the strategy that some corporates like Accor have decided to adopt to gain agility following covid crisis impacts.
See article (in french): https://www.google.
Indeed, a lot of companies have understood that too many levels of hierarchy and decision making avoid them to have agility in decision and execution. It was particularly true during this covid crisis. The goal is to foster local decisions and actions to gain this agility. How? By helping local teams, that do and know, to self-organize.
- Deliver earlier and regularly working software: In order to satisfy our users. It allows us to ensure what we deliver matches with their expectations, collect their feedback and adjust early and frequently.
- Change adaptation mindset: The current crisis shows us that it is not possible to follow a fixed and long term plan in this context of uncertainty and unpredictability. We need to adapt to change, to adopt experimentation mindset, fail and learn and adjust fast, be capable of adjusting depending on contexts and customers/users behavior changes, and so on.
- Reflect and encourage discussions regularly on what went well, what went wrong, what could be improved are the prerequisites for continuous improvement.
In conclusion, we have to focus and work first on mindset and values as prerequisites to establish better conditions to Agile transformation. We have to push the organization to question and make them understand WHY these mindset and values are important. We have to build our Agile transformation around these mindset and values before defining the way we will do it.
There are multiple Agile practices, frameworks and methods. According to me, all are relevant and complementary. As I said to my teams, we have to take them like a set of "tools" that we can use depending on your context and your needs.
Does it mean that we have just to strictly follow these frameworks to succeed in Agile transformation? I propose you to address this matter in my next article and see why a systemic approach is necessary particularly for Agile transformation in big companies.
-- Agnès Vugier
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