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Cultural Readiness for Becoming Agile [#OrganizationalCulture #CompanyCulture #BecomingAgile]

1. Build empowered teams
2. Create generalist roles
3. Get rid of processes that cause delay

1. Build empowered teams
A lot of organizations focus their energy on spinning up new teams as quickly as they can to say they are “agile.”

Being on a quickly spun up team does not make you Agile. What makes it Agile is being on a team where you are empowered to make decisions, innovate, learn and adapt without outside interference.

To be ready to build an empowering team, the organization must trust that the people they hired are capable.

Now this is not saying there are no boundaries and that the team of people are loose to do whatever they want!

An Agile team has a shared purpose and roadmap that comes from stakeholders, but how they approach the work is up to them.

2. Create generalist roles
Agile is all about getting the highest priority work done as a team, not resource utilization. At the end of the day, someone could be utilized 150 percent and get a lot of work started but nothing done that is usable.

When organizations stick to very stringent traditional titles, people are afraid to cross the line into another person’s territory. Unfortunately, what this leads to is a focus on utilization rather than value.

So to set up teams for success with agile, roles need to become more generalized. Sure, the graphic designer will be the primary person that does that work, but maybe others on the team can pitch in and help.

In Agile, we call this becoming a “T-shaped” player, meaning you have a primary skill and other skills that you can help with when needed for the team to meet its’ goals.

3. Get rid of processes that cause delay
Organizations must look at how work flows in – from idea to delivery – to understand where bottlenecks happen.

Every time that work sits idle waiting for approvals, or passing the baton from one team to the next means waiting in the queue, is called a cost of delay and a really expensive problem!

If work takes you 6 months from idea to delivery, but 90% of that time it is stuck on the desk of someone or waiting for a person to be available that is waste!

So to be successful at Agile, that waste needs to be minimized. A lot of that happens by cutting out unnecessary documentation and approvals and giving the team more autonomy and authority.

Adapted from:
If you want to be agile, you may need to change your company’s culture:
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