When embarking on a transitional agile journey, what they don’t tell you is it’s not as easy as reading a book or going on a course. These things are a great stepping stone to start this journey but its challenging and for many the transition from waterfall to agile within an organisation can be a bumpy road (one I have experienced many times).
As you have probably seen, lots of organisations are currently trying to embed or transition to agile ways of working alongside their existing frameworks so they can reap the benefits it can bring. Frequently these organisations have decades of processes and regulation that need to be complied with making the transition challenging for even the most experience agile practitioner.
I’ve spent my career in IT and Data working in both waterfall and agile organisations and a number of those leading teams on this very journey. What I’ve learnt is that if you get it right it really does bring a lot of benefits and a way of working that engages and empowers people.
Like anything transformational or evolutionary agile needs a number of key ingredients to work, leave one out and it will fail. What’s interesting is there is definitely a common thread to the issues I’ve encountered over the years and they generally fall within three categories:
Culture
- Not being geared up for agile can result in frustrated and unhappy staff as they clash with the wider organisation. These teams then fall back into their legacy ways of working or become silo’d which frustrates their internal colleagues.
Leadership and Knowledge
- A lack of leadership and knowledge across the organisation often results in really skilled team members not really understanding how to operate within in these new scrums and scrum teams being asked to comply with governance that’s at odds with how the methodology should work.
Consistency
- The Consistency often falls to the wayside as teams try to define their own hybrid version of agile with the waterfall governance and you start to see different teams adopting different versions of the same methodology across an organisation.
The great thing is all these things have a solution, what you can’t expect is from day one is that you will instantly transition. You have to take it in steps and expect to get it wrong a lot! By considering these challenges and how you address them in the early stages of this journey can really help:
- Engaging across the organisation up front can really help get the support needed as you embed the principles of agile, be prepared this messaging will need repeating in a multitude of ways and multiple times.
- Making sure the whole team have a solid understanding of agile and supported with people with practical experience of agile who can help coach through real world issues.
- A constant drum beat around agile to start to create the consistency and conversation across the organisation supported by senior members of the organisation can really help to constantly evolve and make progress to reap the rewards.
What are your experiences with agile in your organisations? Do these things resonate?
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