Successful Agile adoptions or organisations that have successfully developed their technical, organisational and business agility with lasting benefits for their business, often present some common elements. These elements are listed below.
For a more detailed list of available alternatives follow the related links in Appendix 1.
Your chances of success are greatly increased by taking inspiration from these elements below:
Embracing an experimental approach to Agile adoptions has been instrumental in many successful adoptions. It consists in starting small and proceeding with small experiments, learning, adapting and evolving. It focuses on making things work well in the small before going bigger. Furthermore, it is an Agile approach to adopting Agile. The journey through these experiments, the mistakes and the related learning are instrumental to understanding, learning, adopting and adapting Agile to your specific organisation’s needs.
Using a people-centred approach where employees are invited to participate in the adoption and where autonomy to individuals and teams is increased, has worked well too.
Building on the previous point, a focus on team autonomy, coupled with alignment to clear customer outcomes and wrapped up with lightweight governance, instead of the hierarchical and complex SAFe approach, is certainly a more effective way of scaling agile across an organisation.
What has also worked well is a focus on descaling the problem. For example, through modularisation, aligning teams and the organisation along individual products and services and more in general along value-streams (take a look at Team Topologies for an in-depth Introduction on this). And also through technical excellence reducing and relaxing cross-team dependencies,
A pluralistic approach that takes elements from various non-scaled Agile frameworks (think of eXtreme Programming, Crystal clear, DSDM, Kanban, Scrum, etc.) and patterns and practices available from the Agile community, has also worked well. This approach is informed and guided in each of its steps by the values and principles of Agile, Lean, and Human Complexity.
Exploring team types, their composition and their interactions is a key factor to consider when one considers ways of working across an entire organisation. There are a number of constructs that explore this in more detail: Team Topologies by Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais explores team types (topologies) Sriram Narayan in his book ‘Agile IT Organization Design’ explores similar Sooner Safer Happier by Jon Smart et al - explores safety teams Managing Digital by Charles Betz explores team spectrums Extra-dependent teams by David Kesby explores same skilled teams
There’s more exhaustive organisational design literature but the above is a good place to get started. There are also learning triads as well which are worth exploring too but don’t tend to be a long-term team given the size.
The above should be considered in the context of an existing organisation but won’t necessarily give you concrete practices to de-scale the work/interaction/dependencies although it’s a good start. What people often need is a platform-based approach (see Jade Bloom) and the book Continuous Architecture by Murat Erder and Pierre Pureur.
A focus on technical agility and technical excellence is also a trait common to successful Agile adoptions. With a reference to the domain-specific technical practices used to build the product or to supply the service the organisation offers.
The journey itself to learn and adopt Agile is unavoidable. It is not possible in any way to fast-forward or skip to the finale. Each Agile adoption is a gradual process of exploration and discovery. The destination takes shape and acquires meaning by going through the journey. And it is a place where continuous improvement is the norm.
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