Agile Adoption Roadmap blog - over 500,000 views!

The “Agile Adoption Roadmap” Blog has just topped 500,000 visits on December 31, 2020*.  This is a great milestone and it makes me happy that there are so many professionals curious about Agile including many Agile enthusiasts, advocates, champions, coaches who are visiting and even commenting on my articles.  It highlights that the many articles have value.  If you want to receive its value, consider following this blog at: http://cmforagile.blogspot.com/.  

To add to the statistics, I have folks from 55 different countries that have visited my site.  The top 10 countries include: United States, United Kingdom, India, Russia, Germany, Canada, France, Australia, Ukraine, and Sweden. Other countries that have significantly visited my site are: China, Poland, Spain, Finland, South Africa, Iran, Norway, Iraq, Romania, Brazil, Argentina, Belarus, Israel, Malaysia, Portugal, Netherlands, Switzerland, Colombia, Mexico, Nigeria, Taiwan, Algeria, Tunisia, United Arab Emirates, and Italy.

The Agile Adoption Roadmap blog provides the reader with a range of topics related to adopting Agile within their teams and organizations.  The content has a special emphasis on “being Agile” and bringing the Agile mindset to your work.   I have written and posted 100 articles to date.   What are some of the top articles that Agile, IT, and Business Professionals have found of value?  The top articles include:

• The Forgotten Agile Roles - The Customer
• Story Telling with Story Mapping
• What really is an Agile MVP? 
• Who makes the best Scrum Master
• Agile Animal Farm – Pigs, Chickens, and more
• Agile Value Capture Metrics – Are you building value?
• Right-sizing Documentation in an Agile World
• Agile Definition of Done Starter Kit
• Agile – Its more disciplined than you think
• Gamification of your Agile Journey
• Agile Culture – Are you stepping up?
• The Role of Middle Management in an Agile World
• Are you Ready for your Agile Journey?
• Agile Executive Playbook
• Robust Agile Requirements – Its about the Discussion
• Is it finally time to “Be Agile”?
• Personas – Do you really know your Users?
• User Story Writing Starter Kit
• Agile Lagging to Leading Metric Path

Next time you are looking for Agile material to support you Agile Journey or you are looking to learn what it means to “be Agile”, look no further.  Consider reading the articles and following the blog.   Thank you!

* I reached 200,000 hits on June 23, 2016 and I reached 100,000 on October 26, 2014 so this is good progress.  

Building the Agile Culture you want

When some organizations think of going Agile, they tend to gravitate toward applying a set of Agile practices.  While this provides insight into the mechanical elements of agile, these types of implementations tend to overlook the cultural elements.  A move to Agile implies that you make the cultural transformation to embrace the Agile values and principles and put them into action. 

Adapting an organization's culture is effectively an effort in change management.  And changing a culture is hard. People underestimate the difficulties of a culture change within their organization because it involves the cooperation of everyone. This is why some organizations avoid this.  But the business benefits can be tremendous. 

I have seen Agile efforts get started with poorly stated objectives and motivations, a lack of employee ownership or engagement, and a lack of thinking through the effort. Also, Agile journeys significantly benefit from education in both change management and agile techniques to achieve a meaningful cultural change. I have seen companies assign a member of senior management as the change agent, yet they have neither education nor experience in change management. A better approach may be to hire an Agile Coach with change management and Agile experience.

Creating or adapting a culture is not done by accident. It must be considered a change initiative and thought through. As part of readiness of deploying Agile, start the process of adapting to an Agile mindset and the culture you are looking for. What are some activities that will help you move to an agile culture?  Some include:

• Recognizing that moving to Agile is a cultural change (it’s a journey)
• Sharing and embracing the Agile values and principles (seriously folks!)
• Moving to an end-to-end view of delivering value (don’t stop at just the build portion)
• Adapting your governance to focus on value (enough with the cost, schedule, and scope!)
• Evaluating employee willingness (employees are your brainpower!)
• Gaining continuous feedback from customers (adapt toward customer value)
• Adapting the reward system to align with the new culture (toward team and value)
• Assessing executive support (build engagement along the way)

What other activities would benefit you in getting to an Agile culture?  Ultimately you want to start living the values and principles that help you develop the culture you are looking for.  As you have approached Agile in the past, how much of it was focused on the mechanics and how much was focused on adapting to an Agile culture? 

PS - to read more about really making the shift toward an Agile culture, consider reading the Agile book entitled Being Agile.