Businesses want and need to create better digital products. What’s the point of having a great business model if you don’t have a digital product that can deliver all the benefits?

This has become a matter of survival!

That’s why this article is part of a series where we talk about the maturity stages of companies, and how organizations can take great advantage of leaving a low agile maturity level and reach a professional internship.

 

Let’s talk in more detail what are the characteristics of companies that are in Mechanical Agility and how this can “kill” your product.

If you already use agile concepts and practices, but don’t have people with the right skills to build digital products; lack of product vision on a daily basis; you don’t have good engineering practices or really agile leadership, you’re either wasting money on agile transformation or doing something just a front that won’t bring you concrete results.

Now understand the 7 characteristics of companies and people who are using Agility mechanically and are not changing the way they create digital products.

 

Agile culture

In organizations where Agility is being used mechanically, agile actions are more reactive, with the objective of “putting out fires”, than strategic or proactive actions.</span >

This happens a lot because companies don’t have a clear vision of what high performance teams are – who dominate all areas of creating great digital products.

And this lack of vision makes them think everything is fine, and doesn’t show the need to create a clear plan for improvement and evolution.

In companies with professional agile maturity, everyone works with customer focus as a basic principle, guided by clear goals and strategic objectives.

 

Method only

These teams are more arguing over whether the Scrum framework is better or worse than Kanban; Whether the role name will be Agile Master, Scrum Master or Agile Coach; That is, they are wasting time discussing this, instead of answering the question “What is preventing us as an area from delivering better products to our customers?”

 

Stakeholder centric

In these mechanical teams, much is said about customer centric, but little is known or really applies. Basically, they are still stakeholder centric – one business manager looks at the customer and thinks “what do I do with my product for this customer?”.

Following this question, the hypotheses are raised and become items for the implementation to be done by the Development team.

This generates a lot of waste of time, money, and increases the complexity of the development, because you are developing something that didn’t need to be developed.

It’s hard to make it clear to leaders that personal requests are not an acceptance criteria for developing something.

 

Leadership that “stood in time”

Leadership does not evolve in terms of agile knowledge and trends in the development of digital products.

The company still exists to serve the C-level, with heavy annual budgets and a fight between areas.

The leaders think they have the most knowledge and that they should chew it up for teams to just execute.

In this type of situation, self-organization is still something to be desired, but very poorly applied.

Leadership still demands a lot of increase in productivity, more delivery of tasks, but cannot act as a true leader, generating clearer objectives and metrics, removing obstacles and managing of motivation and people.

In truly digital companies, leadership propagates a culture of delivering value, avoiding waste, serving teams, toworking with the same purpose.

This way, the teams’ productivity ends up being MUCH higher!

 

Unified Product View Low

Given the world we are living in, in constant transformation, there is a lack of strategic planning in organizations.

Lacks product vision, a unified business vision. This is not to say that the company has nothing strategically planned.

It has good ideas and visions yes, but it is not shared and unified between teams.

This makes the people who build the product stay away from the necessary results.

The team ends up being seen as just a factory to build something, and not a team that solves a user’s problem and really adds value to the business.

 

Business X IT

In companies that use agile concepts and practices in a mechanical way, the areas of Business and IT are still very distant.

Distant in the sense that they don’t work together on a daily basis. In high-performance professional teams, some IT and Business goals are shared and professionals work together daily to resolve issues.

In the mechanical agile area, the IT area is still seen as a support area to deliver the roadmaps promised.

This also reflects a company structure with many silos, where each one works to solve their problem and remove any focus of delay in their area, for example.

 

Can’t tell Agile from Digital Transformation

You think Agile isn’t such a nice thing to talk about anymore and now is the time to talk about Digital Transformation. But when you ask what is one and the other, you can’t answer.

Digital Transformation, so talked about lately, is a movement that requires a much broader adoption of technology and is anchored in a cultural shift.

It’s more about people than digital technology.

Requires customer-centric organizational change, supported by servant leadership, driven by radical challenges to corporate culture and the leverage of technologies that empower and empower employees.

Among the various pillars of this journey is the adoption of agile practices and concepts, which are part of several stages of the Digital Transformation.

 

Agile is not helping

Overall, we see that agile concepts and the digital mindset were applied mechanically, just discussing processes and that the culture is still Taylorist.

This structure with low maturity already generates some gain, but it is still far from being considered a structure of truly digital companies.

Fact is, truly digital organizations (for example, banking institutions and payment methods) are gaining a lot of market, being able to hire the best professionals, they are being more productive…

All this thanks to a different model of working and creating your services and products.

Traditional companies really want these benefits and results, but they still don’t know what it really takes to start this journey of change.

The professionals who are managing to solve these problems in these types of companies are gaining a lot of space and visibility in the market, becoming scarce.

 

So what to do?

Stop reading this article for a minute and review your organization.

Has the introduction of that simple Kanban method alone been able to accomplish all these changes in your company?

Starting using Scrum, having daily meetings, having deliveries made by Sprints brought you expressive results?

I can say no.

And that’s the big danger of the first transformation step, that agile mechanic phase…

When you start a process as big as this, you, as a leader, see changes and believe in them.

But culturally, note how traditional your company is still.

Your collaborator is still afraid to expose himself; delivery cycles still last weeks and even months; each one works for himself, does his job and no one is sure how to collaborate with each other…

A clear purpose, an organized process is still missing!

Being agile is having collaborative teams, teams that see the processes as a whole, that focus on the customer for and that want to evolve and grow with the company.

Being agile is having a team that wears the shirt, but as long as you’re in a mechanical agile stage, that won’t happen.

Are you going to stand there, claiming to be agile, when you really aren’t?

Or are you going to go ahead, get your hands dirty and take the necessary step towards transformation?

 

Now what? How to change internship?

It’s simple to explain, but very difficult to apply.

One ​​of the best solutions is to raise the level of knowledge of some areas and/or teams, when it comes to creating digital products.

Here at Agile.Inc we’ve divided this increase in knowledge into four areas: Processes, Products, People and Culture, and Engineering Practices.

There are more than 20 sub-areas, forming the necessary framework of knowledge and application for teams to be truly digital, create products that delight, are productive, and give advantage to companies.

That’s how we did it in Sem Parar – one of the largest toll and parking services companies – generating a 315% increase in its Sem Parar app user base.

 

Being more digital has become a matter of survival for companies these days. And our mission is to help more and more people get there!

Talk to one of our consultants now to understand how we can help you.