4 Issues That You Cannot Avoid During An Agile Transformation

Suppose you have participated in or seen the agile transformation of several enterprises. In that case, you will find that each enterprise has its unique concerns in the transformation process. Still, some issues are indeed the concerns and thoughts of every enterprise's transformation leader, so we have put the relevant content together and look forward to sharing it with our readers and friends.

Does the agile transformation need the support of external consultants?

Different people with different views. I believe that if your enterprise does not have an experienced transformation leader and a strong team of agile coaches, the support of an external consultant or consulting firm is essential. In other words, even if you have an experienced team, it is still necessary to have an external consultant on your side. Still, at the same time, you should avoid going to the other extreme of relying too much on external consultants to neglect to build your internal team's capacity.

The advantage of external consultants is that they can provide systematic ideas for transformation. Because of their extensive experience in a particular field, many consultants can give us more mature solutions and ideas to help companies make fewer missteps. Another point is that external consultants often easily gain employees' recognition and trust. When external consultants express their views, employees will feel that this person is very senior, experienced, and has a very innovative viewpoint. At the same time, employees discuss the same content internally, and they often feel that this person is not capable of working with us every day but is full of unrealistic ideas.

So how should external consultants and internal communication teams collaborate and divide the workload? First of all, depending on the size of the team that needs to be transformed, the level of commitment and mission of external consultants also varies. Suppose the team size is small external consultants are more likely to help companies introduce new ideas and methods. The cooperation time may also be relatively short, while external consultants are more likely to become long-term partners in larger organizations. This process should pay attention to the full use of external consultants' advantages while focusing on internal team training to ensure that the internal team can seamlessly connect when the external consultants leave the field. In that case, the core view is that external consultants are the guide. How far we can go depends on our ability.

How to work with a team on transformation

Some of my friends in the business will take on temporary assignments where the company is willing to hand over a team to you and expects you to complete the team's agile transformation drive, so how do you work in such a situation as the transformation leader? What are the good ideas for you? I believe that the following points are critical.

1. Do not change the concept. If you are dealing with a team that is curious about new things and willing to try agile transformation, you can carry out agile pilots and advocate agile values. Still, if you are dealing with a team that is wary of change and cautious about new things, the best way is to enter the "enemy" area first. When you can help the team solve more and more problems, the team will seek to know your thinking and approach to solving problems and where you can learn them systematically. This is when your opportunity comes.
   
   
2. No rigid application. For example, there are many key activities in the scrum process, so we don't need to introduce the scrum process entirely for everyone to follow when coaching such teams. In general, the daily stand-up and review meetings are relatively easy to start with, and methods like Kanban are less impactful and transformative for the team. They can be actively introduced with quicker results.
   
   
3. Exercise the power of the masses. What I hope to illustrate is that the power of one person is limited, so when you are responsible for the transformation work of the team, you should consider early on how to train more talents to give you support. In a narrow sense, it is about building a team of agile coaches to drive the agile transformation process together. In a broader sense, it is about making everyone involved fully aware of and understand agile, and that everyone can be an enabler of the transformation, which requires the person in charge to have full trust in the team and to use the individual strengths of each team member according to their characteristics.
   
   
4. Appropriate leadership platform. The leadership platform does not mean to put pressure on the team through the leadership right, but to make the team fully aware of the importance of the relevant work through the support of the leadership, what the transformation means to the enterprise and to the team, where the value point of the transformation is, what value the success of the transformation has to each of our employees. Hence, the leadership is not only willing to come to the platform, but also in the consciousness of the leadership should have a full understanding and affirmation of this, which also requires the transformation leader to focus on how to improve the agile leadership of the team leaders, and help them change their thinking through training and coaching and implement it into the team management in a practical way.

Therefore, combined with the above ideas, Agile transformation cannot be forced too much but has to be adapted to local conditions. When the pilot teams are effective, the transformation will no longer depend on the promotion because if agile can solve the problem, more people and teams will be willing to join you.

What's different about the assessment of the agile team?

