9. Why Agile Transformation Is Critical to Achieving Digital Transformation
Given the pace at which digital is still evolving, in order to successfully execute a digital transformation roadmap, you’re going to need an organization that is adapted to working in an agile framework. Many companies right now are starting to execute agile transformation initiatives. While some of these efforts are focused on software development, the reality is the spirit of “agile” software development could be applied to many, if not all functions in business. The most successful businesses today take iterative steps to all of their business processes, including strategies, design, and product development, making each iterative. While many companies and executive say they are agile or want to be agile, they need to recognize this isn’t just something for their technology department to do. They need to acknowledge and implement a change in philosophy and culture. They need to understand where and how the business needs to do their part to operate in an agile way. The purpose of this chapter isn’t to replicate what is already out there or provide a step-by-step guide of how to implement agile or execute the details of the agile project. There are plenty of great books and other content on the details of agile methodologies and how to implement them. Instead the goal, here is to provide business executives with a high-level overview of the key concepts within agile methodologies to be aware of as well as understand how to operate in this new framework.
Agile Benefits Over Traditional Methodologies
Companies think they’re doing agile because they confuse “agile” with the definition of the word itself, and not with the process of agile. They think that agile means something gets done faster, or “we do less work to get to the same result.” That can happen, but the reality is agile is more about a process to quickly create, release, test, get feedback, and improve that creation as you continue moving forward.
Rather than waiting a year to see the results of your project, you see it in one- to two-month intervals as it’s created, not after it’s created. With agile you’re not waiting a year for a project to launch, then having to go back in and change or rework parts of it over the next year.
By releasing work at specific intervals, usually 2 to 6 weeks apart, you’re able to see, shape, and test your project in a series of intervals called “iterations.” You build as you go, repeating rounds of analysis or operations and making changes in each round until you are satisfied with the results. Writing this book, for instance, was an iterative process. It involved creating a proposal, along with an outline, then writing the first chapter, then another chapter, then comparing them to the original outline. As each chapter was written, the outline was tweaked so it reflected our vision better and so on.
Agile adapts management methodologies from agile software development (and agile project management) and applies them to project development teams. That’s agile in a nutshell. It’s a powerful way of managing people, teams, and projects, but it’s more than that. It truly is a movement. Because the entire agile revolution was about a set of values rather than a process, it has the potential to create teams of empowered individuals, not just achievable deadlines and great products. The official agile manifesto is:
• Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
• Working software over comprehensive documentation
• Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
• Responding to change over following a plan
• Real-time decision making and data-driven insights
Agile involves people working on the highest priorities of the business with a shared sense of purpose. When agile is done well, people and teams have fun and do great things. No wonder companies that do agile well love it.
Everyone has their personal reasons why agile is critical to a digital transformation, but the reasons we believe it drives value include the following.
Agile Gives Your Company/Team Real Feedback from Real People in Real Time
As we shared in Chapter 6, for most practical purposes, PowerPoint is dead. It’s dead because it’s one-way communication—from the expert with the clicker in his hand, to the audience. There’s no room for feedback from the audience unless the presenter is taking questions during the presentation. There’s even less feedback from real customers about what the presentation is about.
Agile, however, gets you that real-time feedback. It helps you build the right product, service, or experience based on that feedback from real customers in real time. Instead of focus group(s) imagining what they might think, feel, say, or do with your product, you get actual data about how customers actually think, act, and respond—again, all in real time.
Faster Time to Market with Greater Predictability
Speed matters, but predictability matters more. Development shops, vendors, consultants, and third-party partners will eventually “get it done,” but it’s almost impossible to find one who can get it done predictably. Agile creates a culture where people get good at making and meeting commitments and stabilizing their velocity over time. If you can’t do B and C until A is finished, it doesn’t matter how fast everything else gets done. You need to know exactly when A will be complete. Predictability matters more than speed because it’s predictability that allows your teams to coordinate and align the other parts of the project, the strategy, and the business.
Agile Produces a Better Quality
The only thing people hate more than buying junk is working for a company that makes it. Making beautifully designed products that are also innovative is one of the reasons people love working for Apple. Apple epitomizes the tenets of the agile manifesto.
Agile provides the tools and the processes that allow companies to make a better quality whatever it is they make. Agile means better cars, better software, better customer shopping experiences, and better theme parks, among other things. Because agile allows teams to make better products, teams feel better about their products and so, in turn, they’re inspired to keep improving, to keep innovating and to keep seeking excellence in their products. It turns into a win-win all the way around, from consumer to company to employees.
Agile Gives You Early ROI and Early Risk Reduction
What’s the risk and what’s the benefit to your company when you invest in some resource—whether it’s technology, people, capital, or software? A high return on investment (ROI) means the investment gains compare favorably to investment cost, which is what you want, but can rarely guarantee—unless you have an agile system. Agile gives you early ROI and early risk reduction because it doesn’t treat risk as a separate area that needs managing. Agile is risk management.
When you deliver early and get feedback at the front end of a project, you reduce the risk of building the wrong product. By focusing on architectural risk in the early sprints, you reduce the risk that you won’t have a solution that can be built in time ... at least you’ll know it early on. By continuously integrating and building defect-free software, you reduce the risk that your product wasn’t built right just before you need to bring it to market.
