Agile/Digital transformation

You may have heard these terms in your workplace or if you are a newbie scrum master/product owner, you may wonder what this is all about. Having been part of 2 companies that are transforming, I‘d like to share some insight.

History

Let’s take you back 100 years from today! No internet, no seamless collaboration between creative minds across the world. The jobs back then are obsolete today. I don’t have to sell you on that. Specifically talking about computers and mainframes, only big companies could afford them since they used to cost a fortune and occupy space for an entire room. This was the perfect situation for big companies to thrive. Scientific advances were there but not as much to threaten the existence of big giants.

Fast forward to the early 2000s

With the rise of the internet, more creative minds collaborating throughout the world led to rise of startups. Every possible industry is digitizing and thereby information technology and software development is hot. Companies are getting closer to the end-consumer because consumers have choices – national and international. The world is getting smaller in that sense. With artificial intelligence, companies are trying to predict want the consumers want. The line between industries is also blurring. Who would have thought the meteoric rise of a company Uber would pose a threat to taxi industry! In terms of financial services, there are several small startups offering better investments than the big giants – ALL making it easy to manage your investments online. Earlier, the companies knew their competitor. But with the lines blurring, it is hard to even predict who your competitor is.

What are these big/medium companies trying to solve?

As you might have guessed, with the landscape described as above, companies today have a ton of problems. Unless you are a company that just sprung out in the last 5 years, as the COO and CIO of an older company, I would be worried.

First off, the organization structure of older companies has accumulated fat over the years. Previously, your career path looked somewhat like this; team member -> team lead -> manager -> senior manager ->  director -> vice president -> C level.  In other words, your career progression was managing team leads, departments and there were several levels to that. Over time, this has caused teams building the product to move further away from customers. It took months or even years to get features delivered due to inefficient processes of getting work prioritized. Adding several levels within the organization has not added much value. In order to be more nimble, companies have to empower their people. They want to have all the relevant people on the team for faster delivery and proximity to customers.

There are several companies that still follow the waterfall process, where problems are not exposed until the end. The “2019 state of agile” survey still denotes that there is still a significant population of companies that haven’t adopted agile. To play devil’s advocate, it requires the C Level folks to understand the problem to be able to take the risk and also astute planning to transform an organization that was using waterfall to agile. It is a big shift and cannot be done overnight.

Enter agile delivery – Companies that started following agile are in for something else. Be careful what you ask for. J Whether you follow scrum or Kanban, any form of agile exposes the flaws of the system. C-level execs can now see when teams are working on projects that they requested and when they finished. As a result, it exposes the fat in the system. One of the things that management wants to measure is the time taken from the ideation phase to customer delivery. Typically, a significant portion of the time taken is due to the time taken to even get into the team’s backlog. That is why the C level execs are looking for ways to prune that process. In one of the companies I worked, they had all these senior managers in middle management reapply for the new roles because as part of the transformation they are cutting down roles that are redundant.

Managing career progression of employees is also a very big HR and C level problem. Junior folks are concerned about what their next goal should be. They don’t want to work towards something that will be cut off. Middle management folks are frustrated because in the past, they were rewarded for being managers and not being in the trenches. For many of them it would have been years before they were part of an actual delivery and all of a sudden they lost marketable skills! It is a huge change of mindset too for these folks. It is either change or get let go. So, the C level guys have to retrain these folks for new roles.

Finding a scaling solution for the company

To compete with startups in your industry, you have to solve the additional problem of scale. By now, most of you must have heard about the “Spotify model” for agile or even he SAFE model. Many execs treat it like a silver bullet to all their problems. For sure, agile has made teams faster. However, for big/medium companies that have over 5000 employees, you have don’t have a “model” that you can apply as-is for scaling. Communications from top management to the teams needs to be improved. You have to solve the real demons facing you. For example, the “Spotify model” doesn’t really solve the problem of how an idea can get into a team’s backlog for execution. It has to be something that the top management has to figure out. If you are a regulated company, there are several processes and documentation that has to get done. If you want to do weekly or even daily releases like Amazon, Google then you have to solve these problems too. No model can tell you that. Food for thought is depending on your industry, is releasing daily required? J Is this what your customers want truly? You have to inventory the problems that are truly slowing you down and solution those with your employees. There is only so much you get for free!

Hope that this gives you some insight into agile/digital transformation that you might be hearing about.

Disclaimer – Thoughts and opinions are personal and based on the author’s experience only