Locate the Company’s Position on a Transformation Roadmap
A company that takes the path to agility never makes the shift all at once or “big bang” style. Agility, and to an even greater extent agility at scale, introduces major changes to the way that teams operate.
In a general sense, a company must follow their own path or agile transformation roadmap, which includes the following key stages:
The Waterfall Model: The Default Historical Framework
Unlike the adaptive agile approach, the waterfall model is a predictive approach that stabilizes the final application’s requirements from the start of the project and relies on exhaustive and precise planning. It continues to be the standard approach in many industries where an agile approach doesn't make sense.
Stage 1: Initial experiments with agility
A few agile teams highlight the main obstacles to agility in your company, which allows certain projects to be prioritized to make the company more agile.
Stage 2: Embedding agility
Agility becomes embedded in your company's culture and methodology, and can also be put forward as a viable alternative to the traditional waterfall model. This does not necessarily mean that the waterfall model is dead and buried, as it continues to be appropriate in many scenarios.
At this stage of the roadmap, you should have made progress on a number of axes:
You have a fixed budget approach.
You know how to define the MVP (minimum viable product).
The functional scope is more flexible than in the waterfall model.
Your teams can rely on lean and sustainable documentation.
Stage 3: Experimenting with agility at scale
Once agility is embedded in your company, agility at scale can be attempted in order to address complex systems that need much larger mechanisms than individual agile teams. Just like the agile experiments, agility at scale will bring new hurdles to the forefront and new projects will be prioritized.
Stage 4: Anchoring agility at scale
Agility at scale supplements your team’s agility by providing structure to delivering complex solutions.
Shifting to agility at scale requires changes in the way your company operates. These structural changes are even more radical than the move to agility. Try out agility at scale on an initial project scope to begin with.
In general, I would advise you to take a gradual approach to enable your company to learn as it goes and adopt agility at its own pace.
Use a Capability Grid
In order to check that your company is ready to make the shift to agility at scale, I suggest you use the tool below.
This tool allows you to perform an analysis based on six criteria.
Great! How does it work?
The more your company scores above 2 on the different axes, i.e., above the green dotted line, the higher its chances of successfully shifting to agility at scale!
In addition, as you saw in the agile transformation roadmap, I advise you to pay special attention to the "Team agility” criterion when performing this analysis.
Complete the assessment grid for your company and take note of the six criteria in the table below:
Topics | Assessment criteria |
Team agility Team’s agile practice experience level | 0 - No agile experience. 1 - The company is discovering agility. Some experiments are in progress. 2 - The obstacles to team agility have been identified but not removed. 3 - The main obstacles have been removed. Agility is seen as a solid methodology for the company. 4 - The teams are agile and release to production at the end of each iteration. |
High-level sponsorship Identifying strategic support in the agility at scale process | 0 - No sponsors have been identified to support agility in the company. 1 - A motivated sponsor has been identified, but does not have control over the obstacles identified in the agile experiments. 2 - A sponsor has been identified, but not at the right level for agility at scale. 3 - A sponsor has been identified at the right level, able to drive structural change in the organization. 4 - The sponsor is an agent of change who sets an example. |
Business area onboarding Identifying strategic support in business areas as part of the agility at scale process | 0 - Your agile teams struggle to find Product Owners. 1 - Your Product Owners are mostly people from IT. 2 - Product Owners are for the most part people from the business areas, but no one is steering an overall strategic vision. 3 - The strategic vision for the business area is well known and shared by all. 4 - The business area has been completely onboarded to the process.Business owners often meet with the agile teams to share and assess the business goals. |
HR involvement Support and training for teams in the agility at scale process | 0 - The agile teams have never had training or support. 1 - The agile teams have been trained and supported in agility, but agile roles are not recognized in the company. 2 - Agile roles have been created in the company, but the teams are not familiar with agility at scale. 3 - The teams will be trained in agility at scale. 4 - HR plans to support the new roles in agility at scale. |
Software quality Overall assessment of application development based on specific indicators (reliability, performance, maintainability, etc.) | 0 - The company does not invest much in its internal developers (high staff turnover, outsourcing). 1 - The developers are minimally aware of testing and code quality.There are frequent anomalies. 2 - The agile teams are aware of unit tests, but they are not automated. 3 - The unit tests cover a significant proportion of the code and are automated. 4 - The agile teams apply Test Driven Development and Behavior Driven Development to better design, test, and maintain code. Code quality is measured frequently, and code is continuously improved. |
Continuous delivery Automation chains allowing developers to easily deliver value during production | 0 - The agile teams make requests to related departments in order to deploy them in environments. 1 - Teams are autonomous, but the environments and tools provided are often unavailable or unsuitable. 2 - The teams are autonomous, but many tasks for integration, packaging or deployment are done manually. 3 - As many tasks as possible have been automated, allowing the teams to focus all of their attention on producing value. 4 - The teams are agile and release to production at the end of each iteration and activate/deactivate the new functionalities on request from the business areas. |
Over to You!
Equipped with this grid to help you, you have interviewed a representative panel of all stakeholders from the SoEasyHotel company:
Senior management
Business area representatives
Product Owners
Scrum Masters;
Developers
Departments dedicated to integration and launching production
HR department manager
The results are as follows:
What would your analysis of the agile capabilities of SoEasyHotel be?
Can the company switch to agility at scale?
What recommendations could you give SoEasyHotel?
Answer Sheet
You can consult the answer sheet to check your answers to these questions.
Let's Recap!
Companies that embark on the path to agility follow a four-stage transformation from initial agile experiments through to embedding agility at scale.
Each stage on this roadmap is necessary to ensure the transition to agility at scale.
You can use an agile capability grid to assess if a company is ready to transition to agility at scale.
Now that the prerequisites are in place, your company is ready to scale up! Where to begin? We'll cover that in the next chapter.
