Ask for the moon
…in a large, complex organisation, you’re invited to start and lead an large scale agile transformation. Multiple teams and dozens or hundreds of people need to become more agile.
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Organisational change is hard and complex. Making sure the essential start conditions are in place boosts the chance for success. Some organisations are unfit to start such a change, so any effort is just a waste.
A list of essential and optional ‘asks’ to discuss during your first engagement.
- asking for optimal conditions for kicking butt;
- talking about ideal executive support;
- people who are excited to try a new way of working (rather than have a process imposed on them);
- a genuinely cross-functional community of dedicated people (“everyone needed to be successful”);
- an ideal workplace for collaboration and concentration;
- training to help develop essential agile skills;
- coaching to help cement those skills;
- chartering to align everyone on a clear vision/mission/objectives;
- retroprospectives to help the community continuously improve;
- coaching-the-coaches to help the organization build capability to help others learn genuine agility.
Essential for success is:
- Executive Support, in order to:
- slay any impediments;
- take quick and decisions and secure its implementation;
- lead by example.
- Assessment, in order to:
- gauge organisational fitness for adopting agile;
- provide a safety tool to discover whether people want to improve;
- find out how we may best go about making improvements;
- get people to know each other better in other ways;
- improve understanding of the current and desired state of affairs;
- explore problems;
- consider future directions;
- educe effective and pleasant ways of working rather than imposing it;
- excite the majority to move forward—creates energy.
- Cross-Functional Community, in order to:
- perform as a committed, cross-functional community;
- focus on a whole product rather than individual tasks;
- delight customers with amazing products and services that fulfil needs.
- An Awesome Workspace, in order to:
- allow focused work as a small group or individually;
- create a commons where people collaborate naturally;
- publish information radiators for key information;
- facilitate mobbing and pairing.
- Training & Coaching, in order to:
- maximise the return on coaching instead of wasting it;
- make the training practical and making it stick;
- expose the whole team of teams to agile & lean leadership, planning, evolving;
- Chartering, in order to:
- co-create, refine and live a shared vision, mission, objectives, key results, and outcomes, as well as community working agreements;
- foster connective tissue between all levels;
- facilitate rapid and sound decision-making near the action as well as decision-making with oversight;
- secure aligned autonomy.
- Retroprospectives, in order to:
- continuously evolve and improve;
- boost the flow of value creating work by an infinite stream of experiments, small and large;
- fuel the joy of meaningful work.
- Coach-the-Coaches, in order to:
- accelerate agile adoption;
- free up the mercenary, often external, coaches—autonomy;
- make agility stick organisation-wide.
Therefore:
Organisational change is hard and complex. Making sure the essential start conditions are in place boosts the chance for success. Some organisations are unfit to start such a change, so any effort is just a waste.
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