In recent years, when discussing agile performance appraisal, many people will first mention the concept of OKR. Although, strictly speaking, OKR is used for goal management, many companies and individuals treat OKR as a substitute for KPI, so people will think that agile teams should use OKR management methods in parallel. Of course, I agree with the advantages of OKR and the high degree of compatibility with the views advocated by agile teams. Still, I think that in addition to the specific methods of agile team performance appraisal, many principles should be given more attention.

1. The masses can see the truth. This principle expresses that performance appraisal should not become a dictatorship. The leadership, through their subjective judgment evaluation, is often not right, especially when the team is large, the leader's performance evaluation is less objective, and if you meet with subordinates who do not like to report, it is easy to make the appraisal results lack credibility, so the appraisal should be the evaluation of multiple parties, here we do not discuss the specific calculation formula and proportion, but emphasize the importance of multiple parties. Suppose a team member has more than one superior, such as a department manager or a project manager. In that case, it must be scored by more than one superior and then calculated according to the weighting. The more important point is that it is difficult for leaders to work with employees daily. The evaluation of other employees will be more valuable, so methods like comprehensive evaluation are a good supplement.
   
   
2. We should make more performance. A common phenomenon in traditional performance management is that leaders do not communicate with employees after scoring them, and employees have complaints and nowhere to say them. Some employees muster the courage to go to the leaders to ask for an explanation, and a common statement from the leaders is: "Don't worry, as long as you do a good job, you will be given priority next year!" Therefore, the performance appraisal of agile teams is also the same. Strengthening the frequency of communication and answering employees' questions in a fixed cycle is the core practice of agile performance appraisal.
   
   
3. We need to motivate on demand. The purpose of performance appraisal is not to punish but to motivate employees to improve their motivation, so the motor can not simply consider bonuses1. We need to motivate on demand. The purpose of performance appraisal is not to punish but to motivate employees to improve their motivation, so it can not simply consider bonuses and ratings. From the perspective of Maslow's hierarchy of needs theory, each employee must also have his or more important needs, so the diversity of performance evaluation is also important. On top of the basic performance incentives to add more personalized incentives is also an idea and method worth exploring.

So, if you understand agile thinking, why not use KPI's even if you are still using them?

What is business agility?

Business agility is a topic that has received a lot of attention in recent years, but many people wonder what exactly constitutes business agility. Does it mean that the business is involved in agile activities? One view is that business agile is a stage in the evolution of agile, a new stage where people look at the business from R&D (Agile) to operations (DevOps).

My understanding of business agile is based on the word "business" itself. To put it bluntly, business is the foundation of a company's profitability, and business development depends on customer recognition and satisfaction. Thus to a certain extent, business directly represents customer value.

Some may wonder, hasn't Agile focused on customer value since the beginning? But when we are in a VUCA environment and agile has reached this stage of development, more and more factors depend on the delivery of customer value. As mentioned above, business agility relies on organizational agility, cultural agility, team agility, engineering agility, technical architecture agility, and even performance management agility, so business agility represents the organization's capability to deliver value and adapt to the times continuously.

To put it more boldly, I believe that the digital transformation that companies are actively promoting today is also in the service of business agility.

Digital transformation is a high-level transformation based on digital transformation (Digitization) and digital upgrading (Digitalization), which further involves a company's core business and aims to create a new business model. Digital transformation is the development of digital technologies and supporting capabilities to create a dynamic digital business model (from Baidu.com).

So it can be said that the goal of digital transformation is to grow and innovate the business model by reinventing it. In contrast to the understanding of business agility above, it can be said that digital transformation supports business agility or that the two complement each other.

Therefore, if we return to the topic, the involvement of the business team can be the first step to trying business agile, but it is far from enough. The exploration of business agile can be combined with the development of the times to try and improve continuously, and it is the core competence of enterprise development.

The above 4 points are my views on some of the common concerns in the process of business agile transformation. Thus agile business transformation has a long way to go, and the results of transformation do not depend on any individual but need joint efforts and collaboration of the whole organization to obtain results and progress continuously.