Michael had been with a media and publishing company for five years, making steady career progress from a junior business analyst to a senior delivery manager. He was amazed that one person could learn so much in five years, and this made him very grateful to his employer. He took advantage of every opportunity that presented itself and never regretted tough transition times and the necessity to learn a new area of knowledge every year, especially since each new area came with a new skill that he learned, a promotion, and an opportunity to meet new people. Coming from a Java development lead position with a New York City agency, he felt that he built up his skills to learn almost every aspect of the IT profession.
Starting with his current employer as a junior business analyst in 2005 and learning the hard way how to create solid business cases, he assumed a systems analyst role designing IT applications, creating system and architecture diagrams, and defining data flows. He learned UML (Unified Modeling Language) and used European software called Enterprise Architect to create UML diagrams, one flowing into another and generating Java code as an output. Because of his prior experience as a Java developer, Michael was able to troubleshoot this code fast and create deployable software within weeks, proving to be a strong individual contributor. Within months, he was promoted to lead a team of business systems analyst globally and became responsible for a group of 12. It was a knowledgeable and hardworking group of people recognized across the enterprise.
Michael felt that he was “at home” leading a group of like-minded individuals and working on the ground as a Business Systems Analyst for a new content management system (CMS) that would change how the enterprise ran its business along with a vendor on the West Coast who developed the CMS. The vendor insisted that the combined project group use a new software approach referred to as Scrum. They even sent several people including Michael to Scrum Master training, and Michael immediately saw the advantage of this new framework. He felt it was the way he had always developed software; he just didn’t know the name for it. Suddenly all his prior experience became meaningful in leading him to this profession. The CMS project was delivered with a big success and Michael was sure at that point that he wanted to become a Scrum Master. Unfortunately, in this company, emerging Scrum Masters belonged to a different organization, the Project Management Office.
Project management as a profession was not respected by the organization. Project managers were seen as policemen who were taking notes at meetings and then following up with everyone on tasks and post due items, while people were busy doing their day-to-day work. Most of the project managers had none or limited IT background so engineers did not take them seriously as a competency, while the project managers constantly complained that the organization did not see the value of their profession.
Luckily for Michael, a new Head of PMO was hired, and the situation quickly changed. The new PMO Director, David, was known for building relationships, standing up for his staff, and excellent problem solving skills. In a few months, David gained respect and established open collaboration with other departments within the company. Michael tried to speak with his own manager, who was permanently unavailable between his job-related and personal travel, and after several weeks of trying, decided to approach the new PMO Director on his own.
Michael’s observations about David and his positive reputation turned out to be fully accurate in a conversation that Michael had with David the day after he asked for the meeting. David was an attentive listener, he was genuinely interested in Michael’s background, appreciative of his diverse IT experience, and was not concerned about Michael’s lack of skills as a project manager. He had an open position available and was willing to do an internal transfer following a quick interview process, which was the company policy. He also volunteered to speak with Michael’s manager to ensure that he was also supportive of the move, which he was.
In a week, Michael joined the Project Management office as a project manager. David ensured that he took an industry-recognized project management certification before joining, to ensure that his transition was smooth and that other, very experienced project managers on the team would treat him as an equal, rather than a junior colleague. He recognized that Michael was moving from a managerial position to an individual contributor role and saw it as a sign of courage and a proof of Michael’s interest in the new profession and his servant leadership attitude. Michael was immensely grateful to his new manager and excited about the new role.
Initially, everything went well, but then the CTO was promoted to a similar role with a parent company. The new CTO came from operations management and knew nothing about IT. Many excellent technologists and talented engineers left the company. One day, David assembled his team and told them that he was moving on to lead PMO in another organization. For Michael, this was very sad news but he wanted to stay with the company because he saw a way to realize his passion in agile software development. Within a year, he convinced several major programs, including the editorial platform, the core of the business, to move to agile, and in six months, it was a huge success.
Despite this progress, the new IT management was uninvolved, bureaucratic, and unsupportive. Seeing no way to move further in organizational agility, Michael decided to look for a new job and sent his resume to a number of companies. He was pleasantly surprised when he received a call from David the next day. David was leading a project management function in a large educational company where Michael sent his resume and their internal recruiter gave him Michael’s resume for consideration. Without a second thought, Michael followed up with a call to company’s recruiter, who set up an interview the next day.
