How to be Agile?

How to be Agile?

Sorry, but there is no clear answer for you how to deal with Agile. The most important thing you need to remember is: you can not DO Agile, but you can BE Agile. Changing employees roles, names of meetings won't make your company Agile - this is actually the long process of continous improvement which never finishes.

Are you depressed now? Don’t be. Agile really can help solve lot of problems simply by exposing them. It is often so easy to hide 'the elephant in the room', isn't it? Get it exposed then deal with it and your organization will get better!

Below you can find my ‘Agile Decalogue’ - things I’ve learnt during last years working with Agile that you need to know before you will start with transformation in your company. You need to also remember about Agile principles I described here.

  • 1) If you decide to start with Agile you should follow especially those rules:

    Create trust environment
    Build value-based organization
    Create engineering culture
    Build knowledge-sharing organization
    Promote diversity
    Support self-organization
    Agree on experiments

    …according to the rule – first build people, then products
  • 2) Agile helps in dynamic and competitive markets, is good to solve complex problems and uses an empirical process model (transparency, inspect and adapt)
  • 3) Scrum is most popular Agile framework, but it's not the only one - you can also try others like Kanban, XP, Lean Software Development, FDD, etc.
  • 4) There is huge difference between doing Agile and being Agile – mechanical way of implementation Agile (in most cases Scrum framework) frustrates people and never finishes good, usually causing regress
  • 5) Not only money and external bonuses motivate people - more important are: autonomy, purpose and mastery.
  • 6) Managers need to become leaders and start using Management 3.0 approach (servant leadership) – this is one of the hardest and most challenging part of Agile adoption
  • 7) You can’t be Agile without using engineering techniques like TDD, BDD, CI, CD, etc.
  • 8) Self-organizing teams are most welcome, but can’t decide about everything – leaders should create bounded environment, where teams can move, act and decide
  • 9) You need an Agile Coach - this position has different roles which all you will need - leader of change, teacher, facilitator, trainer, coach, mentor, expert, psychologist, etc.
  • 10) Last but not least - Agile implementation never ends and sometimes fails. Yes it is!

How to do Agile transformation?

So, if you decided, it means you read a lot about "hows" when it comes to working in Agile way. That's way at the very first beginning we will focus mainly on "whys", to find a real value for you of Agile approach.

The best way for Agile transormation is to do this in Agile way! Plan-Do-Check-Act strategy will be helpful here:

Preparation

At the beginning, I will help you to identify the difference between current state of your process and the target. We will build a shared vision and specify the first steps. Perhaps it will be training, perhaps consulting or coaching. And perhaps all-in-one at the same time. We work this out together. The goal of preparation phase is to create Transition Backlog.

Iterations

I will be available for you at each iteration, giving you advices according to my experience. And at the end of each iteration we will summarize the results to check, if we go to right direction or we need to change something.

Check and Act

There is no any already existing prescription with solution that fits your comapny. Sorry, but you can not buy it at a pharmacy. For one company certain technique will work well in another necessarily. That is why we need to regularly check what succeeded and what still needs work. On this basis we will update the plan for next iterations.

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