Last week, I discussed some of the many ways you can prove your worth to an organization as a Scrum Master. Today we will be discussing the steps an Agile Coach can take to bring a great Agile transformation to an enterprise. Please find the steps below:
What: Build a Leadership Coalition; make sure to form a partnership with leadership in the initiative, it is challenging to achieve this, but it is critical for your success. So, while interviewing for the role, ask questions that would let you know if this environment is of the type that would allow this to happen.
How: You can set up an Executive Steering Committee, you can also set up a transformation leadership team. You should seek the support of your manager to implement this.
Why: Leaders need to set the vision and strategy, create a culture that fosters collaboration and continuous learning, communicate effectively, provide support and resources, and lead by example. With an Agile leadership who is committed to the success of the transformation, you will be strongly positioned to achieve success.
What: Along with leadership, decide your definition of success upfront, and what that would look like. You can do this by creating a hypothesis for what the end result would be. Your hypothesis should cover structure, governance, and metrics. It’s essential to customize the metrics based on the organization’s specific goals, context, and industry. Additionally, consider a combination of leading indicators (predictive measures) and lagging indicators (outcome-based measures) to get a comprehensive view of the transformation’s success. You should apply the practice of Progressive Elaboration in this initiative; you go into more details the closer you come to completing a particular activity. You would do well to stay off Traditional upfront planning so that you remain flexible enough to incorporate unexpected changes.
How: There are different tools you can explore, some of them are: strategy sessions, brainstorming sessions and workshops, also it is advisable that you rely heavily on feedback to improve your plan.
Why: By providing this level of visibility into the plan, you would be able to get the buy-in needed to support the initiative. Everyone would have a good idea of the vision and the part they would play to actualize it.
What: Build a Roadmap for the initiative. This is a strategic planning tool that provides a visual representation of the initiative’s direction and key milestones over time. The Roadmap will outline the planned sequence of activities, major goals, and deliverables to be achieved. You should structure your Roadmap in bi-weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly segments. This also makes it easy to identify if you are making the right progress to achieve your goal.
How: Your Roadmap should capture a few critical things including how the flow of work (teams) will be formed, the training required by the teams, coaching required by the team, dates and timelines, amongst others.
Why: The purpose of the Roadmap is to communicate a clear vision, align stakeholders, particularly leadership, and to guide the teams in executing the plan. Essentially, it keeps everyone on the same page.
What: Utilize a 90-day Rolling Plan; this is a quarterly plan with a specific view of what is going to take place. By working in these increments, it is easier to adapt and make required changes as you move along.
How: Transformation leadership team meets periodically to plan forward, assess progress and adjust as necessary. You can revisit your weekly/biweekly training and coaching plans, you can go into more details with resource planning, and review expected activities and outcomes.
Why: Continuously reviewing and updating your plan helps to keep it efficient and reliable as it will always take into account any new developments.
What: Conduct 30-day reviews; This is a periodic assessment of your progress, it is similar to a Sprint/Iteration cycle.
How: Schedule recurring meetings, review and update planning artifacts, review your metrics and see if they are still relevant and continuously improve your plans.
Why: This is an opportunity for the transformation leadership team(s) to review the progress against strategy and outcomes. It also helps with keeping these stakeholders informed and manages their expectations as they see the unfolding of the work.
What: Connect Activities to Outcomes; You want to create a link between your activities and the outcomes. You don’t want to be busy with activities without corresponding outcomes. As a matter of fact, prioritize your outcomes over the number of activities; for example, do not use two/multiple sessions if you can get results in a single session.
How: You should create a hypothesis, try different experiments, pivot when necessary based on learnings. You can use tools such as: assessments, status updates, surveys, interviews amongst others.
Why: The fact is that any enterprise involved in an Agile transformation has Return On Investment as a driving factor, so by demonstrating that your activities are actually geared towards providing that value, you encourage the leadership to believe that indeed your work will provide the expected value. This also provides an opportunity for stakeholders to observe the small wins on your way towards the final results and would help solidify the support you get.
What: Using KPIs, connect Outcomes to the Business Objectives (OKRs); By connecting your outcomes to the business’ objectives, you are showing the link between the results you are getting and the enterprise’s vision and goals.
How: Ensure that the outcome of your activities can serve as KPIs for the enterprise’s OKRs. That is, if they have an OKR of achieving 12% increase in productivity in 1 year, your outcome can show that at the pace at which you are going, with a 3% increase in productivity per quarter, you are able to help them achieve that result.
Why: This is meant to help you map improvements in the system to tangible business benefits.
What: Incorporate Feedback; You will find that refining the end-state vision and the Roadmap will become necessary as you get into more details of the work. You would realize that some concepts were not correctly explained or understood, you might encounter some hindrances that would require a pivot, etc. so you need to rely heavily on feedback to make your plan efficient.
How: Meet with critical stakeholders and SMEs, do not rely on leadership alone, go to the teams where the actual work is done for the most helpful information and update your plan accordingly.
Why: As it is said, information is power, but information that is not utilized is useless. Using the feedback you get from the most relevant sources will help in ensuring that you have the right plan for the right environment.
What: Manage Communication; Communication is key to managing any initiative, especially an Agile transformation effort that is new to the business and is completely different from how they previously worked. Communication is one of the most important elements of this initiative and its importance cannot be overemphasized.
How: Use town hall meetings, Executive Roundtables, Signage, Information Radiators, email updates amongst others.
Why: This would help maintain insight into the transformation, engender confidence and manage stakeholder expectations. Regular updates on the success of the initiative will create energy and excitement!
What: Create a Sense of Psychological Safety; Very often employees are afraid of losing their position or their power when an Agile transformation initiative gets underway. Letting them know that this is not necessarily accurate, will help build a sense of safety, confidence and support for the initiative.
How: Design workshops for coaching, training and mentoring where an understanding of the new mindset, new way of working, and expectations are provided. It will be up to the stakeholders to decide if they are willing to learn, unlearn, and relearn to make themselves relevant in the new enterprise.
Why: It helps to make everyone understand what is in it for them and helps them see where they fit in the new organization
Questions and comments are welcome.