For his interview, Michael met with David and two others. One of them was David’s peer who led the business analysis (BA) function, similar to Michael’s prior role at the media company. Dario, the BA manager, was attentive and friendly, and as passionate about agile as Michael was. In addition, Michael was interviewed by Chris, a Harvard University graduate who was one of the senior project managers. Chris was smart, sharp, but stressed and overworked, so Michael made a mental note to look for signs of unsustainable work approach. He did not observe any signs. David was happy at his new job, and Dario mentioned that he had a flexible schedule and was able to spend time with his family, so the job seemed to Michael like a good horizontal move to a company that valued its employees. Michael was also happy to work for an educational company because he taught at his alma mater for a few years and was fond of academia and learning. Everything was coming together for him with this job move. He announced his departure at his media company, created a comprehensive transition plan, and set up a few training and coaching sessions to ensure that his projects and his agile community of practice-related work would progressing well.
However, there was an unexpected twist along the way. David called Michael to share he was being promoted to lead a lean initiative across the company, so Michael would be reporting directly to Dario. Michael felt happy for David and a little bit worried about his own future but once he found out that he would be reporting to Dario, he felt much better; they were equally passionate about agile, and Dario seemed like a really nice pal.
First Days at the New Job
When Michael joined the educational company, he was pleasantly surprised. This New York-based company called A Plus was a test prep pioneer committed to providing a better education to those who lacked initial knowledge and to enhancing their chances of being admitted to college. Michael was awed by the commitment to quality education, availability of relevant knowledge, and accessibility of skill-enhancing information and tutoring. Michael felt that the community-and-education-targeted nature of the company would be a solid foundation for lean agile culture and mindset. He discussed next steps with Dario, who said that he’d rely on Michael’s prior experience with his previous employer and proven leadership to drive agility across A Plus. Michael was up to the challenge.
Best Practice
Michael was so excited to join a new company that he forgot to ask a number of important questions about the factors that would support or impede his mission of driving lean agility across the enterprise. What are these questions?
First Day
During his first day with A Plus, Michael met with his peers and leaders across the enterprise. He made the following observations: first, the project management team was comprised of waterfall project managers who wanted to change and enterprise business analysts who feared any disruption to their jobs because no one made an effort to create a safe environment where they would feel that their jobs were protected, no matter which framework was implemented. Second, the company’s strategy was controlled by two forces: directions from the parent company located in Florida and middle management driven by engineering leaders. Third, the PMO team did not have much respect for Dario; they considering him a micromanager who took credit for the successes of his team and blamed the team for failures. They did their best to not expose any issues until they were too late to fix. In sum, the PMO had all signs of a dysfunctional organization.
Michael also found out that he was taking the place of someone who was being let go because of presumed poor performance. Michael was surprised to meet Yuan, a sharp project manager with a solid engineering background who he was about to replace on the project. Yuan was smart, well-educated, hardworking, and devastated about his departure. This was not a pleasant realization for Michael, who found out that the back-office application Yuan’s team was building was already six months late, and upon review of Microsoft project plans, he saw little hope of completing the 100-page scope in the extended three months. In addition, the engineering manager who was in charge of the development work was inexperienced and his technical knowledge was limited.
Michael started by building partnerships. He met his peer, Stan, who was tech savvy and friendly, and became his advisor going forward. Stan confirmed that Dario was known for taking credit for others’ work. Michael was already aware of this perception but was not concerned about it because he believed in teamwork and was driven by ability to drive change. He should not have overlooked this warning.
Michael was relieved when Dario told him that he was hiring an Agile Coach who was supposed to join in a week. Combined with everything he learned about his job on day 1, though, this career move looked less and less attractive to Michael. However, the bridges were burnt and he decided to concentrate on the back office project and change the trajectory to move in a positive direction.
First Month
During his first month with A Plus, Michael was able to establish good relationships with multiple stakeholders across the company. He found out that the 100-page requirements document contained way more functionality that was needed to launch the new system, and met with the team of business analysts to suggest a MVP for the launch due in three months. He also spent time with business stakeholders in the back office and other relevant functions to find out which functionality was crucial from their standpoint. His intention was to get the immediate risk out of the way so that he would be able to concentrate on his passion of instilling lean-agility across the organization.
Michael also set up introductory meetings with the majority of the organizational leaders to find out who would support building agility to the enterprise. He found out that most of the A Plus divisional leaders were education professionals with strong backgrounds and ties to the industry. While most of them had never heard of agile, lean, Scrum, or Kanban, they were open minded and frustrated by the time it was taking them to get any changes to the company software implemented, not including new or replatformed systems, which took years to get delivered and were outdated before they were completed. Michael saw these leaders as significant supporters of the agile transformation and future drivers of agility. One of these leaders, Greg, was a fast and smart leader, and a huge proponent of agility. Michael immediately created a partnership with Greg in promoting agility across A Plus.
