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.  

How do you reward within an Agile Team culture?

The primary notion of rewards within an Agile culture is that the team shares the success or failure of the work they are doing.   The driving principle is that unless we all succeed, none of us succeed.  There are advantages for rewarding at the team level.  Rewarding by team promotes the Agile team culture.  Team rewards promote and encourage team members to help each other out.  Trust is built when individuals must come together to share information and collaborate. This can work well except that it leaves no room for individual focus and can leave some top performers feeling underwhelmed.  So the question is, is it so simple to say that we “only” reward as a team?

It is true that some team members will align with the Agile culture quicker than others.  Also, some team members will, in fact, contribute more than other team members.  And maybe sometimes, it is important to acknowledge exemplary work when it occurs.   However, individual rewards can lead to unhealthy competition.  Past leaders who have been constantly rewarded for being the superstar will have a hard time with a team reward approach.  Under-performers may find it easier to lay low in an Agile team and just do the minimum.  By providing more reward to some team members could lead to a feeling of jealousy and resentment.   This is problematic in not only an Agile culture but any culture.  

Ultimately, you do have to remember that you get the behavior you reward.  If you give reward at the individual level, you will get a level of competitive behavior and a willingness to place personal achievement over team accomplishment.  If you reward at the team level, you will get a level collaborative behavior that places team accomplishments over personal achievement.

Team Reward Approach

Within an Agile context, rewards should be supportive of the team culture.  The question is, what does a reasonable reward structure look like?  First it is important to acknowledge that answer isn’t straightforward.  It depends on your context and situation.  As a suggestion, consider starting by making at least 50% of the reward based on team collaboration and success.  Then over time increase the team reward part to make it a major part of the rewards, and still leave a small percentage available to acknowledge individual growth, exemplary work, and more adaptive alignment to an Agile culture. 

Not all Rewards are Created Equal

What is meant by reward?  Not all rewards are created equal and a reward for one person can mean something difference from one person than another.  To some employees, reward means money in the form of a merit increase or bonus.  For others it can mean advancement and more responsibility.  Yet for others it’s the ability to have freedom to work on what they want.  As part of self-organizing teams, you can have Team members recognize each other.   For example, during a Sprint retrospective (if this is being applied), the first part of this event can be where team members recognize each other for their help, assistance, helping the team drive forward, complete stories, and more.  

Team Reward must Live within a Team Culture

Maybe the answer is not as simple as instituting one type of reward system or other.   Maybe this can only work unless it fits within a broader context of focusing on the culture.  For Team rewards to be effective, a company’s culture must embrace the team concept.  Maybe it has to first start with understanding people’s natural tendency toward an Agile culture and team environment.  Maybe there has to be an understanding of people’s willingness to adapt and align with Agile.  If individuals and/or management are not really willing to adapt, they may not be able to handle a team-based reward system.  In order to handle the competitiveness, potential jealousy, and other harmful attributes, the best scenario is when team members understand and believe in the Agile values and principles and in particular, the principle of self-empowered teams.  Ultimately, the reward system that best suits your needs can be driven by an Agile principles but it should be adapted over time as your organization adapts to the Agile team culture.   

The Knight bringing Agile to the Day

Once upon a time, a Knight challenged the King saying that we should provide people with what they need and not what we want to provide them. Instead of asking people for all of their needs now and not deliver until a year later, we should deliver their more important needs in shorter time periods to ensure we provide them with their needs sooner and then allow them to adapt to their needs as life changes around them.

The Knight learned that the marketplace and the customers therein drove the real needs. This gets to the heart of providing business value, value that the customer perceives, value that can change in this ever-changing world.

As the Agile Manifesto (the Knight's creed) says, Agile values working software over comprehensive documentation. Working software is where the customer sees the value. The “right” amount of documentation, neither too comprehensive nor too little, can lead us to working software more quickly.

Individuals and interactions have more value than processes and tools. This does not mean that processes and tools are not important, it is just that defined processes and tools should not determine how the individuals should interact to get their work done.

Customer collaboration is valued over contract negotiations since Agile values the continuous interaction with customers to ensure we are constantly reducing the risk and increasing the certainty of delivering what the customer really needs.

And finally, responding to change over following a plan allows us to adapt to change with collaborative control that ensures the change is both welcome, understood, and continuously validated.

Agile embraces change and accepts the fact that life is uncertain. By providing methods and techniques to minimize risk and increase certainty, this ensures we close the gap between what the customer actually wants and what we end up delivering.

With that, the Knight brought Agile into the day and people into the light.