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I do not believe there is a recipe for Agile enterprise transition plans because good ones must take the context and setting of the organization into account.
I do believe that starting step-by-step is the only way to get the snow ball of incremental improvement rolling down hill. Our model, Flow-Pull-Innovate, is based on a strategy of creating a self-funding sustainable approach to adopting Agile; where some of the savings/profits from each step are reinvested in the next improvement step. (See my post An Alternative to Agile Adoption Cookbooks – Flow, Pull, Innovate for details on this approach.)
In addition to a step-by-step transition plan, you need a vision, shared commitment and social contract to be successful. Although, The Flow-Pull-Innovate model does provide sign-posts for your roadmap, the actual stories necessary to transition vary. When we work with groups or organizations to build a plan that will take them from one step to another, we use a transition planning model that I helped define in the mid-1990′s. This planning model is based on organizational change work from Peter Senge’s Dance of Change and Michael Hammer’s Reengineering the Corporation.
In this step-by-step plan, we use these high-level variables for planning change; “Strategy, Process, Organization and Technology.” In these transition steps, a typical story starts with the implementation of new technical and organizational infrastructure to support new methods, tools and techniques that lead to new way of working. Download An Example Transition Plan (PDF).
An Example Transition Plan based on the Flow-Pull-Innovate model for Enterprise Agile Adoption
Again, please note this plan is very high-level and a fairly generic application of the Flow-Pull-Innovate approach. (See Jean’s post on What’s So Great about Flow? for more details on the first step.) I have seen many variations on these detailed plans over that last 6 years. Use this as a simple starting point for you and your group to think about your own situation. If you work with Rally coaches to help you plan your organization’s transition, you benefit from their years of experience and ability to start with a clean white version of this model.
Transitioning to Agile at the enterprise level can be a very simple step-by-step process as long as you and your group thinks about it in this way. If you do a good job of defining “Done” for your steps, you will then be able to inspect your progress and adjust your plans based on empirical feedback. In this way your adoption approach is just like the Agile process your adopting for software development; an empirical process that you steer with regularly schedule inspection and adjustment.
If, on the other hand, you think about the adoption as a “Big-Bang” that will be done on a certain date, I believe your “plan-driven” thinking will cause you to miss the real opportunity. You will typically end up with only incremental improvement and not have the momentum to enable your teams to keep up the good work. And, you will fail to get on the continuous improvement curve that will lead towards Agile/Lean expertise. Given that most organizations are operating in a “plan-driven” world, this is not a surprising reaction to Agile adoption. Agile success comes as you gain success incrementally by taking one step after another, while keeping process, technology and organization change areas aligned.
In CMMI, Level 5 teams get to a place where they “become continuous improvement teams.“ In enterprise Agile adoptions, we start folks at continuous improvement and watch them benefit from creating employees and teams that both solve their own problems and continue to re-focus on value delivery through each step.
About the Author: Ryan Martens is a fly-fisherman, founding board member of Entrepreneurs Foundation of Colorado, and Founder and CTO at Rally Software Development. Subscribe today to get free updates by email or RSS.
