The Most Effective Way To Start Your Agile Transformation

By now, you may have heard many stories of companies who achieved success after going through an agile transformation. As a leader, it’s natural for you to want to follow their footsteps and experience the same success in bringing positive changes. But, where would you start?

This article covers the effective way to introduce agile transformation into your company.

What is Agile Transformation?

Agile transformation is the process of shifting the way your company operates to be more adaptable and effective in responding to market and industry changes, through the adoption of agile practices. This can involve delivering products and services in a more flexible and iterative way, with a focus on rapid delivery, customer collaboration, and continuous improvement.

Depending on the company’s goals and situation, there are two popular ways companies start their transformation: the big bang, and the incremental approach.

Big Bang Agile Transformation

Many companies go for the ‘big bang’ approach, which is a large scale roll out of changes to processes, roles, and ways of working. This method mostly work when your company is relatively small. Sure, there are big corporates such as ING that are known to achieve success with this model, but at what price?

The big bang approach expects high-level of cost and effort commitment at the start, and comes with big disruptions to existing ways of working. Large-scale changes like this will naturally cause large amount of confusion and stress to the people within the company. This is why many companies find themselves stopping short of their transformation efforts because of unmet expectations.

Here’s where incremental agile transformation offers a promising alternative.

Incremental Agile Transformation

Compared to the big bang, incremental transformation aims to roll out the changes in smaller stages, with a focus to measure the progress and adapt your efforts between each stage.

In a nutshell, incremental agile transformation typically follow this continuous process:

• Defining a starting point

  This is choosing the simplest group to start implementing agile practices in their ways of working. This may be a certain teams, departments, or products.

• Implement agile practices

  Start bringing agile ways of working into the chosen group. As you go along, expand your efforts. Scale it so it includes more groups of people.

• Measure your results

  Spend time to measure the results shown by the group so far. Highlight any successes or setbacks experienced.

• Learn & adjust your efforts

  Adjust your efforts according to your findings, allowing for continuous improvements to be done.

Illustration: Incremental agile transformation

The process above illustrates how an incremental agile transformation has no hard end-point. As the market and industry keeps changing, you’ll find that unless you deliberate put in effort to measure and improve your efforts, you will get left behind.

Summary

• Compared to a big bang approach, incremental agile transformation lets you put more focus on your transformation efforts to a smaller group to start with.

• This approach generally requires lower cost and effort commitments at the start, which also means lower risk against unwanted surprises along the way.

• The more focus you put into the smaller group, the higher your chance for success.

• Once you’re ready, you can gradually expand your transformation efforts with a bigger group. Making your efforts less disruptive and more sustainable.

———

Need help in making your agile transformation a success?

Talk to us today to learn how you can come up with a transformation approach that bring results.

Cover photo: unsplash/@riccardoptz