8.1: How to Bring This Information Back to Your Company - Video Tutorials & Practice Problems

<v ->Welcome to lesson eight.</v> The first topic we will review today is the direction that hopefully you'll already have by now, which is how to bring this information back to your company. This course is highly pragmatic. As you have engaged on the journey to understand agility and to learn the foundations of agile software delivery and beyond, you expanded your delivery horizons no matter which role you hold or the position that you will have in the future. Whether you're at software developer, business executives, scrum master, or product owner, the foundations of agile product and project management course applies to the value delivery at any level of the organization and in any role that you may have. So what are the best ways of now bringing this information to your company? We have mentioned John Kotter's organizational change model previously. So let's look at it closer. It applies to any organizational change, including agile transformation that you do at company or team level. While your organizations are different and maybe at different stages of the agile transformations, some are at the very beginning and some are very advanced, the same universal steps apply. So let's review them starting with step one. First, you need to create urgency. Transformation for the sake of transformation is meaningless. You have to identify the areas where you want your company to improve. What are the bottlenecks in your organization? What are people frustrated about? What are customers unhappy about? Maybe teams produce software, but are not doing well in terms of managing dependencies. Maybe your organization builds products that are not really appreciated by the customers, or maybe just not bringing the business success that you are looking for. Maybe the cycle time for delivering in your organization from start until the product is delivered is too long. Maybe you have a problem attracting and retaining personnel. Whatever it is, make sure that you identify the most challenging, the most problematic areas, internal and external. Once you do, build OKRs, objectives and key results around them. If your goal is to shorten the delivery cycle, measure the baseline and then agree on the improvement that you'd like to make. If it takes one month to deliver a new feature now, what would you like to aim for in the future? Maybe two weeks, maybe three. If attrition is 5% per quarter, would you aim to reduce it to 2% quarterly within one year? Do not select too many improvement opportunities. Pick the most impactful ones and achieve alignment within your team or division or the company, depending on your role. Step two is to build a guiding coalition. How wide is your alignment and who is willing to join you in achieving this goal? Are your peers supportive? What about your manager? What about other leaders? Ensure that others share the same passion for improvement and agree with you that this is a significant problem for all of you to solve. Step three is to create a vision. Now that you and the group of others agree this is some significant problem to solve, create a vision of how you are planning to solve it. Are you going to transition your team to scrum in order to achieve commitment and predictability, or would you like to train your division in Kanban to reduce cycle time, which is a time when you got a task or a request, a problem to solve, until you deliver the solution? Are you planning to establish a product management organization to ensure that the products that you build delight the customers? Whatever it is, your vision has to be compelling, metrics driven, and very pragmatic. If it is not achievable, you won't be able to lead others and get their support. I worked for educational company that was struggling and it created a goal to become the best education provider in the world. It was a very compelling goal but it did not motivate people. Actually it discouraged people and people were laughing about it because it was not realistic. The company was too far from achieving it. So make sure that your goal is realistic and yet inspirational to others. Make sure that you get feedback and continue refining your vision continuously until it is ready to be shared. Step four is communicating this vision. In short, use multiple channels. Use town halls, company blogs, internal websites, any means that are available. Ideally use multiple means of communication to ensure that it reaches people very broadly. Listen to their feedback and further refine your concept. Sometimes organization has a prior attempt of agile transformation and they feel it was not successful. And now they don't want to try again. They say we did it before, it didn't work for us. In this case, do not focus on the word agile since it's clear people already have negative connotations with this concept. Focus on values and outcomes you'd like to achieve, nimble organization, flexible delivery model, value based outcomes, delighting your customers. Now step five is to empower others. Agile is all about teams, collaboration, and alignment. While it may be your idea, you won't be able to move forward if it remains your own idea. If teams are not empowered to plan their own delivery, if product owners are not empowered to prioritize their features, if the customers do not have direct feedback loop, then agile transformation will not be successful. Ensure that organizational culture supports agile transformation. Once this is all achieved, the organization is ready for step six, create quick wins. This step depends on what is the problem you're trying to solve. If it is a business problem, this could be revenue growth or expansion of your user base. Put numbers around it and start measuring it. If this is customer satisfaction, then the net promoter score for your product or just customer satisfaction score would be a great measure. If your goal is employee retention, then employee satisfaction and the retention numbers would be able to prove the success. If you are aiming to improve product delivery, then demos of your product to customers, internal and external, are the means and customer satisfaction is the measure. So tell these success stories as stories through the eyes of their participants with empathy to the experience. Such stories are contagious in a very positive, productive way. They attract attention and others want to repeat this success. Now step seven is to build on this change. Now you have success stories. Now expand those throughout the whole organization. Build communities. In my experience, I have built successful agile champions committees and practices in really large companies, thousands of people. Those champions promote your ideas. They multiply everything that you do and create further successes at scale. Without this community such as agile champions, you won't be able to expand, deepen, and sustain the change. Rely on agile practitioners, agents of change, bring them together for experience sharing, conferences, support them by sharing their success broadly, helping them with their career growth and recognize this impact. And finally, it is important to make sure that this change sticks. So many agile transformations driven by external agile consultants have vanished when consultants left. There is a story, what happens when agile coaches leave? Nothing if you do not sustain the change. You want to build sustainable change, the change that will become part of the status quo, the way your company works. And the one that will bring positive outcomes to the organization and to you personally when you are within the organization, and even if you leave it. And if you leave the change will become part of the organization's DNA and your departure won't influence how strong agility is there. So does it mean that when agility is sustainable you are getting yourself out of your job? Of course not. When this happens, celebrate success, identify the next biggest challenge and start the cycle all over again. There are always enough challenges to solve.