Questions to ask to Kick Start Agile Adoption – Part I of II

As a consultant coach, each client engagement is a learning experience and a great opportunity to gather these learnings and come up with an improved and effective way of providing enhanced value. While each client is unique in many ways, there are questions that need to be asked at the front end of an engagement to help the client in better decision making.

This checklist is based purely on my personal experience and the application of these suggestions should be done on a case by case basis. For me personally, this checklist should be looked at very early, in some cases before signing a contract to helps build trust and sets the stage for a more engaging partnership. So, here you go:

Establish Vision and Create Alignment – Is there a clear vision for the impact we are trying to create with the move to agile? Alignment is a term mentioned in almost all of the posts that I have written so far and it continues to be the single most important aspect of any successful initiative. One of the most important questions for me to ask the client as I walk in is “Why agile? What problem are we trying to solve with agile?”. It is important that the expectation is clearly understood. In some cases, a facilitated conversation can help the client come up with an answer. 

The timing of this discussion is important too. If a consulting engagement starts without the objectives or intent, the partnership can turn sour pretty fast. A shared understanding of the vision can go a long way in building trust and lead to meaningful conversations and articulating of a roadmap to get there.

Inspire change, top-down – How will leadership INSPIRE and ENABLE agility? Almost every single time during my first few interactions with the client (someone who is going to pay for my services), there is a feeling about the manager highlighting the need for agility for a certain part of the organization. At no point have I heard a client start with asking a question “How can I partner in enabling agility?”. It comes across as agility being something that is expected but not practiced.

Peter Block in his book titled “Flawless Consulting“ talks extensively about contracts. I treat it more as “terms of agreement” where I like to encourage the client to have some skin in the game in order to become catalysts and enablers of agility. This agreement is extremely important to arrive as early as possible.

A symptom where the leaders/managers check themselves out from training or workshops or are not involved in the earlier adoption activities is an early warning sign that the leader is looking at agility to be limited to the team or it may also be a sigh of resistance towards change.

The fact that leadership is enabling and driving agility and is creating an environment where the teams can afford to experiment and fail, helps creates an ideal environment for change.

Let Business Drive Agility – Does the business understand agility and what this change will mean for them?  Business agility drives success or failure of every agile adoption effort. The ability of a Product Owner to think strategically and support through collaborative tactical activities makes the role indispensable.

The biggest beneficiary of every agile adoption is business and its customers. An agile setup that works for a business that lacks vision, strategy and a roadmap to achieve the end goal is a meaningless setup. It is critical for a business to drive agility by creating business alignment and ensuring all interested parties understand what is achievable in the short and long term. A business that is able to create an interest in a problem and a passion to develop a solution and, ensures value delivery in changing market conditions through the right engagement of all stakeholders (business and engineering) becomes an enabler for organizational agility. The absence of business agility will lead to frustrated customers, value deprived outcomes and, non-motivated team members.

Structural Changes – Are we open to structural changes (feature teams, roles, management, business etc..)? A common pattern that eliminates the impact of the agile way of working or specifically using Scrum is the resistance to make any structural changes. This results in organizations trying to force fit the new process into existing structures resulting in the process losing its impact.

There is a reason why agile produces best results for organizations that are less complicated, have self-organizing and cross-functional feature teams that can own and deliver incremental business capabilities. By not committing to making the needed structural changes, it is pretty much like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. Having a clear understanding of structural changes are possible or not, will help organizations avoid the effort of making agility work on a nonagile setup.

Partial Agility is no Agility – How are we planning to provide the supporting structures that encourage and enable agility? A common impediment in the way of teams that are trying to adapt to agile methods are the surrounding nonagile aspects of the organization. These include (but are not limited to) project planning and funding methods, hiring and sourcing practices, progress tracking, management and leadership styles and more. Trying to exist in such nonagile environment, a team will end up getting distracted leading to frustration and ultimately getting into the “this will not work for us” mindset.

Special attention needs to be paid to certain critical organizational aspects that will act as a support system to implement the change and show an incremental success. This may lead to some parts to support two distinct working models but this is generally a temporary state with handsome payback in the long run.

In the next part, we will look at some more powerful questions that should be asked at the front end of any agile adoption. Until then, be agile….