Agile Transformation Strategy

Your transformation strategy will need to address your specific needs. By first establishing where you are in your agility across a wide range of roles, workflow processes, product performance, understanding of your market and customers, and much more, you will be in a better position to answer the question, “Why does my organization need to transform to be more Agile?”

Agile Transformation Roadmap

Every transformation is different, but a typical roadmap for transformation will have several common features:

Analysis of where the organization is today – technologically, culturally, in the market, etc.
Discovery of where the organization would like to be at some point in the future
An area of the business where they can pilot a mini-transformation, from which to gain learning
A vision to guide the transformation
Governance as guard rails for the initiation
A communication strategy for those affected directly as well as indirect effects the rest of the organization may see
A change management strategy for working with and supporting the individuals and teams who will be living and working within the parameters of the pilot
A high-level plan for what training, coaching, and consulting will be provided to these individuals and teams to make the intended initiative results stick

Waterfall to Agile Transformation

If Agile is the new way of working, we can think of the old way of working as “traditional”. You will also see and hear the word “waterfall” a lot. Not long ago, waterfall was an innovation, the first iteration of a consistent process for developing software.
Early on, Scrum allowed teams to do the impossible: release value to end users within one sprint, with the typical sprint being two weeks. Even if that were inflated to four weeks or eight, delivering anything of value to an end user in anything short of six months to a year was just not possible.
Agile isn’t for every type of organization. For example, Agile is not suitable in stable and highly predictable environments where new knowledge isn’t being created and where the horizon of what is known is far away and wide. Unfortunately, this describes very few industries anymore. Agile is necessary in today’s VUCA world: volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous.