Leaders, This Is Why Your Agile Transformation Failed

In today’s fast-paced market, more and more business leaders turn to agile transformation to gain competitive advantages over their rivals. But despite the many benefits that an agile approach can bring, many leaders still struggle to make it work.

Here are six top reasons why agile transformations fail, and what you can do to avoid these pitfalls and ensure a successful transformation.

1. Copying other company’s agile transformation model

No two companies are the same. This means there’s no one-size-fits-all solutions to agile transformation. Having a unique organisation means what works for one company may not work for yours. Instead of trying to copy a model, it's important to understand the specific needs and goals of your business and tailor your agile approach accordingly.

A good first step is to start with your customers and your teams:

• How are your customers doing?

• What are the biggest challenges your teams face in making your customers happy?

• What are your leaders doing about it?

From what you uncovered in these initial discussions, you can then decide on a transformation plan that suits to your business needs.

2. Not focusing on business outcome

Many leaders obsessively push their agile transformation agenda to the point that all they care about is putting certain agile processes in place, instead of achieving a business outcome.

Keep in mind that the goal of an agile transformation is to improve the way your business works, not to simply put a new process in place. This is why it's important to focus on the intended outcomes of your agile transformation, and to regularly review and adjust your approach as needed.

To avoid this situation, you can establish clear objectives along with success indicators for what you want to achieve from your transformation efforts. By ensuring your objectives are inline with the company’s goals, those objectives can serve as the main target to help focus your efforts.

3. No dedicated team to drive the transformation

Agile transformation is a complex initiative with lots of components and moving parts. For a transformation to successfully happen, you’ll need a dedicated group of people to consistently move the initiative forward. Without anyone to give their focused attention on the success of your agile transformation, it's easy for things to fall sideways.

A dedicated agile transformation team can be the one who come up with relevant transformation objectives and the actions to make them happen. With clear roles and responsibilities, a dedicated team can help plan, rollout, measure, and adjust your transformation efforts. This ensures that the transformation stays on track. For example, you can create a cross-functional team, consisting of members from different departments and levels of the organisation, to lead the transformation and ensure everyone is working towards the same goals.

3. Lack of management support

If management is not fully on board with your transformation, it's unlikely for you to succeed with your efforts. Without their buy-in, it will be difficult to get the resources and support needed to make the transformation happen. This is why it's important to involve management in the planning and implementation of the agile transformation, and to clearly communicate the benefits of an agile approach.

A good way to increase the level of management support is to strategically involve them in the transformation process. It would be great to have someone from management to be part of the transformation team to collaboratively define the goals and design the transformation plan.

Additionally, it’s very beneficial to organise workshops and training sessions to educate management and other stakeholders about the benefits of an agile approach, and to gather their feedback and input.

4. Organisational culture that is resistant to change

Every company has a degree of resistance to change. The question is, how much does yours have?

A deeply rooted culture of not being open to changes is one of the major reasons companies fail their agile transformation efforts. The bigger your company, the more processes and culture it already has. The moment you try to introduce changes to those processes and culture, you will always be met with push back. Does that sound familiar?

The key to avoid this situation is to start with a select group of people that are more open changes first. Together with the group, build a culture that is open to change and experimentation, and form a partnership with them to move things forward. As you get more positive results and feedback, you can start inviting more people in. This way, you’ll have a higher chance of achieving success in your transformation.

5. Expecting too much, too soon

Let’s face it, you’re not going to be good at something you’ve only started doing. Many companies however, get so frustrated and discouraged over a failure, that they don’t bother to keep trying. Remember, agile transformation is a long game, not a one-time event. It's a continuous process of improvement, and you will need to put in consistent effort through trials and errors before seeing any results.

Having unrealistic expectation usually lead to big disappointment, and can hold the transformation back. It's important to be patient and to celebrate small wins along the way. For example, you can break down your agile transformation into smaller, manageable phases, and set realistic and achievable goals for each phase. This way, you can gradually build momentum and see progress over time, rather than trying to achieve everything all at once.

Bottomline

Bottomline, an agile transformation is a challenging but rewarding process. Knowing these common pitfalls will help you minimise the challenges you’ll face, so you’re much more likely to get the valuable results from your transformation. By taking a customer-driven approach, you can better choose the right transformation model for your business. Also, keep in mind the value of having a dedicated team to define clear transformation objectives along with the practical plan to break down the efforts into manageable parts.

Check out my related article to learn more about the benefits and steps needed get your agile transformation running.

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Cover photo: unsplash/@joshbrown