12
The Guiding Coalition
“A strong guiding coalition is always needed. One with the right composition, level of trust, and shared objective.”
—John Kotter
Introduction
Organizations arrive at the need for change from a wide range of starting points. Once the rationale and urgency for a significant change has been established, the difficult work begins, and the first critical move is to form what Kotter calls a ‘sufficient powerful guiding collation.’ This is accomplished by following the first four steps of the SAFe implementation roadmap.
Reach the tipping point.
Train Lean-Agile change agents.
Train executives, managers, and leaders.
Create a Lean-Agile center of excellence.
This chapter describes these first four steps of the journey.
Step 1: Reach the Tipping Point
“The tipping point is that magic moment when an idea, trend, or social behavior crosses a threshold, tips, and spreads like wildfire.”
—Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference
Changing the way of working—including the habits and culture of a large organization—is hard. People naturally resist change. Accepting change means acknowledging the possibility that the organization and its people have some weaknesses. Even worse, it may challenge people’s long-held beliefs or values. As a result, there must be a reason for change, one so compelling that maintaining the status quo becomes unacceptable.
In other words, the enterprise needs to reach its tipping point4—the crossroads at which the organization’s imperative is to achieve the change rather than resist it, thus creating the sense of urgency needed to overcome inertia and the comfort of the status quo.
4. Malcom Gladwell, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference (Little, Brown and Company, 2006).
We’ve observed two forces that are the most common catalysts for tipping an organization to SAFe.
A burning platform. Sometimes the need to change is obvious. The company is failing to compete, and the existing way of doing business is inadequate to achieve a new solution within a survivable time frame. People’s jobs are at stake, driving a sense of urgency for mandatory change throughout the organization. This is the easier case for change. While there will always be those who resist, the energy that drives the need through the organization is overwhelming.
Proactive leadership. In the absence of a burning platform, leadership is responsible for driving change proactively by ‘taking a stand’ for a better future state. This is the less obvious reason to drive change, as the people in the organization may not see or feel the urgency to do the additional hard work needed. After all, the organization is successful now. Why should people assume that won’t continue in the future? Isn’t change hard, and risky, too? In this case, leadership must continuously communicate the reasons for change, making it clear that maintaining the status quo is no longer acceptable.
In rare instances, organizations have both a burning platform and proactive leadership with the courage to direct the change. With SAFe as the transformation blueprint, such organizations can experience a rapid and dramatic turnaround from a bleak crisis to positive business results and a brighter future.
Reaching the tipping point, however, it not enough, by itself, to succeed. It requires a guiding coalition of practitioners, managers, and change agents who can implement specific process changes. Perhaps, even more important, it also requires leaders who can set the vision, show the way, and remove impediments to change. Such leaders must have sufficient organizational credibility to be taken seriously, and the expertise needed to make fast, intelligent decisions.
After the vision has been created, it’s time to build a guiding coalition that is sufficiently powerful to implement SAFe. Achieving this requires organizations to take the steps described in the following three sections.
Step 2: Train Lean-Agile Change Agents
“Are you creating a critical mass of people to help you change?”5
—W. Edwards Deming
5. Edwards Deming, W. Out of the Crisis. MIT Center for Advanced Educational Services. 1982..
Most enterprises source change agents from both inside and outside the organization. They may be business and technology leaders, Agile coaches, program and project managers, process leads, and more. In addition, scaling Agile across the enterprise requires training all the people who do the work. To make it practical and cost effective, SPCs are licensed to teach other SAFe courses. This affordable strategy supplies the trainers needed to initiate and implement the change. While attaining SPC certification provides the ability to teach, it’s highly recommended that new SPCs who have limited hands-on SAFe experience pair with more experienced internal or external coaches.
The Scaled Agile course, Implementing SAFe with SPC certification, helps develop change agents and prepares them to lead the organizational transformation by adopting SAFe.
