Adopting an agile methodology is what everyone wants to do. Agile companies can increase productivity, shorten the delivery cycle and still improve quality. No wonder everyone is in the race for agile transformation.
However, for many this is a big challenge that involves several redesigns. When the company works in a traditional way, the path to agile transformation is a little longer, including:
- new values
- differentiated mindset
- new tools
- change of attitude and interaction with the world
In other words, a total renewal of the company’s organizational culture.
Because of this, the agile transformation needs to be planned and executed by experienced professionals, covering several areas of the organization. Having the mission, with a cross-functional team, of optimizing the value chain in order to fulfill the wishes and needs of customers in truly effective solutions.
But is your business transforming properly? Is your company really agile?
Agile Transformation
Agile Transformation is driving Digital Transformation. In the world of Digital Transformation, companies break down barriers with innovative products that fulfill desires that customers didn’t know they had. The products and services are made-to-measure adding value to the business.
In a world of change, it’s important to stay ahead. Stimulating knowledge, improving processes, giving visibility to people, that is, delivering solutions that will add value, this is the concept of agile transformation.
In short, the purpose of using agile concepts is to simplify the way projects are executed so that they have an increasingly positive end result.
While the more traditional models use long processes with defined objectives, in the agile methods, a proposal of shorter processes is used, with deliveries in less time that focus on improvement and in team alignment. Making the identification of faults easier and generating greater flexibility in the work methodology.
When we talk about agile transformation, we are talking about 4 pillars:
- communication — individuals and interactions more than processes and tools;
- pragmatism — product working more than comprehensive documentation;
- collaboration — collaboration with the client more than contract negotiation;
- adaptability — responding to change rather than following a plan.
But should agile transformation be part of your company or is it just for the IT area?
Agile transformation is just for IT?
When you’re running a business, it’s important to embrace risk. It is not something that is done automatically, but it is a very necessary practice in the transformation journey towards a new way of managing a business using more and more digital and integrated technologies.
Agile methodologies will help your business overcome operational, planning barriers by adopting a more flexible, change-able approach.
Businesses need to take the first step, start seeing the benefits of transforming and stop hiding behind those who say agile transformation is just for IT. Everyone can benefit and change the history of their areas.
Agile maturity stages
To help a company understand where it is at a stage of agile maturity, we use our own concept, the 4P’s:
- Processes: how are the internal processes
- Products: how are the products created
- Practices: how are the practices and tools used
- People: how are the people in this organization.
Analyzing these 4 P’s it is possible to identify which stage of maturity your company is in and see which points are needed to improve:
0. Traditional Company
It’s that company where some contributor has heard about agile transformation, read a book on the subject (like the “The art of doing twice the work in half the time”, by Jeff Sutherland) and realized that this was necessary for him and, at this point, he seeks a consultancy to help with the transformation.< /span>
1. Agile Mechanical
Most organizations are at this point, where they know the concept, they do parts of the agile transformation but not the entire process.
At this stage, normally, the company already uses kanban, post-its, and organizational methods, but it is not enough to be considered agile, since there is still a lot of plastered process .
Flaws are often frowned upon and therefore it is not a transparent organization with clear objectives.
Analyzing the 4P’s of the agile mechanic:
Processes: unscaled, no metrics, value stream…
Product: Has no product vision, doesn’t usually know the customer well.
Practice: no agile quality, agile engineering.
People: still have traditional culture.
With consulting, training and a good squad it’s easy to elevate from this level to the level of agile professional.
2. Practicing Agile
The company that is at the “practicing agile” level is right in the middle of the road. It has already overcome most of the malfunctions of the agile mechanic but has not yet reached the continuous stream of value of the “agile professional”. It is a time where processes still need to be improved, people need to develop their skills, knowledge and experience. With the help of experts, meaning people more experienced in the journey, it’s easier to go through this stage and go to the next level.
3. Professional Agile
Here is what we all wanted from the start. When we talk about the benefits of agility, they can all be reaped at this stage. Both the team and the leadership understood the importance of clear goals and alignment in execution.
Decentralization happens, teams are empowered to make decisions (but of course, with restriction). Innovations encompass all areas, as everyone is free to adapt.
Employees and customers, that is, people are at the center of everything. Value is continuously generated as motivated employees produce user-focused solutions.
Agile leadership sets goals, knows the customer, promotes value delivery, removes impediments, knows how to support and develop team members.
This makes everything in the company run fast and, in fact, agile.
“When you have an agile and clear process, with well-defined rules, any project can be more successful.”
Agile Methods
Now that you know what agile transformation is and have identified what maturity level your company is at, let’s understand a little more about agile methods, how they work and of course, how to apply them.