Agile Is Efficient
Business is often still silo driven—meaning it can be mostly inefficient in many areas. It’s even more inefficient when silo mentality sets in and people start hiding information from other silos, or competing with each other in unhealthy ways. In this case, people know that their existing business model, strategies, and silos aren’t working well together. They know they spend more time in documenting, shuffling, and passing around reports and things that don’t matter than they do just doing the work.
Agile eliminates redundancies and helps you become more efficient and productive, which means you can better able to scale, flex with daily demands and adapt, thrive, and grow. Agile also eliminates the things that clog up, slow down, or create backlogs, jams, missed deadlines, and inefficiencies. It empowers companies and their employees to get down to the business of creating new products that amaze and change the world.
Leverage Common Agile Concepts
There are actually many different agile methodologies. You may have heard terms such as adaptive software development, agile unified process, extreme programming, lean software development, kanban, Scrum. At their core, most agile methodologies have variations of the common concepts that we will generalize and define for the business executive in the following paragraphs:
Sprints or Iterations
Sprints or iterations incorporate the agile approach, dividing up work on projects into repetitive cycles called “sprints.” Iterations chunk the work into more manageable pieces. These pieces are completed and reviewed on an ongoing basis, allowing for continuous improvement as the project moves forward. These iterations occur usually in two- to three-week cycles but can be shortened or lengthened based on the decision of the teams involved or the complexity of the project. Not every sprint will yield results that are ready for the end user. However, every iteration delivers something for leadership to review that shows incremental progress toward objectives of the project. These shorter iterations allow teams to receive ongoing feedback so that any changes or rework can be done preventing any project derailments.
Product Owner
The product owner is the project’s key stakeholder. This is usually someone from marketing or product management. There can also be product owners that extend to other stakeholders or which include other leaders within the organization who funded the project and/or end users.
Scrum Team
A typical Scrum team has between 5 and 9 people, but Scrum projects can easily scale into the hundreds. However, Scrum can easily be used by one-person teams and often is. A Scrum team does not include any of the traditional software engineering roles such as programmer, designer, tester, or architect. Everyone on the project works together to complete the set of work they have collectively committed to complete within a sprint. Scrum teams develop a deep form of camaraderie and a feeling that “we’re all in this together.”
ScrumMaster or Project Manager
The ScrumMaster is responsible for making sure the team is as productive as possible. The ScrumMaster does this by helping the team use the Scrum process, by removing impediments to progress, by protecting the team from outside forces, and so on.
Product Backlog
The backlog consists of a prioritized list of features of all requirements or changes to a product initiative. Sometimes this can also include a sprint backlog that tracks the list of tasks to be completed during an iteration.
Sprint Planning Meeting
At the start of each sprint, the team involved holds an initial planning session. During this meeting, the product owner presents the top items on the product backlog to the team. The Scrum team selects the work they can complete during the coming sprint. That work is then moved from the product backlog to a sprint backlog, which is the list of tasks needed to complete the product backlog items the team has committed to complete in the sprint.
Daily Scrum or Standups
During a sprint or iteration, project teams hold daily 15- to 30-minute meetings to set the context for each day’s work. These daily sessions keep the team on track and motivated. All team members must be present.
Sprint Review Meeting
At the end of each sprint, the team meets to demonstrate the completed functionality of their digital initiative. During this meeting, they demonstrate the new features of the initiative without PowerPoint slides.
Sprint Retrospective
Also at the end of each sprint, the team gathers to conduct a sprint retrospective. This is a team review session where the ScrumMaster, product owner, and team assess how effective Scrum has been working and any changes or additions they choose to make for it to work even better.
Codeathons and Hackathons
Twitter was originally a hack. People didn’t get together to form a new business, raise capital, and pursue a business plan. It was invented at a hackathon in 2006 by a group of developers who wanted to test sending standard text messages to multiple users simultaneously. Hackathons are typically events over a day or multiple days where a group of designers and developers take an idea from concept to functioning prototype. They may work around the clock or have sleep breaks but never leave the room until the prototype is complete. It forces the team to breakdown unnecessary roadblocks to innovation.
Leverage Agile Tools
“Agile” methodologies changed the game in software development. With each successive gaming success, they started to creep upstream into product design, and later even into strategy and marketing. Now the heavy product management and project management processes and tools are also being replaced with agile. Forward-thinking teams are using a new league of lightweight tools that follow the 80/20 rule. They’re focusing only on features that are really necessary and making them very intuitive. Where possible they’re also automating the administration.
The point here isn’t to give a detailed list of every tool you should be using, or to review all the tools out there. There are hundreds of apps and platforms your organization could consider to run its digital business. In the following sections, we’ll outline the types of tools your teams should consider. Despite digital moving quickly where new tools are launched regularly, we’ll even mention some examples of today’s tools, at the risk of being outdated by the publishing date of this book.
Gantt charts are still powerhouses when it comes to project management. If you want a Gantt project plan, we’ve found the spreadsheet-like nature of Smartsheet as an easy program to learn, highly visual, and a real-time collaborative alternative to heavy enterprise systems. Consider Jira for development backlogs and combine it with Trello for more upstream business side product and project management. Many teams that used to seek out the activity feed of a platform like Basecamp have graduated to a more activity feed format like Slack.
Action Steps
• Identify champions in organization to support change.
• Create a communication plan.
• Establish an agile champion on the leadership team.
• Roll out educational programs to build support.