Dario introduced Michael to Trent, his protégé and a career-oriented recent graduate who was brought in by the former Head of PMO as a relative of someone she knew. Trent graduated from Yale with a degree in world poetry, and this was the first real job after a series of freelancing and dog sitting gigs. Trent was smart, personable, and an avid runner. His work responsibility was limited to managing Clarity, the A Plus project management software, to ensure that everyone entered their vacation time and time spent on projects. Dario felt that Trent with his natural curiosity and lack of professional experience combined with ambition would become good support for rolling out agile as a logistical coordinator and a Scrum Master over a period of time.
As a result of this early relationship building, Michael was invited to provide an update on his Business Systems project to the company’s CEO and COO, given the state the project was left in by his predecessor. While others might have considered this a terrifying challenge, Michael saw it as an opportunity to explore the level of support he would get from executive management in rolling out lean agility and get their support for the current project. He made a decision that coming up with a feasible delivery plan and limiting MVP would be his opportunity to build trust with two top executives at A Plus.
The update meeting went extremely well, despite the fact that Michael suggested significant reductions to the scope delivered in three months. He brought in numbers that showed that the effort planned for three months was feasible, it was based on historic data, and it addressed all high priority business needs. Executives were impressed that any estimations were based on empirical data and saw that even though only 20% of originally required features would be built, they covered 80% of use cases. At the end of the meeting, both the CEO and COO offered Michael support for the Business Systems project and agile rollout. Michael was energized and challenged by the high expectations from two most senior people within the company who believed in his abilities. Mario, who was part of the meeting, presented the numbers they collected and was very supportive.
Best Practice
In a safe environment, there is a great value of presenting issues and potential challenges openly to senior executives, as well as providing recommendations on resolving them, such as Michael and Dario did in suggesting scope reduction based on the data collected.
During his first month with the company, Michael witnessed a strange situation with the newly hired Agile Coach. The Agile Coach hired by Dario started and was let go in a few weeks. Michael never fully understood what happened, and he wasn’t able to form a collaborative relationship with this coach in such a short period of time. The coach shared that she felt that she was required by Dario to work around the clock, which affected her health and well-being. Dario claimed that the coach had the wrong attitude.
Michael was sad that this did not work out and hoped that a replacement would be hired soon. Instead, Dario suggested that Michael concentrate on coaching, training, and educating Trent, who would be helping with logistics to gain some technical expertise and eventually become a Scrum Master. The work expectations Dario had for Michael were extreme: Michael still had responsibility to deliver a large program that was just getting back into shape and approaching delivery timelines; to prepare all prerequisites for the agile rollout, which they were planning within three months of Michael joining the company; and to coach Trent to become a Scrum Master.
Best Practice
When accepting a role of an lean agile coach or agile leader within an organization, consider transitioning any other responsibilities you may have. Otherwise, this time-consuming role will lead to unsustainable work pace or impede your opportunity to be an effective leader. Similarly, when appointing someone within your organization to lead a lean agile transformation, define who this person is delegating their current responsibilities to.
First Year
With full support from the leadership, Dario insisted on a “big bang” approach to agile transformation. Michael whose previous experience with agile transformation was “ground up,” was committed to making it work, although he was hoping for a more organic approach. Dario felt that given the state of their engineering organization they did not have time for a “ground up” approach, which would be much slower.
As a result, they worked with engineering leaders to split all engineers into nine teams, assign Scrum Masters and Product Owners (Michael trained all project managers and business analysts as Scrum Masters and Product Owners), and start sprinting. Several people in these competencies left the company for more traditional roles, but the majority stayed and were excited by the changes.
Resistance came from middle management, specifically in engineering. Despite a lot of coaching work related to their new roles, they were not comfortable losing command-and-control functions, and impeded agility by imposing status reviews, requesting Gantt charts, reassigning people from team to team, and giving them multiteam assignments. Dario and Michael both tried to advocate for a more lean agile approach, and over time they achieved mutual respect, but were still far from true partnership.
Trent was a quick learner, and Michael started transitioning some of the training sessions and facilitation to him as they started up the first Scrum and Kanban teams. The drawback for Michael was that his work-life balance became less and less tolerable: he was coaching nine agile teams and resolving impediments, his team grew to nine Scrum Masters and Agile Coaches, and in addition, he spent numerous hours helping Trent as a coach, trainer, and mentor.
At the end of the first year Michael was with A Plus, to acknowledge the positive change in visibility of software delivery, high quality, and employee satisfaction (all continuously measured since the day the new organizational structure was announced), a Lean Agile Center of Excellence was created and Michael was promoted to a Director of Project Management and Agile Practices, reporting to Dario.
