Agile Transformation

8 habits to start Digital Transformation and achieve incredible results

Claudio Barizon, Lia Nascimento

• Publisher: Babelcube Inc.
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781667402826
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Project Management in Engineering
• Index: Technology & Engineering

Agile Transformation is the answer for organisations that need to modernise to meet the challenges imposed by Digital Transformation and the new behaviours of the increasingly dissatisfied and volatile consumer, whose desires can be met quickly and are within reach of their palm. In this new complex world of accelerated change, there is no room for organisations that still have their processes, policies and management models based on bureaucracy, rigid and highly hierarchical organisational structures, with practices that worked in the past. These organisations have difficulties in anticipating market changes and disruption, which are hitting industry by industry and putting at risk their own survival or, at least, their ability to prosper.
With this book, you will have a new perspective on teamwork and get to know genuine collaboration. We will present very simple and practical working methods that guarantee the delivery of value from your team, through a new management model: agile and collaborative. These concepts were put into practice, with different emphases, formats and methods, in various organisations with great success. And this was the motivation for writing the book: to disseminate the transforming experience, which was one of the foundations for the creation of the startup Zehnk, where the author is co-founder.
The objective is to share this experience and show organisations that it is possible to build motivated, proactive and innovative teams, able to work in an integrated manner, with total transparency in communication and with common objectives, even if their members do not belong to the same area, department or company. Or are not physically together.
True collaborative work happens when the team has autonomy, self-management and responsibility, generating deep engagement and incredible results. It is where everyone seeks what is best for the organisation and its product or service: results and value for the business are pu

PART IV – AGILE ORGANIZATION

Chapter 15: A Long Journey

Many organizations with more traditional management models, in particular, have been going through major challenges and, because of this, are seeking changes to improve their results and achieve their goals. For this, however, they need to be trained to face a transformation in the way they act and serve their customers.

So far, we have seen how some simple habits can be created to establish a new culture and a new form of management: with a greater understanding of your purpose; with more autonomy, for the teams to seek better solutions and solve your customers' problems; with the possibility of experimentation, in a more secure and fault-tolerant environment; and focused on delivering more value to your market and bringing the expected results or even exceeding them. However, it is especially important that this model is not restricted to some teams or some department. It is essential that the entire organization can "drink from this water”.

The agile approach we have dealt with so far, as you have already noticed, is not about speed, but about adaptability. As Charles Darwin already said in his Theory of Evolution: "The strongest species does not survive, but the one that adapts itself to change.” Or even, "In the history of mankind (and animals too), those who learned to collaborate and improvise were the ones who prevailed." And these phrases have never been as true as they are now for organizations.

So, my goal in this Part is to discuss what we can do to bring these concepts to the whole company and how to apply them, following the same logic already presented. The idea is to show the simplicity behind these principles. However, being simple does not mean that its implementation and adoption is easy. Quite the contrary! But certainly, understanding the whys, as I always like to say, can (and will) commit and engage the entire organization.

Digital Transformation is a Journey

Digital Transformation is the "buzzword". Many organizations are embarking on this wave. But it is particularly important to understand that Digital Transformation is actually a long journey. Counting on the sponsorship of top management and leadership is fundamental.

In many places, as I have seen, the mission of starting the Digital Transformation is delegated to the Information Technology departments. Nothing more natural since many of the initiatives are causally related to the application of technology in the (new) way of doing business. We are talking here about the use of the enormous availability of data (big data) in favor of the business, in a more predictive way, IoT (internet of things), artificial intelligence (machine learning and deep learning), Cloud Computing, Bitcoin, Blockchain and many other techniques and technologies. But all of them are not the object of this book. Here we are in a previous phase, which is one of sensitization and awareness: once again, why it is necessary to start this agile transformation journey.

But getting back to IT, it has been carrying this "flag" in most cases. The CIO has a fundamental role in this process. In this case, I believe, the first action to lead it is to seek support and sponsorship. This is a long and difficult journey, which needs to be endorsed by the CEO and the entire board. Therefore, all leaders are fundamental in this process and they need to be aligned and, more than anything, set an example. In this context, HR plays a fundamental role and is another area that, many times, can also be the chosen one to carry out the transformation.

The more executives understand the benefits, join, and sponsor this project, the greater the chance that the company will effectively enter the world of digital transformation, becoming a more agile/adaptable organization, with greater innovation potential, greater impact for its customers, and reaping better results for its shareholders.