Step 3: Train Executives, Managers, and Leaders
“People are already doing their best. The problem is with the system. Only management can change the system. It is not enough that management commit themselves to quality and productivity, they must know what it is they must do... Such a responsibility cannot be delegated.”
—W. Edwards Deming
Some of these key leaders will provide ongoing executive sponsorship. Others will be directly involved in implementing SAFe, managing others who do, and participating directly in ART execution. All of these stakeholders need the knowledge and skills to lead, rather than follow, the implementation. This training may include the following courses:
Leading SAFe. This course is designed to teach the SAFe Lean-Agile mindset, principles, and practices, as well as the most effective leadership values in managing the new generation of knowledge workers. This course also helps the organization reach the tipping point for change and seeds the enterprise with the knowledgeable, active leaders prepared to guide it.
SAFe Lean Portfolio Management. This is a course and workshop where attendees gain the practical tools and techniques necessary to implement the Lean Portfolio Management (LPM) functions of strategy and investment funding, Agile portfolio operations and Lean governance. While it’s not initially necessary to train leaders in LPM, an increasing trend is to begin adopting it at the same time as the enterprise begins adopting SAFe. This provides leaders an opportunity to experience Lean-Agile practices in portfolio management, a domain that is familiar to them, which fosters better support for the transformation.
Step 4: Create a Lean-Agile Center of Excellence
“A guiding coalition that operates as an effective team can process more information, more quickly. It can also speed the implementation of new approaches because powerful people are truly informed and committed to key decisions.”
—John Kotter
In Chapter 9, we noted how a Lean-Agile Center of Excellence (LACE) can be a powerful and persistent force in both achieving the transformation and fostering relentless improvement.
Indeed, experience has shown that the LACE is a significant differentiator between companies practicing Lean-Agile in name only and those truly committed to adopting Lean-Agile practices and thereby achieving the best business outcomes.
Establishing the Vision for Change
As the guiding coalition of leaders and change agents is being formed, they begin to craft a clear vision for the changes that will be enabled by the adoption of SAFe. The vision should start with a compelling and well-understood reason to change. Kotter notes that establishing a ‘vision for change’ is a primary responsibility of leadership.6 The vision provides three vital benefits.
6. John P. Kotter, Leading Change (Harvard Business Review Press, 1996).
Purpose. It clarifies the objective and direction for the change. It sets the mission for all to follow. It focuses everyone on the ‘why,’ not the ‘how,’ of the change.
Motivation. The vision helps motivate people into action by giving them a compelling reason to make the change and start moving quickly in the new direction. After all, change is hard. People’s roles and responsibilities will shift, and fear may even cause some people to leave. However, with a compelling vision, everyone will know that change must occur and that there is no job security in keeping things the same.
Alignment. The power of alignment helps start the coordinated action needed to ensure that hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of people work together toward a new and more personally rewarding goal. With a clarity of vision, people are empowered to take the actions necessary to realize the vision without the need for constant management supervision.
In the case of a SAFe transformation, the vision for change must be rooted in the understanding of the Lean-Agile mindset (Chapter 3) and SAFe principles (Chapter 4). It’s also critical that leaders understand that how they lead directly influences whether employees buy into the change and contribute to its success. The Lean-Agile leadership competency (Chapter 5) described the leader behaviors that create a positive environment for change.
LACE Mission Statement
Like any Agile team, the LACE needs to align itself with a common mission to achieve the vision for implementing SAFe. Figure 12-1 shows an example of a mission statement.
Figure 12-1. Sample LACE mission statement
As we noted in Chapter 9, the LACE may be part of an emerging Agile Program Management Office (APMO), or it may exist as a separate group. In either case, the LACE often serves as a focal point of knowledge and transformational activities that can power the enterprise through the changes. In addition, the LACE often evolves into a permanent organization for Lean-Agile education, communication, and relentless improvement.