Trent asked Michael to assume formal mentorship because he wanted to repeat the same career as him in 5 years. However, this was not necessary. Shortly after Michael’s promotion, Dario announced that Trent was promoted into a similar director-level position. He said he made this decision because he wanted to appoint a peer to Michael. Michael was surprised that Dario hadn’t asked for his opinion since he had mentored Trent for over a year, but did not say anything because he was happy for Trent.
This was not the only situation when Michael felt lack of respect from Dario. He felt that Dario frequently presented ideas others came up with or the work done by other team members as his own. The team ran multiple team events at the company level to promote innovation and agile thinking (product workshops, hackathons, idea jams) and Dario marketed each of them as his own invention, without giving credit to the team. When Dario presented one of the ideas as “it came to me in my sleep,” Michael openly said that it was in fact his idea based on something he did in his past job, which he previously shared with Dario. Dario asked Michael to stay after the meeting. He said that because he was the ultimate leader of the team, all successes were automatically attributed to him, and Michael should support him in preserving this assumption, otherwise he wasn’t a good team player and wasn’t concerned about how the team was perceived by others. Michael felt ashamed after this conversation and never brought up with topic again, even when Dario continued to take credit for team successes. Michael believed in teamwork and if Dario wanted to represent himself as the whole team, Michael was in support of that.
Meanwhile Dario started ignoring Michael. He said that Michael’s meetings with the CEO and COO were no longer necessary and suggested that Michael find a new area to advance agile transformation to. Michael suggested getting non-software teams involved. A new team member, Mory, took the lead on that and started reporting to Trent, who needed to have direct reports in support of his Director status. Mory started working with the marketing team, who adopted agility with enthusiasm.
The major pain point was the middle managers who started questioning the Scrum Master role given the growing agile maturity of the organization. Michael asked Dario to support him in building trust with this group, but Dario’s conversations with them did not strengthen this relationship.
Anti-Pattern
“Big bang” (full reorg), top-down, lean agile transformation fail to address the minds and hearts of middle managers who play important role in any organization. Not building trust with this group is the first sign of failure for lean agile coaching organization.
During this year, the Lean Agile Center of Excellence became highly respected within the organization. The team was awarded a company award for Innovation and Creativity; they were known across the organization, and highly respected. All Scrum Masters except for Mory reported to Michael as a functional manager, and their agile practices were consistent and reflected an agile mindset. Michael was proud of this team, and working closely with Trent, who was becoming an Agile Coach while retaining his Scrum Master role within Dario’s organization, which was now marketed as a Lean Agile Center of Excellence.
Trent reported directly to Dario as a peer to Michael. Michael made it a priority to support Trent, who was learning new agile skills, and to be available to him for any questions and support he needed. Trent was an avid runner and so was the company’s CEO and he successfully used this opportunity to promote the work he was doing within the Lean Agile Center of Excellence.
Michael shared the successes of his team. Believing in data, he created a holiday video sharing successes of agile transformation in its first year full of numbers, such as a 40% increase in productivity, 25% increase in quality, and 20 % increase in customer satisfaction. Michael himself was astonished at the rapid success of agility at A Plus.
Three More Years
Michael spent three more years at A Plus. These were years full of victories, although they did not come easily. By the end of the second year, 100% of the software delivery organizations were agile (Scrum or Kanban), in addition to multiple lean agile teams, programs, and divisions (such as Marketing) outside of software delivery. This included a total of 15 software teams and multiple non-software teams across the organization.
For the success in working with the marketing team, Trent was nominated for an A Plus parent company award. Michael was surprised because it was all Mory’s coaching, but Trent was so genuinely happy that Michael did not question the fairness of this decision. Later, he found out that Trent was nominated by Dario for this award. Even though it seemed unfair, Michael was happy for Trent, who has grown a lot professionally in these few years. He also felt that the time he invested in Trent was paying off. He did not expect anything in return, although he noticed with sadness that Trent took his support for granted. Leaving his house at 5 a.m. to get to the office for a 7 a.m. coaching session with Trent followed by a full workday starting at 9 a.m., Michael sometimes asked himself whether Trent ever felt grateful to him for investing his time and effort in helping him grow, and then stopped himself because he was not doing it for appreciation or gratitude. He genuinely wanted to support Trent, Dario, and promote agility at A Plus. Agility at A Plus was growing and expanding to the parent company and beyond.
