#15 – The Agile Transformation Plan

Authors’ comments:

For agile transformations (which sounds awfully temporary), there is always the paradoxical risk of a Big Design Up Front approach. Therefore, remember to make sure that, if your external agile coaches have their own transformation framework, they don’t follow a prescriptive, BDUF, waterfallish process, but more of an iterative, experimenting, learning-based one that grows the effort organically.

One approach could be:

  1. Start with discussing, identifying and aligning the ‘why’ of wanting to go (scaled) agile and design an end state aspiration with leaders from central places in the organisation.
  2. Identify a hypothesis and some leading indicators for it to catch early if your agile transformation is not going the right way.
  3. Identify a pilot for testing the hypothesis by showing immediate business improvements by working agile.
  4. Pivot if needed, and stop the transformation if agile hasn’t improved the company yet, but if it has, decide on whether to grow the pilot, start up more agile groups, or both, and repeat the steps.