[Talk] Agile Transformations Explained – Mike Cottmeyer Live @ Agile DC
Leading a large-scale agile transformation isn’t about adopting a new set of attitudes, processes, and behaviors at the team level… it’s about helping your company deliver faster to market, and developing the ability to respond to a rapidly-changing competitive landscape. First and foremost, it’s about achieving business agility. Business agility comes from people having clarity of purpose, a willingness to be held accountable, and the ability to achieve measurable outcomes. Unfortunately, almost everything in modern organizations gets in the way of teams acting with any sort of autonomy. In most companies, achieving business agility requires significant organizational change.
Agile transformation necessitates a fundamental rethinking of how your company organizes for delivery, how it delivers value to its customers, and how it plans and measures outcomes. Agile transformation is about building enabling structures, aligning the flow of work, and measuring for outcomes based progress. It’s about breaking dependencies. The reality is that this kind of change can only be led from the top. This talk will explore how executives can define an idealized end-state for the transformation, build a fiscally responsible iterative and incremental plan to realize that end-state, as well as techniques for tracking progress and managing change.
Comments (4)
Elaine Mikesell
Hello,
Is it possible to receive the slides for “Agile Transformations Explained”. the It is hard to see the slides in Youtube video. Thanks
They are embedded below the video above. They are also available here. https://www.slideshare.net/LeadingAgile/agile-transformation-explanined
Colin Sweetman
Excellent Mike. Sensible, pragmatic and understandable for execs new to all of this. Great job.
Melissa San Nicolas
Dear Mike, thanks for posting this talk and slides. As a newcomer to learning about Agile Project Management and a graduate student thinking about how this could apply to what I do at work from an individual contributor perspective, it’s easy to jump to – we need to learn agile techniques and apply them and the rest will follow. It’s clearly not that simple and naïve. One must stay grounded and learn the depth of transformation, why it’s needed, what problems needs to be solved in relation to business driver and then managing change and measuring progress (my next steps for my own personal knowledge will be to look for the next video you mentioned in your talk on managing change and measuring progress). The culture, practices, and systems matter to say the least. Learning how to develop backlogs with customer feedback, dedicated work teams to increase chances of stabilizing velocity, and having a working tested or validated product that meets acceptance criteria, has no known defect, and no technical debt is important. Could you help me understand technical debt piece a bit more?
Thank you for the four quadrants and clarifying what type of business could exist in each; this is very helpful in visualizing where the organization I work for sits and strives for. It makes sense executive buy in is critical to success because the change involved can be significant. This talk really helped tie the idea of agile to a real world way of transforming and providing a framework to help refine agile goals more clearly no matter what industry you’re in.