29.05.2023
3 minutes
Jeroen Nollet
Uniformity, one size fits all, consistency... (Almost) every manager has a soft spot for expressions - and more specifically: workflows - like these. But is it really what you need when making changes in your organization? Find out the danger of uniform Agile Transformation, and our advice on how to do it better in this blog!
I have had customers that did a small proof of concept of their Agile transformation with a small number of teams, just as I mentioned in the blog on Big bang Agile Transformation. Because of these teams’ accomplishments, the management decided to continue to roll out this new way of working throughout the company.
Unfortunately, herein lies a new pitfall. The organization is tired of waiting and won’t gradually propose this new way of working to the other teams. Instead, they plan to roll out that successful way of working of those ‘pioneer’ teams to all the remaining teams.
This “one size fits all” approach is dangerous. The strength of an Agile team lies in the ability to work autonomously, in a way they think is efficient. In large organizations, it’s normal to have multiple domains, each of them with their own complexities. It’s not straightforward to push the findings of one or two teams towards the entire company.
When you carve the entire end-to-end process in stone, there’s no margin to make any adaptations (without the approval of a centralized team), and the Agile transformation will feel like a burden. Every time you think you’ve taken a step forward in your process, you’ll notice that somewhere in the organization, people have slowed down because of it.
Give each team the time to make the switch and the ability to implement their complexities. They must have the freedom to adapt. The idea behind agility is to learn from the feedback a team receives and to change its way of working.
My advice would be to choose a uniform approach on the higher organizational levels (Program/Portfolio), but to provide teams with enough freedom to make decisions that apply to their workflow.
The usage of Jira.
This tool has gained a lot of popularity in the past ten years because of its claim to support agility. Unfortunately, it all depends on how you configure it. I’ve consulted multiple clients that had their flows fixed, leaving only one way of working for all the teams.
To make things worse, only one person or team was responsible for evaluating requested changes and implementing them (when approved). When promoting agility, it’s irrational to force everyone into one way of working and have a central approval process if a change is requested.
My approach would be to provide each team with some trained team members so they can change the workflows of their Stories to match their needs. They cannot, however, modify workflows that relate to Epics, Features, or other components that are more cross-domain because data is gathered upon them to report back to management. For those workflows, a centralized team could make sense.
Provide your employees with the freedom to decide how they want to work. To the management, this might sound scary because they are afraid of a ‘cowboy’ mentality or even complete anarchy. But the same is true for your employees. They receive a lot of additional responsibilities they are not used to because of the previous way of working.
“With great power comes great responsibility.”
Nothing is more true. When providing your employees with more accountability, everyone must understand what it includes AND the responsibilities that come with it. Agility does not mean creating an environment where everyone can do as they like without bearing the consequences of it.
More on Agile Transformation? Check out our insights or give us a call!