This is a PPT from CTE Solutions' Smarter Everyday Project

1. 4 Steps to Agile Success
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2. Experiencing massive amounts
of change? You are not alone. You are also likely
seeing that some organizations are thriving, not in spite of
the pace of these changes, but because of them. In fact some
companies are the reasons for the changes that are occurring
– they are disrupting the status quo. Yet, there are other
firms that appear as if they are lost in the wilderness and
unable to cope or to understand what is happening or what it
is they can do about it. Why is that?
If you were to look under the covers or to talk to many of the
successful organizations you’ll find that they have embraced
Agile thinking and practices. When change is so pervasive, so
all encompassing as to what they do, how they do it, and how
they organize to do it, these organizations and their people
have learned 4 critical steps.
Why are organizations looking at adapting
Agile practices beyond their software groups?
They have come to realize that in order to become more responsive to the volatile
business environment that they operate in; they must find ways of delivering value to
their customers more quickly and reliably. And this is happening in startups like Ottawa
firm Shopify, established firms like GE and even large government organizations like the
FBI, CIA, and the whole of the UK government who recently made it a policy that all new
projects must use Agile practices.
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3. What does Agile Accomplish? Improved process – it enables
streamlining processes and the shortening of delivery cycles so that the right products are
delivered sooner.
Improves organizational capabilities – because of the emphasis on continuous
improvement by the people who are doing the work, an unintended but highly valuable
outcome is that they are creating a more capable workforce that is composed of people
who are more engaged and invested in the work that they do. The people thereby gain
greater autonomy in what they do.
The 4 Steps
1
Engage Early and Often
When you embrace Agile ways of working you engage stakeholders – early and often.
Rather than gathering requirements and then disappearing into a black box,
stakeholders are involved throughout the delivery cycle making value decisions on
what gets delivered and in what sequence. Because stakeholders are involved at each
step, the team is assured that they are building the right things.
The stakeholder is also able to re-prioritize and to make changes in what is being
delivered right up until the final iteration – change is not seen as something that has to
be managed, but rather as something that has to be embraced.
It really is a different mindset.
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4. 2
Develop a Collaborative
Whole Team Approach
Agile organizations develop collaborative whole-team approaches to planning and
delivering work that increase team effectiveness and resiliency and improve overall
risk management.
The most commonly cited risk in traditional projects and the most cited reason for
project failures is the lack of stakeholder engagement.
Another is how long you have to wait to see a working product or to see value being
delivered to the business.
By getting the business to prioritize desired capabilities, it means the less valuable
ones will not get built. This avoids the 60-65% of rarely or never used product features
that many studies cite as the major reason for cost and schedule overruns as well as
the reason that many projects fail. If you only build the 30-40% of what you actually
need you avoid these and other areas of project risk.
Perhaps Agile’s greatest risk avoidance capability is its focus on transparency and trust.
Teams and individuals are expected and encouraged to identify and address
impediments that can get in the way of delivery goals and objectives – on a daily basis.
Risk avoidance, like planning, is a daily activity in Agile work environments.
It isn’t in a binder on a shelf that no one ever looks at.
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5. 3
Simplicity
The best part is that Agile isn’t based on the use of specific tools and
techniques – it’s a mindset based on creating an environment where team
members and stakeholders work closely together and share information
continuously in order to shorten the feedback loop between having an
idea and delivering the work to make it real.
Simplicity and hence the active avoidance of unnecessary complexity are
fundamental to Agile.
So you will find that for many Agile teams, the best set of tools you can
give them are a white board and some yellow sticky notes!
4
Highly Capable Workforce
A byproduct of Agile’s focus is the development of a highly capable workforce.
This highly capable workforce also becomes a highly adaptive workforce that
thrives on change and the performance consistently improves over time.
Their autonomy is enabled through their ability to self-organize and focus their
efforts on the right things at the right time and in the right ways – all without
managers telling them to do so!
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6. What can you do now?
The first thing you can do to is to
enable your people to self-organize around the work they do. Take a careful look
at your work environments and think about what could change to make it more
adaptive to the needs of the people who have to do the work.
Remember not everything requires big expensive tools – in many cases, Agile
teams go decidedly low tech – by choice.
Some organizations have come to value the serendipity that occurs when their
people interact more – this does not happen when everyone is in high-wall cubes
or offices.
They also allow their people to re-organize their work spaces as needed based on
what they are working on and with whom. Teams form, disband, and reform on
their own.
Start running experiments - try something, inspect how it is working, and then
make adaptations based on what you have observed.
This applies equally to your product and your processes. Having processes should
not turn people into automatons. Processes are meant to guide – not direct our
actions. Being able to adjust to the realities of circumstances in situations is critical
to being able to embrace change.
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