Agile Transformation Difficulties
The way up to make a full agile transformation is not really easy, so many challenges will be faced, and the most important part is not given up and not accepting the partial transformation, organizations should go straight ahead to the full functional agile environment.
Throughout my career I worked for many companies and I did many projects, in most of them I was part of that hard transformation process, I saw how successfully applied agile and on the other hand how they failed, and learned what should and shouldn’t do to be agile, in these brief lines I want to share with you some of this transformation difficulties:
Resistance anything new ‘why should I do that’
We all know that change will always be faced with resistance and here I mean people who don’t like to do more or do it in a different way, they just want to continue as they used to, they will always show you that they will support the change and even the would offer to lead it but in the background, they will not hesitate to find all the ways to make your mission harder and even fail.
You have to understand their intention and peruse them and encourage them to be a real part of the game. You should use your brain with some of them and with others you should use your heart.
The empowerment of the team ‘My way or the high way’
As you move from Waterfall or let’s say the hieratical and structural module to be agile with a team that contains brand new roles like in scrum, for example, there is a scrum master and product owner and the developer team, you will face a problem with the members that used to play the lead or management roles, they will fight to play the scrum master or the product owner role and they will do whatever it takes so they not to be a part of the developer team because it is the lowest level in the group as they think! in this case, you should really find if they understood the responsibilities of these roles correctly and if they can really play it because they should be more as facilitators rather than commanders.
After you form the team you have to keep tracking of it cause even if the old managers accepted the role to be a part of the team maybe they will keep trying to dominate the team by not allowing the others to give their opinion or make a decision or even talk, in this case, you have to balance the load and manage the situation by showing that any member of the team has the right to talk and explain his own opinion and be part of the decision making process.
Selling the idea ‘sell me this pen’
If you asked one of the team ‘what this change is all about?’ and you found that he started saying ‘so, Aaah, mmm, let me think about that!’. You should know there is something wrong going on here.
If the whole team does not believe in what they do, and I mean every single member, the change will be weak and by the time you will find that you will not gain what you expect instead you will get the pain, maybe teams are struggling in understanding the new methodology and the changes that came with it and they hide their fears and difficulties, actually, there are so many reasons for that, maybe they forced to or maybe there is a lack of knowledge or experience, as soon as you notices that you should start to move, arrange for a one to one meetings with the members besides that you can make some workshops and sessions to increase the knowledge and experience.
Casting away from the core ‘Wilson!’
You should always remember the main value of being agile and core rules to change to agile and stick with them in the whole stages of change, no matter what business you do or the culture that you have in your organization or how big is your team, and among all these rules don’t forget that they give a value to the people and the communication, over the fixed process and rules.
Forget to have fun
In all what you do you should always try to make it fun and attractive, agile contains many activities and meetings and actions and you have the choice to make it energetic or to make it boring, especially at the beginning of change they will think ‘We are attending meetings more that we work’, here comes your role to show why it is important to do this or that in an interactive motivative environment that makes everyone curious about everything related to this new methodology.
Fail to track and learn from the past ‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it ’
Agile full of ceremonies and plan milestones that advice you to look back and learn form what you have done, for example in Scrum we have the retrospective meeting which take a place after every sprint to review what we have done if it is good or bad and what to do to improve it, some teams do not even do that meetings, some others really do it but they forget the most important thing about it, ‘what are the actions that we agreed to follow for the bad things that we did before, what have we done about it, when this actions will be completed, when I will check again this action is finished successfully, how I will measure it , is there any action that should be changed ’ this meeting is not only to make the list and put it in a file, you should hang it in front of all the team to make it visible to all the members to say to them, look the problems are here and the action next to them what have we done to make this action real ,and the good things that we used to do, are we still doing them or we gave up.
Summary:
No matter how was your intention for change employees may show resistance to it, maybe they were not a part of the decision-making group or they or they were not ready for it yet, it is so important how to introduce the change and how to make it real by listening to employees and explain every single step you take.
It is all about communication and communication and communication.
