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.