At this point, engineering mid-level management became very vocal in questioning whether the organization needed Scrum Masters anymore. Given the maturity of enterprise-level lean agility, they felt that this role could be played by developers. Given the financial challenges that the company experienced, they argued that Scrum Masters were an expense that the company could easily cut. Michael did not receive support from Dario, who simply suggested laying off 50% of the company’s Scrum Masters.
One day, Michael thought of a new angle of looking at the Scrum Master role: since their mission was to orchestrate delivery, he suggested rebranding Scrum Masters as delivery managers. This gave additional responsibilities to Scrum Masters while saving their jobs. The goal was to deliver software rather than promote a collaborative and transparent mindset. The days of hackathons, idea jams, and product workshops were gone.
Anti-Pattern
When I state that it is important to evangelize lean agile transformation across the enterprise, what do I mean? Which group was ignored in a top-down transformation at A Plus? What about the team members and the teams they were assigned to? Name several ways to overcome these deficiencies.
For Michael, this was a difficult time. His hope of restoring the agile mindset had a lot to do with buy-in from the CEO and COO but he had no direct access to either one of them anymore. He was trying to find ways to restore the lean agile mindset despite the tight budget. The company was moving towards digital education, so product lean agility would matter a lot to make it competitive in the market with all of the innovative apps and crowdsourced question banks it was creating.
The opportunity seemed to present itself. Dario announced to Michael and Trent that the company leadership acknowledged the need for change and influence of digital disruption, and the Lean Agile Center of Excellence team was invited to run an executive offsite for the company’s leadership. Dario announced that he expected Michael and Trent come up with ideas on how to implement lean startup techniques to product thinking. Trent was not familiar with lean startup, so Michael spent many hours finding articles for prereading, designing product envisioning exercises, and creating templates for the company’s leadership to align on next steps. In between, he was educating Trent on lean startup, reviewing books, and sharing ideas. Dario was invited to attend the event and advocated for one more team member to join because they played an integral role in designing the agenda.
The date of the offsite event held in Florida approached. Dario was busy meeting with executives and presenting the ideas, Trent was busy preparing for a marathon, and Michael did most of the groundwork related to the three-day company leadership offsite. One morning, Dario invited Michael to his office to tell that one additional team member was approved. Michael was already celebrating the opportunity in his mind when he heard that Dario decided that he wanted Trent to join him because he was a rising new star.
He said that the decision had been already made but he was open to listening if Michael objected to an opportunity for Trent to take his career to the next level. Michael was devastated by unfairness of this decision but he also felt happy for Trent. He went to see Trent, who was already aware of this news. Michael congratulated Trent, who acknowledged that he felt bad that he was selected and not Michael, who worked numerous nights to prepare for this event. He offered to tell Dario that Michael deserved the right to participate more than him. Obviously, Michael refused. Instead, he started looking for a new job. Agile coaching was a hot skill on the market. In one week, he had five interviews and got five offers. He accepted one of them and left within two weeks. Trent was promoted to his job, and Dario left a year later, leaving Trent in charge of the Lean Agile Center of Excellence.
When Michael announced his departure from A Plus, he told Dario that his decision to select Trent to join him for the executive offsite was a trigger for his decision, and Dario’s lack of support was a significant concern of his. Dario acknowledged the situation and said he understood that the decision was unfair given that Michael did the lion’s share of the prep work, but that the company’s CEO expressed his preference of Trent joining the offsite based on their shared interests in sports and a kayaking activity in the scope of this event. Michael was not sports-oriented, so Dario did not feel like objecting to this request and explaining to CEO who did the actual work. For Michael, this was just another confirmation that his manager did not support him, so he felt confident in his decision to leave.
Best Practice
Was Michael’s coaching time at A Plus a success or a failure? Did he manage to transform the organization? How was this transformation for him personally? Despite all the hard work, Michael did not succeed from a career perspective. What could have he done differently in building his relationships within the management team and with his immediate manager?
Agility at A Plus did not disappear. It was already in a steady state with the team strong enough to sustain agility across the enterprise. There could be no better acknowledgement to the work that Agile Center of Excellence had done. If Dario and Michael stayed with the company, though, the next step would have been to emphasize agile prioritization to build 20% of features to support 80% of the functionality required, establish a build-measure-learn loop for any product they were building, and implement lean startup thinking at the enterprise level. Up until now, agile product portfolio management was a challenge for A Plus.
Best Practice
Many companies face a dilemma of whether to hire Agile Coaches externally or to implement an Agile Center of Excellence within the company. The most successful implementations combine both: a strong team of external coaches and internal Center of Excellence as a heart of an enterprise-wide agile implementation.