4 Common Misconceptions About Agile Transformation

The most popular misconception is that Agile is a set of practices and can be installed by trainers and coaches.

This is the easy button form of Agile Transformation. You train your teams on Agile, the teams start using Agile, recognize their impediments, and change the systems to be more effective at delivery. In practice, most teams are not empowered to change the systems they operate within, so they bastardize the processes to accommodate the dysfunction. This is where we see lots of teams going through the motions of Agile and not getting the business benefit of doing the approach.

The litmus test for this is as follows. Can any given Agile team claim to have a stable velocity against a known backlog? Can they produce a working tested increment of software every week or two that can be validated by an end customer?

The next most popular misconception about Agile Transformation is that it is a culture problem.

The challenge is that it feels like a culture problem. It feels like Transformation is hard because of command-and-control leaders who don’t want to delegate to or empower the teams. It feels like an attitude and beliefs problem. A behavior problem. But let me tell you, if you understand how and why Agile works, and you understand what will get in its way, these leaders are right to stand in the way of Agile. Implementing Scrum or XP or Lean Startup on top of a tightly coupled legacy mainframe system is a recipe for disaster.

One of my favorite user group questions to ask is this. If you were king for a day, you could do anything you want, you could change anything in the culture or mindset of the organization, what would you do tomorrow? The caveat is that you had to start producing working tested software within a few weeks. What would you change in the org design? The technology architecture? The governance model?

You see, many of us want to believe that the teams know best. And that may be true about building software. But it’s not always true about running a for-profit software company.

Another popular misconception is that Transformation is a one-time event.

Transformation itself is a process that takes years. It has a starting place. It has intermediate states. It has a defined end-state. But as customers and markets change, your organization has to change with them. So, the misconception is that the process is linear, and once the process is installed, or the culture has shifted, you will be done.

In my experience, this is never the case. We find that getting an organization to change requires a series of intermediate states that have to be traversed as you systematically improve the organization to enable greater Business Agility and move closer to the ideal.

The fourth and final misconception is that the things you do at the team level are sufficient for running Agile at scale.

So, Transformation is about creating the conditions to do Agile well. And in large organizations, training teams on how to do Scrum or XP is wholly insufficient. You have to address the overall operating model. You have to address governance and compliance and audit and control.

https://leadingagile.medium.com/4-common-misconceptions-about-agile-transformation-3245e8dd1d99

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