How to manage Agile transformation?

Adopting Agile transformation is not adopting agile practices or an agile culture. While those elements are important, the main goal here is to achieve desired business outcomes. 

The path toward becoming more agile starts by defining what outcomes are critical to your business’ success. Knowing what matters is essential when making decisions on how to come up with a tailored approach and mould your transformation to show improvement and to meet critical business objectives. 

What is Agile transformation?

An organisation’s agility refers to distinct qualities that help respond rapidly to changes in the market while staying competitive and relevant. Adaptability, flexibility and balance are essential attributes to sustain it. Innovation is usually what drives long-term agility. Lack of innovation usually results in organisations falling behind the competition as they don’t manage to evolve at the same paced as the shifts happening in the market. In light of this evidence, let’s have a look at the steps to take in order to lead an organisation’s agile transformation. 

What does Agile mean for your organisation?

Agile’s aim is to help companies take a close look at what values are important from an organisation’s planning standpoint and comparing it against clients’ expectations from a delivery perspective. Organizations often find themselves operating in ways that don’t align with their clients. They may attempt to adopt agile to synchronise this process, but end up out of alignment with how the rest of their organisation operates. Getting everyone working together is a process that can be planned and executed with clearly defined goals and measurable outcomes usually enabled by an enterprise Agile transformation model.

What does Agile solve?

1. Predictability - most companies mention being too predictable as the reason for seeking agile transformation even though agile tends to focus on adaptability. 
2. Accelerate wins (ROI) - Agile helps businesses struggling with delivery cycles to achieve quicker time to market and increase their revenue. 
3. Innovation - Agile can help in improving organisations’ competitive edge as certain organisations may tend to be less responsive and innovative as they grow. 
4. Quality - Agile comes handy in companies’ scaling as it helps focus on quality requirements through to implementation
5. Lower costs - saving costs is essential for an organisation and can be difficult to maintain. Agile enables to assess funds are spent more efficiently hence in areas that are most likely to generate the greatest ROI. 
6. The right fit - meeting delivery deadlines is only relevant if you deliver the right product or service fit to your clients. By testing processes and seeking feedback, agile enables you to get the knowledge necessary to achieve this outcome

The Agile journey

Chances are you’ll fail along the way, but in the transformed Agile world, even failure gets a rethink to become the way to go when generating new knowledge.

The roadmap to success involves defining a team based organisational structure, a governance model to coordinate value alongside a metrics strategy to guide and shape a company’s transformation activities. Once established, come up with a pilot approach to test the structure, validate the framework and challenge assumptions made during planning. Metrics help in shaping and informing on the progress used as guidance to drive the remainder of the transformation. Last but not least, brief the team with the knowledge and skills necessary to sustain the changes moving forward.