Challenges/issues organisations face while doing the Agile ‘transformations’ (not necessarily in any specific order)

• Not knowing about what you’re trying to achieve from the transformation
• Doing it for the sake of doing it or doing it because it worked at other places and assuming it’d work at yours too, without understanding your problems and then trying to solve them. And then doing it in a big bang – e.g. oh worked at , let’s try to do the same thing for us and let’s do it organisation-wide (without trying it on a smaller scale first)
• Resistance to change (and people are not bought into it) – if it’s top-down
• People are unwilling to change and keep challenging the “Agile” way of working
• Management stops supporting it after a while (even if the initiative was top-down) because of whatever reasons e.g. stakeholder pressure, delivering on timelines proposed and committed by some other teams (other than the ones working on it) etc.
• Lack of support from the management – if it’s bottom-up
• Continuous pressure to prove that agile works – if it’s bottom-up
• The management works in the waterfall manner while individual teams on the lower level are Agile
• Not having enough people on board who know what the Agile ‘mindset’ is
• People don’t really know what Agile is
• Project managers trying to be Scrum masters/coaches
• Trying to ‘implement’ Agile rather than adopting through experimenting
• Project managers trying to be Scrum masters/coachesNot investing in coaching and training people
• People don’t really know what Agile is
• Project managers trying to be Scrum masters/coachesFear of failure hence teams and people don’t really get the true opportunity to try new ways of working
• Measuring success as ‘On time’, ‘On budget’ only
• Traditional funding model which comes up with fixed deadlines
• Traditional thinking of upfront planning and imposed deadlines
• Overselling Agile as a silver bullet to magically solve major organisational issues (at any level)
• Technical tools constraints
• Cross-team communication and issues
• Trying to do Agile in a bubble
• Not really thinking of customers but trying to polish or improve the organisational way of development / technical work

Some suggestions to overcome those challenges (not necessarily in any specific order).

• Define transformation: what are the outcomes you’re trying to achieve?
• Define your vision, mission, and measurable KPIs to achieve those outcomes
• Identify/find the best-suited people (could be from within the organisation or new employees). Find the ones who are passionate about Agile and product development, and can infect others with the right attitude and mindset
• Once you have those people, give them appropriate autonomy, and run your vision, mission, and KPIs through them and come up with a strategy to achieve those
• Focus on Agile values at all levels
• Build a fun culture
• Provide psychological safety to team members
• Set up a learning organisation
• Start small and iterate. Do small POCs and experiments
• If certain methodologies are not working for you or answering your problems, try something different, learn from it, iterate on it, until you achieve the optimal phase
• Define success which should include much more than ‘on time’, ‘on budget’ mantra
• Management needs to support teams and people as the true transformation is a journey. Teams take time to Form Storm Norm and Perform in new ways of working
• Training and coaching at all levels (especially at the top level)
• Talk to your customers, observe how they use your products, anticipate their needs
• Align customers’ requirements with your business vision and build the right thing
• Build teams across your strategy to achieve business and customer’s vision instead of throwing too many people to solve ambiguous problems
• Traditional funding model which comes up with fixed deadlines
• Invest in tools and technologies which enable faster delivery to customers which helps teams measure the usage and react to that which could bring more satisfaction to teams knowing that they are adding value for customers
• Make things visible and be transparent at all levels
• Celebrate both successes and failures and reward people and teams
• Try to build small product-based teams solving specific customer problems
• Change your funding model to support those product-based teams
• Keep your processes as simple as possible and don’t have so many process gates which block teams’ work from quickly going to customers

This article was originally published by the author on LinkedIn.