The Agile Iceberg: Don’t let your ship towards Agile Transformation to sink
The last years, we notice an increasing need to reach the end user/costumer much faster than ever before. With the industry giants deploying to Production new changes in less than a min, they set high standards for other companies producing software. Agile frameworks can actually help the organization gradually reach this goal and make this happen, if implemented correctly.
Doing Agile is fundamentally different from being Agile.
A common mistake we see in the organizations is that the first thing that they do is focus on the toolset.
It is very easy to set up the tools and practices. The team will gather every morning in a timebox 15 min meeting, they will discuss what they did, then by the end of the Sprint we will have the Sprint Retrospective and Sprint Review and a new 2 week iteration will start again with the Sprint Planning. Easy peasy, right? Are we Agile if we are performing religiously and to the letter the Scrum Ceremonies? If we have a Product Owner and a Scrum Master? If we measure the velocity? The answer is no.
The benefits of being Agile are countless. Being Agile opens a whole new level of capabilities for the organizations that are brave enough to take the leap of faith and change their org’s culture. Because for an Agile Adaptation, it is imperative that, we, the organization and each and every employee should be ready to make a change in their mindset and re adjust the way they think, and reaching to the bottom of the iceberg, where the benefits are mindblowing.
So how do we change our org’s mindset? How do we move away from a waterfall/ slow approach to adapting in a more incremental approach?
The answer is not at all simple. Even identifying from where the transformation begins can be debatable, right? I have heard many examples of Agile transformation starting from the top of the org pyramid working its way down to the base. I have also seen examples where the Agile Transformation started from teams in smaller departments/programs within the organization and the efficiency, productivity and outcomes of the teams, where increased, the approach was adopted by more and more teams through time.
My opinion is that we need a combination of the two. A true Agile transformation cannot happen if we don’t change our “old” ways. In big organizations, this change, this realization of change of mindset needs to happen from above, from the upper management layer. However, it is important that the org does not push the members into implementing Agile, because in that case we will only see the tip of the iceberg. It is imperative that the org first believes in the change and is ready to nurture and educate their members but also themselves about the Agile mindset. If the members and the org is educated enough, all the Agile ceremonies will find their true meaning and value, without ending up being mandatory meetings that one has to attend. Seeing the value on each scrum ceremony, will increase the involvement of the team members, which means increasing the team’s efficiency, which leads to forming self-organizing and highly efficient teams
Apart from the education of the members, the other aspect of the Agile Transformation is the incremental approach which is one of Agile’s biggest benefits. The organization has to embrace the idea of MVP (Minimum Viable Product) when setting up their strategies and goals. A prioritized wish list is one of the key aspects and, for sure, one of the most difficult ones. And why is it difficult? The reason behind this difficulty is the power of habit. The organization/ team members are accustomed to years of waterfall, when the product needed to have all its features at once before it hits the market when each release was containing an enormous amount of code/architectural changes when we need to write all the code for a particular item before we merge it. As we see from these examples, the waterfall approach is well embedded in all levels of the org and that is why the incremental approach needs to be absorbed in all levels — with thinking with MVP concept in mind when we decide the first product release, so it hits the market early — with an architectural infrastructure which will allow frequent code changes and check ins without jeopardizing the stability of the product and with checking in and merging faster each change of the code with pipelines that will allow us to vouch for the stability of the merged code early enough.
Doing Agile and seeing only the tip of the iceberg, sticking only to the ceremonies and have a superficial implementation of the Agile frameworks will for sure result in a shipwreck. Being Agile means embracing all the values that Agile is offering, it is changing the way we think and act. Besides, the most dangerous phrase in the language is “we’ve always done it this way.” So, be brave and persistent, because it will not be easy, keep an open mind and think incrementally, even on how to start your trip towards Agile transformation.