Operation and Organization
The LACE typically operates as an Agile team (typically four to six people per business unit) and it applies the same iteration and Program Increment (PI) cadences as the ARTs. This allows the LACE to plan and Inspect and Adapt (I&A) in harmony with the ARTs, serving as an exemplar for Agile team behavior. As a result, similar roles are needed.
A Product Owner works with stakeholders to prioritize the team’s transformation backlog.
A Scrum Master facilitates the process and helps remove roadblocks.
The LACE team is cross-functional and has credible people from various functional organizations. That allows the team to address backlog items wherever they arise, whether they’re related to the organization, culture, business, or technology.
The team’s Product Manager is typically a C-level leader (or one level below).
Typically, the LACE is responsible for the following types of activities:
Communicating the business need for SAFe
Integrating SAFe practices
Fostering communities of practice
Creating alignment around organizational changes
Providing coaching and training to ART stakeholders and teams
Establishing objective metrics
Facilitating value stream identification workshops
Defining the LACE Team Size and Distribution
The size of the LACE must be in proportion to the size and distribution of the development enterprise. A small team of four to six dedicated people can support a few hundred, while a larger size team supports proportionally larger groups.
For smaller enterprises, a single centralized LACE can balance speed with economies of scale. However, in larger enterprises—typically those exceeding 500 to 1,000 practitioners—it’s useful to consider employing either a decentralized or a hub-and-spoke model (Figure 12-2).
Figure 12-2. LACE team organizational models
The LACE has a tall order to fill: changing the behavior and culture of a large enterprise. Once a LACE has formed, there will be a natural desire to accelerate progress and work through its full backlog as quickly as possible. However, trying to remove all the major organizational impediments right at the start could bring the transformation to a halt. Instead, by defining and launching ARTs, the LACE empowers the organization to generate short-term wins with the support of the entire guiding coalition. It then consolidates those gains as additional ARTs are launched.
The LACE should work with Business Owners to identify the metrics that they care most about, determine how the business tracks the success of the transformation, get a baseline of these metrics before the first ART is launched, and remeasure with every PI and every new ART launch so that the business benefits over time can be tracked with hard numbers, even in the early stages of the transformation. This provides the positive momentum needed to tackle the broader organizational issues.
The business agility assessment (see Chapter 16, Measure, Grow, and Accelerate) can help the LACE understand where a portfolio is on the road to business agility. The LACE should offer a baseline assessment at the start of the transformation and then continuously measure progress and use the recommendations provided to drive the improvement backlog.
Communicating the Benefits
“If you can’t communicate the vision to someone in five minutes or less and get a reaction that signifies both understanding and interest, you are not done.”
—John Kotter
Whether the reason is a burning platform or proactive leadership, the goal is the same: realizing the business benefits that change is intended to deliver. SAFe’s Principle #1 reminds us to ‘take an economic view.’ In this context, the leaders should communicate the goal of the change in terms that everyone can understand. Dozens of case studies7 can help people understand the journey and its benefits, which are summarized in four major areas, as Figure 12-1 illustrates.
7. http://www.scaledagile.com/customer-stories
Figure 12-3. SAFe business benefits
Leaders should communicate these intended outcomes as part of the vision for the change. Also, they should describe any specific objectives and measures they hope to accomplish. This will provide the emotional fuel necessary to escape the inertia of the status quo.
Summary
Changing the habits and culture of a large organization is difficult. Some people naturally resist change. As a result, there must be a reason for such a move, one so compelling that maintaining the status quo becomes unacceptable. There are two main forces that tip an organization to SAFe: a burning platform where the organization is failing to compete or proactive leadership where leaders take a stand for a better future state.
After reaching the tipping point, forming a guiding coalition is the next critical move. An effective coalition must include the right people from across the organization, especially leaders who can set the vision, remove impediments, and make blocking the change difficult. The people in this coalition need sufficient organizational credibility to be taken seriously and have the expertise and confidence to make fast, smart decisions. The coalition also requires practitioners, managers, and change agents who can implement local and specific process changes. The next step is to design the implementation itself.