The reality will be a lot of convincing. IT and HR, if they are effectively the areas chosen to lead this journey, can initiate this process and, from the inside out, infect the company. For this, besides the need for training and building the necessary resources for the transformation, it may be a good strategy, once again, to choose good pilot projects, so that they can be carried out successfully and serve as inspiration for new initiatives that should increasingly rely on the participation of other areas of the company. Even if this seems impossible, especially considering a more traditional organization, it doesn't hurt to remember a teaching I absorbed from Thaís Pegoraro: "The impossible begins with the first step. (For those who do not know her, Thaís prepared herself to climb the seven highest mountains in the world in each continent and did it in the period of 1 year).

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Cultural Before Digital

Digital Transformation, before being digital, is a cultural transformation and this is a point of concern always. Even if the organization has already experienced initiatives with an agile approach, some of them, which were not born digital, have years and years of "muscle memory" of practices, rules, policies, and signs that can be ties and obstacles and are ingrained in the culture, processes, structures, and relationship between departments. And this will be a great challenge of this great journey: to make all areas of the organization understand, absorb, breathe, and practice the agile mindset.

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Lack of Strategic Alignment and Lack of Focus

A common scenario I have encountered is that, amidst the need for the organization to transform and rediscover itself, there are still many other projects and demands in progress or waiting to be started. To make matters worse, many of them need to be evaluated and estimated, which takes a lot of time from teams that are already absolutely busy, which obviously generates waste. Waste by stopping people to evaluate and budget demands that may not be realized (or, at least, not at that moment) or by taking them out of focus to do these analyses. This reset time to think of another solution and return to the original activity is one of the biggest villains of productivity. Not to mention the friction between the areas to negotiate these initiatives, which often undermines relationships and trust.

The most important point, however, is that the strategy is often unclear and therefore does not help determine what actions should be taken. This does not mean that the strategy does not exist. But in many situations, the impression is given of a large gap in average management, in the space between those who define and those who execute, generating the perception that communication does not flow. Many times, there is no transparent communication, in fact, nor a structured process to cascade the strategic planning into actions (tactical and operational), leading to the expected results. Thus, the criteria for the selection and prioritization of projects to be carried out are not clear, so that even with a strategic plan outlined, there are still countless demands to be handled also by IT, which is practically involved in all the company's initiatives and projects.

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What is your Problem?

Another common point, which further increases the distance to the desired situation of agile and digital transformation, is the fact that solutions arrive ready to be implemented. There is little room to discuss the problem. This happens a lot in more departmentalized organizations, where the business areas define everything that needs to be done and even tell you how it should be done. But this also happens when you do not have the agile mindset.

For example, I was recently at a large company that was just starting to use agile practices. In fact, they were already using an agile framework to restart a project, which had been outsourced at first and, a year later, nothing useful had been delivered. The new team started their process and promised delivery in 6 months. According to this team, it already knew what was to be delivered (due to previous experience of 1 year) and thought that if it structured the process in an agile way, the 6 month goal could be achieved. No, it could not. It would be.

It was interesting to see the team's excitement when they presented me the plan and the division of the backlog into 12 sprints, which would close the 6 months until the final delivery. However, without getting into the merits of whether the scope of the solution was correct or not (because I had just arrived and did not know the problem exactly), I made some provocations to evaluate the mindset: I asked if, at the end of each sprint, the customer would be able to receive part of the solution, where it would be possible to obtain value or some feedback (remembering that this customer, already without confidence, had been waiting for more than a year for some delivery). The answer was "no": the customer would only start extracting value after the delivery of the 12 sprints at the end of that new 6-month deadline.

Trying to explore further to understand if some other approach could be used, I realized that the team was absolutely "bought in" to the solution and that it was "just" a matter of implementing it. And this is one of the biggest mistakes in this new world of digital transformation, innovation, and entrepreneurship: never "fall in love" with the solution, but with the problem. It is the problem that must be addressed, hypothesized, and experimented on to reach or extrapolate the expected results.

Let me recover an image from Henrik Kniberg, a renowned Swedish Agile Coach, which is a great parallel to the described situation and perfectly illustrates what I want to demonstrate.

The team in this case was looking at the best way to deliver the "car" (solution) and discussing the requirements that this "car" should and could have to delight the customer. This same customer's problem, however, was "how to get from point A to point B as fast as possible" (even though this customer had said, in all letters, that he "wanted a car"). Note that the solution may not necessarily be the delivery of a "car" and this solution may still vary, depending on other situations or constraints. However, the solution was already defined, and the "factory" was set up to build it.

On the other hand, an iterative and incremental approach could fully serve the customer, allowing them to achieve their goal...