Scrum
It is one of the but to use agile methods in projects. Its main objective is to assist in the management and development of products, fitting in very well in medium and long term projects.
As it is one of the most popular methods, it is often confused with the very concept of agile methodology.
To put it into practice, it is necessary to know all the positives and negatives of your team, and define for each employee the role and function.
In Scrum, there are new roles such as the Product Owner who defines the Backlog of things the team must do, as well as defining what is value for delivery, the Scrum Master who has the objective of helping the team in the delivery, and ensures that agile concepts are being applied and there is also the Development Team, which are people from different areas, with different skills, who make value deliveries. This team will deliver higher value and faster, generating innovative solutions and increasing the competitive advantage for the area or company.
The Scrum method is very important for projects with high complexity and delivery urgency. For this, cycles known as Sprints are created, which are nothing more than time intervals for the development of pieces of the solution. It all starts with planning what will be done in that cycle, followed by the development stage. At the end of each sprint there is a review of what we have done and a retrospective for improvement as a whole. This runs the product development cycles in Scrum.
eXtreme Programming (XP)
XP, together with Scrum, is one of the first agile methods and is intended to improve software quality and responsiveness to changes in what is generated for the client. This method advocates frequent deliveries in short development cycles, with the goal of improving productivity and introducing checkpoints at which new customer requirements can be adopted.
Other XP elements include: pair programming, code review, unit testing, emerging architecture, code simplicity and clarity, changing customer requirements over time, and frequent customer communication with the development team. The methodology bears in its name the idea that the beneficial elements of traditional software engineering practices should be taken to “extreme” levels.
Kanban
It is one of the newest and simplest agile methods to use. It consists of visual and practical elements to promote the flow of activities.
Kanban has gained a prominent position and can be a way to perform project management in a super adaptable way.
The main idea of kanban is to seek evolution, allowing the organization of processes to be done in a visual way. In its simplest form, you need to assemble a frame and divide it as follows:
- To Do — activities that need to be performed;
- Doing — activities being performed;
- Done — activities that have already been completed, evaluated and approved by the team.
Just as important as creating this to-do list is the flow management being done constantly by the team. Metrics such as number of tasks and execution time are common to be monitored in teams that use kanban.
How to do the agile transformation
Implementing the agile transformation is not just about starting to use Kanban, Scrum and the other methods. You need to do a thorough analysis of your company in order to identify the positives and negatives of the process as a whole.
To carry out this analysis, the most used method is the SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats), in Portuguese, SWOT (Strength, Opportunity, Weakness, Threats) . But what is this analysis for?
The purpose of the SWOT analysis is to draw a strategic plan for companies or new projects, carrying out a complete diagnosis that will identify opportunities for improvement and define action plans.
Process improvement
Agile transformation affects the entire company, it matters to analyze and see what the organization’s internal problems are, where the bottlenecks are and where the projects tend to fail. After all, this is the ultimate goal of agile transformation: to seek solutions.
Exchange of knowledge
In order to improve processes, it is necessary to encourage a culture of knowledge. Qualify your team and encourage the sharing of knowledge and communication.
For this, it is very important to always respect the differences and individualities of each person so that no space is invaded and can generate discomfort.
Communication
As stated above, it is important to improve internal communication.
Debating problems, finding solutions, qualifying, putting changes into practice, it’s all agile transformation being applied truthfully and correctly.
When there is a lack of internal information, the team is, in most cases, disunited and focused on the final product, and not on the process, so it is very difficult to see the problems.< /span>
Inside-out transformation
When you want to transform a company, you need to work in-house first. It’s something that takes work and patience, but gives great results in the end.
Some points for agile transformation to happen:
- Encourage short cycles with measurable deliveries;
- Promote effective communication between everyone involved in the development and delivery of the service or product;</li >
- Give visibility to team problems and actions;
- Deliver solutions with business value;
- Encourage the exchange of experience in the team, seeking a culture of learning and continuous improvement.
By setting small goals and fulfilling them, agile transformation takes place fully and in accordance with the organization’s values. You don’t have to want to change an entire company all of a sudden, it’s small steps that are taken towards transformation.
Use Agile to Deploy Agile
Deploying agility in an area or company so that it reaches high maturity is very complex. Therefore, this project itself must be done in an agile way. This is how we at Agile.Inc minimize risk and increase the chance of success, in your real transformation, so that it doesn’t just stop at level 1.
Scrum Day Brazil
If you’re still unsure how Agile Transformation works and how it works for you, we talked about it at Scrum Day Brazil 2020 and you can watch everything that happened there by clicking here.
Scrum Day Brazil 2021 has a date and tickets are now on sale at special prices, get yours hereand participate!
