- With any large organizational change,
it's difficult to see where to start.
Some organizations want to start from the bottom up.
They want to train their employees
and just get started with Scrum, XP or Kanban.
Other organizations want to start from the top down.
They want their executives and managers
to understand the change
and create new budgets for agile teams.
Both of these approaches have their own advantages
and disadvantages.
Starting from the bottom up
will get you going pretty quickly,
but you might run into trouble with executive support.
On the other hand, starting from the top down
could get you a lot of executive support,
but the teams might not know much about the agile mindset.
You might be surprised to hear
that a lot of agile transformations fail
before they even get started.
That's because a lot of organizations have a culture
which has a hard time embracing big changes.
An organizational culture is an unseen
and unspoken way of working.
You might hear employees say something like,
that's not the way we do things here.
These rules might not be written down.
They're just understood as being part of the organization.
One of the most common types of organizational culture
is the control culture.
This is a culture that's based on a hierarchy
of different supervisors, directors, and executives.
Everyone in these organizations
knows exactly who they work for
and knows who works for them.
If you fit neatly into an organizational chart,
then you're usually part of a control culture.
A control culture wants predictability.
That's because each manager is responsible
for the people that work for them.
If there's a lot of uncertainty,
then it gets difficult to make predictions.
That's why a lot of control cultures
have a very strong project management office.
The PMO likes to divide work into predictable projects.
Each one will have its own scope, budget, and schedule.
This common type of organization
will have a really hard time
embracing some of the radical changes
that are part of an agile mindset.
So the first thing you want to do is figure out
if your organization has a strong control culture.
If it does, then recognize that most of your organization
will push back against many of the core parts
of an agile mindset.
If this happens, usually your best approach
is to create an entirely separate team
within your organization.
One company that I work with actually put their agile team
in entirely different building and then isolated them
on their own two floors.
That gave them full ownership of their product.
Then the executives checked out if this team delivered
better than the rest of the organization.
When a company decides to make an organizational change,
it could take 5 or 10 years to make this transformation.
This is a huge commitment,
so it's better to understand the big changes
before you get started.