Creating an Agile Culture

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When it comes to building a successful agile culture, the focus should always be on people… on every stakeholder in an organization, not just the project team.

Photo by Lala Azizli on Unsplash

Focusing on people, and specifically on the actual mindset changes needed for an agile transformation, is fundamental to success. Spreading the agile mindset across organizations creates network effects that can deliver shared benefits, enhance project visibility and improve the chance of overall project success.

However, “being agile” and “doing agile” are two different things, so let’s get that out of the way. Being agile is not necessarily about using the best agile tools or techniques — rather it is a mindset. If an organization is not achieving the desired quality, speed to market and increased team member engagement dimensions through an agile transformation, it has been implemented in theory alone — and the mindset has not kicked in.

The traditional, deterministic project life cycle approach does not necessarily work for software implementations, knowledge worker projects and projects with nimble requirements anymore. This is because predictive life cycle phases are often organized sequentially in a waterfall structure and it typically takes about 18 months to 2 years before the customer gets to see the benefit.

The reality is that the world has changed. A lot of new technologies and capabilities become available in that 18-months to 2-year time frame, and most importantly, the customer wants a better and intuitive graphical user interface (GUI), better design and better reporting functionality, to name a few. Agile approaches capitalize on this need. Quite simply put, a version of Pareto’s law comes into play here when prioritizing customer requirements — 80% of the customer’s needs comes from 20% of the requirements, which is known as minimum viable product (MVP). Agile teams usually address these requirements in the first few iterations.

Value-driven delivery and a reduced cost of change through continuous improvements are two important benefits of adapting agile approaches, among others. A project manager must internalize these concepts in their mind before spreading this mindset to a wide variety of audiences:

  • Value-Driven Delivery: If something does not add value, take it off the product backlog and do not invest more time in it. In the world of agile, we are constantly refining the value chain while discovering and exploring requirements ranging from envisioning to the initiation and release planning cycles. This value-driven delivery approach ensures that companies assess, prioritize and use Lean approaches to deliver incrementally. This minimizes waste and rework, delivers tangible results and helps organizations adapt and improve by failing fast, that is, finding out at an early stage of the project what works and what does not. The beauty of this is that customers get to “kick the tires” before delivery teams move to subsequent iterations.
  • Reduced Cost of Change through Continuous Improvement: By releasing frequent product increments and leveraging multiple feedback cycles, companies can demonstrate the increments to the customer and other stakeholders to obtain immediate feedback and quick wins. Each delivery cycle is a vertical slice of a classic PMBOK® Guide Process Group (Initiating, Planning, Executing, Monitoring and Controlling, and Closing). That means the team religiously carries out these processes for each delivery cycle, adding much-needed rigor. The multiple delivery cycles that make up a product release help in flattening out the cost of change. The multiple feedback loops and agile ceremonies are “icing on the cake” to help the team address problems on a near real time basis throughout the process with root-cause analysis and value stream mapping.
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