Any large scale transformation is bound to fail if it does not holistically look at an organization and its DNA. The transformation change cannot happen if we focus only on individual team behavior. Instead, we should take an overall systemic view, overcoming the challenges across People, Processes, Technologies and Infrastructure.
People:
It is well known now that Agile adoption requires a huge shift in the mind-set and culture of an organization and its people. In fact change has to happen across the functions, engineering, HR, Finance and Procurement team - everyone needs to move away from their existing mindset or methodology to embrace agile principles and practices.
There needs to be a focused effort to enable decentralized ownership of decision making & accountability.
From an outsourcing perspective, while the internal employees are enabled for these changes, it is necessary to educate vendor partners and suppliers on agile way of working.
Inculcate innovation through technical spikes followed by inspect & adapt (cooling off) period.
Process:
When we speak about the need to increase the overall Agility in the system, organization needs to look at nimble and simplified process that enables the organization to respond and adopt faster to changes.
At Harman, across all functions we believe in ‘being agile’.
Apart from financial benefits, organization should look into changes to HR processes for recognition of talent. This builds an environment of opportunity for the teams to up skill across cutting edge technologies and inculcate the behaviors for high performing and self-sustaining highly motivated Scrum teams.
Have continuous feedback mechanism to tune the various processes and aligning them over a period of time. This allows the organization to operate at an optimum Agility with the given need. HR enabled team happiness exercises where the whole set of DNA change in the appraisal process is linked to individual growth in the Agile construct.
Engineering/Technology:
While there needs to be a huge focus on people and process, technology and engineering practices are often ignored.
This has brought in a huge mind shift amongst the Enterprise / Application Architects. The need is to emphasize the experiential architectural model, validate the given design models and evolve adoptively keeping in mind the long-term architectural strategy and blue print for the Enterprise.
Most of the enterprise scaled agile frameworks have given special focus on topics like Technical runways, enablers, separate integration and devops team and so on.
Summary
Enterprise Agile transformation and Adoption is a continuous improvement and evolving journey, while there can be milestones to quantitatively measure the progress and business benefits achieved, it cannot be initiated with an end state in mind. However it is critical to bring the organization to a self-sustainable state from which Agility is ingrained in the system and works in an automated model towards excellence.
