Evolving the Organisation – The Agile Practice Guide

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We’re looking at the Agile Practice Guide from the Project Management Institute and Agile Alliance.  This one in particular is “Evolving the organization.”

Check out the article and video below!

Evolving the Organisation

When we say evolving the organization, really what we’re talking about is bringing Agile into an organization in a way that also uses the Agile methodology.  Maybe traditionally you’ve been using a more linear approach, very step-by-step, very focused and figuring out all the scope and cost upfront, and then being afraid when all that changes as the project rolls out.

But if we’re moving towards more of an Agile approach it’s really recommended that we undertake that work incrementally.  In other words we’re actually using Agile, and our Agile way of putting things in the hands of our customers (which in this case is our teammates and our organization) then we’re using that to actually roll it out so we treat the change as an Agile project with its own backlog of work, and backlog of changes or Agile things that we could implement and that could be introduced to the team, based on the perceived value.

In this case our team is the customer so whether you’re leading a team or maybe you’re trying to implement it across an organization, but either way the customer in this case is other people who you’re moving the implementation of Agile onto.  That means that the value has to be based on what they perceive the value to be, and that’s very important.

Iterating Towards Agile

When we’re iterating and getting that feedback from the customer as we’re implementing Agile, then we’re putting that feedback back into the process and using what works and discarding and what doesn’t.  So when we are are implementing practices like Scrum or Kanban or Feature Driven Development, or maybe Scrum of Scrums across multiple teams, or many other things like the whole team approach and regular feedback using iterations – each of those changes can be treated as an experiment.  They can be tested for a short period of time to determine the suitability or need, or to further refine it.

What that means is we don’t have to say “Look everyone, this is happening!”  We can instead say “Let’s try it out for one or two iterations,” in this case using Agile terminology again, say four to eight weeks in total, and then let’s round back on it using a Retrospective where we ask is this working well, what didn’t work well, what did I learn and what still puzzles me during this implementation.

Then we can put that feedback back into the process.

Using the Agile Method of Kanban to Track Progress

We can also use Kanban boards to track the progress of the things that we’re implementing  – showing the new approaches to use as “done” and the things that we’ve tried as or we’re currently trying as in progress.  Again this is another Agile approach.  We’ve got all of these things that we want to implement in the backlog – maybe we’re going to move to Scrum, maybe we’re going to use Kanban, maybe we’re going to use the Whole Team Approach or a cross-functional team and some of those will be moving those across into “in progress” and some of those will already be finished.

Assessing the Current Culture

We’ll have gone through that retrospective process to find out what worked, what didn’t work, what we want to keep and what we want to discard.  Now before we get into all of this or to start implementing these changes we can assess the current culture and its readiness for a job and tailor a solution to suit.

As we’ve seen there are quite a few different methods and practices that we can use in Agile and not all organizations will want to use all of those practices. One model that we can use to find out what would suit an organization is where we ask:

Do we value exploration more than execution for example, maybe we really really just need to deliver things and we need to deliver things quickly and in that case maybe we can increment and deliver increments every two to four weeks on a regular basis. Or maybe we want speed or maybe we’ll want stability in the team.  Which one is more valuable?

Maybe we want quantity maybe we want quality.  And maybe want flexibility in our work or maybe want predictability in our work.  This will just help us determine which of the Agile practices will be valuable from a team’s perspective.  You could use any framework really when you’re figuring this out and what to use from an Agile perspective but the key point is that we want to be understanding the team.  Whether it’s just going and talking to the team and saying “Hey what are you currently doing, would this work, can we use it as a test?” and we then get feedback on it, let’s work together.  The whole point is delivering value from the perspective of your customer, and in this case the customer is the team.

And that is evolving the organization from an Agile perspective.

– David McLachlan

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