Core concepts
These topics are core to the journey, regardless of the stage. All transformation sponsors and leaders should explore these topics early in their mentoring journey.
Agile Sponsorship: Journey Overview
Sponsoring and leading agile transformation starts with understanding the overall arc of the journey, what to expect along the way, and what that journey demands of leaders, practitioners, and the company itself.
Agility: Capability, Product, Mindset
Agility is a capability that every group in the company must demonstrate, and it’s one that every group must build on its own. The transformation doesn’t build that capability, it provides a set of product-like offerings that help groups achieve agility themselves.
Key mindsets for transformation
There are a set of key mindsets and perspectives necessary for members of transformation leadership to carry with them and exemplify in their behaviors if agility is going to take root. More importantly, you need to be able to explain to others why you value those mindsets and associated behaviours. This creates the basis for a more agile culture.
Exploring Agility
Exploring agility proceeds general organizational acceptance, and represents the work to create permission, energy, and proof that agility is feasible (vs. desirable) in the organization.
Chartering the Transformation
Every significant change needs evidence of broad executive support in addition to focused executive leadership. The chartering process aligns people on the purpose, impact, measurements, and scope of expected change required to achieve agility. It gives permission to people across the company to engage, and pulls them in a common direction as part of that engagement. This is the first critical focus moment for the executive sponsor.
Making the case for agility
Chartering prior to having broad executive support can lead to counter-productive results, so you need to gain that support ahead of the chartering. There is an essential art to highlighting the benefits agility brings to each stakeholder in the organization while still having all of the different perspectives align to the same outcome.
Defining your agility product
The job to be done of agile transformation is “better, more easily functioning products, services, and projects across the company.” You need to understand your (internal) customers, their needs, and define the product that people will buy to accomplish their goals. This in turn sets expectations and provides clarity enterprise wide.
Measuring Agile Impact
There is no value in “agile” unless it is providing material benefits to the company, and your peers are right to demand clarity and evidence of the benefits they’re buying by funding transformation. There are four levels at which impact can be measured, and which impact is visible will vary throughout the journey.
Building transformational roadmaps
You need clarity on where you will will be in the future, not just where you are today. While it is not possible to provide specific details of the full journey, it is possible to characterize the likely path, the expected engagement requirements, and the nature of the changes the organization will likely face. This will change as the organization learns, and the roadmaps provide a tool for visualizing and communicating those changes.
Budgeting for transformation
It’s easy to get caught up in the excitement of agility and transformation, and fail to practice the discipline required to operate in the existing enterprise. It’s important to consider, quantify, source, allocate, and manage to the budget as you train, coach, adopt new collaboration platforms, and all the other associated efforts required to instill agility across an enterprise.
Exercising Agility
Exploring agility proceeds general organizational acceptance, and represents the work to create permission, energy, and proof that agility is feasible (vs. desirable) in the organization.
Maintaining organizational energy
It’s easy to see the intentional pace of exercising agility as “going slow”, and it can be difficult to maintain focus and energy during this time. It is important to manage expectations, diffuse the natural hype cycle behaviors, and refocus positive energy into beneficial activities.
Enabling value streams through local action
The transformation office can’t drive every change in the company, and it shouldn’t try. Instead, it should create the conditions and provide the support required to build teams, launch release trains, and otherwise create agile impact local to each product, service, and project in the company. This is one of the three core offerings of an effective agile transformation product.
Removing friction through better policy
Many of the delays in companies aren’t caused by the teams or groups doing the actual work, they are caused by organizational policies, processes, and culturally embedded habits. The transformation office will need to partner broadly across many functions to instill agility into these areas by chartering or joining focused initiatives on many different topics. This is one of the three core offerings of an effective agile transformation product.
Leading LPM and product transitions
One of the biggest, most complicated changes in any enterprise is moving away from a project-oriented funding and management approach and instead choosing to operate as a set of coordinated internal and external products that benefit from a consistent, lean funding and governance approach. This is the second critical focus moment for the executive sponsor, and is perhaps the most valuable single place for executive sponsors and transformation leaders to focus their energy after the initial chartering activities.
Creating the agility platform
Every great product requires a solid platform for a foundation, and agility is no exception. Designing the team, operating model, cross-enterprise collaborations, and engagement approach for your transformation office provides that solid foundation, and ensures you are able to deliver against your product’s promises.
Key collaboration behaviors
Your platform is an aggregation of many enterprise services, and you will be “meddling” in areas across the company as well. It is important to be flexible and intentional on your engagement models, your collaboration approaches, and what stance you’ll take towards instilling change in each situation.
Using vendors and consultants
It’s unlikely you have all the required skills for agility inside your company, or you wouldn’t need an agile transformation. However, misuse of vendors can be an expensive delay to your overall adoption rather than the accelerant it was meant to be. Different types of vendors useful in various aspects of adoption, but there is no one-size-fits-all approach.
Expanding Agility
Exploring agility proceeds general organizational acceptance, and represents the work to create permission, energy, and proof that agility is feasible (vs. desirable) in the organization.
Protecting impact and quality at speed
Opening the floodgates and encouraging everyone to adopt agile approaches creates the risk of poor quality, misguided application, and general chaos. You need to provide clear guard rails to allow at-speed adoption, support paths for quality issues, and a pathway to effective organizational learning during this rapid scaling period.
Overcoming exceptions
Every adoption will have holdouts and resistors. The general approach with agility is to ignore the resistors and chase the positive engagement until agility is the norm, and then engage those holdouts. There are several different ways to engage, but ultimately, agility is not optional, it is required for the good of the company.
Beyond business agility
What’s next? You’re running agile for execution, the business is fully engaged, agility is the expected default mindset… now what? You need to sustain the wins you’ve created while still aspiring to greater heights, bringing in intentionally diverse perspectives to continue your growth journey as a company.
Planting seeds for agility
The best transformations are ones where energy arises from many parts of the organization. It is important to provide knowledge, permission and guard rails around agility so people have the basis for making effective decisions and can experiment with agility local their context without compromising the quality of the overall transformation. This is one of the three core offerings of an effective agile transformation product.
Evolving the agility product for scale
Success in the initial Exploring and Exercising of agility leads to the need to change your transformation office’s interactions with the rest of the company – the nature of your product offering changes as you scale rapidly. This is the third critical focus moment for the executive sponsor.
Operating at scale
Your team and engagement model will need to shift alongside your product offering as you reach scale, and effective transformation leaders will get creative with how they scale to meet the demand for agility inside the company. Where possible, use hard-learned lesson from one group to grow another by rotating leaders who have led internal change to new areas.
Preparing to scale down
At the same time you’re balancing the demand across the company with coaching and advisory capacity, you’ll start planning the draw down and next career steps for your core transformation team, because you know that the demand for coaching shouldn’t last long-term.