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Scaling up Agile involves all your people
Why Agile?
Your company probably wants to keep up with the latest challenges and aspires to be innovative. Digital markets make it hard for traditional companies to hold the pace of their flexible competitors.
That is why you want to master the transition to agile. Agile methods promise a highly productive, low-risk and speedy way of reaching your targets with high-quality results.
That sounds like an instrinsically good approach to build your project work, right?
But can it be implemented?
Centred on the individual
Working agile means delegating work, responsibility and decisional power to the individual teams. Going agile is always a bottom-up approach. It can not be “dictated from above” and proceeds slowly.
The integration of suitable tools drives the development of an agile mindset within your teams and makes your people internalize essential values and principles. Only with the right mindset your people will be able to successfully apply agile methods to work on ambitious projects.
These methods allow your teams to structure, execute and analyze iterative processes which leads to a continual improvement of their project outcome with every new loop.
You might now rightly wonder whether this will work for an entire organization.
Is it possible to synergize a large quantity of such individual teams?
You are asking for scaling up agile. The answer is: yes, you can.
Agile means ongoing change
Studies comprising hundreds of companies have shown that “companies can scale up agile effectively and that doing so creates substantial benefits” (HBR 2018).
But how can this be achieved?
Scaling up agile turns out to be a challenging process for your whole company. While some functions can be perfectly managed with an agile approach, others just are not suitable. To ensure harmony and productivity within your organization, traditional and agile methods must be brought in line. Change is inevitable.
What makes agile teams special is their nearly independent nature. Given the direction where to innovate, they will find their individual way to meet their targets. As reality underlies continuous shift, target adjustments are an important part of the daily business. Therefore, the process of scaling up agile likewise represents a path of continuous adaptions.
To provide a proper framework for change in any such organizational environment, you need an approach that involves all your people. To keep on track, you must monitor your processes with sound numbers.
Agile Pitfalls & ChangeMaker® Solutions
Agile without proper KPIs comes to nothing
Some teams do not pay enough attention choosing the right KPI to measure progress.
Monitoring processes with sound KPIs is necessary to work on targets effectively.
Without a clear picture, you will lose track over the project and fail putting your work into concrete results.
KPIs as constant companions
Automated KPIs appear as a natural constituent of the ChangeMaker user interface. They edit and aggregate the relevant data you should keep an eye on. Therefore, you will never miss out on anything again.
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The wrong corporate culture inhibits agile methods
Implementing various methods for continuous improvement will not be enough. Initiating cultural change within the firm is essential to align the mindset of the people to the participative agile philosophy. Without the right mindset, agile approaches will come across misunderstanding and resistance.
ChangeMaker as an enabler
ChangeMaker promotes transparency and agile activities through its clear and intuitive user interface. In enables you to set a timeframe with fixed deadlines while granting enough space for your teams to work on creative solutions. Therefore, ChangeMaker paves the way for an agile transition.
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Physical separation may impede cooperative work
Cooperation over distance is a general challenge when it comes to project work.
Being able to work together on the same artifact is important to combine all the creative ideas for the best solution. Without a common data origin and the function to cooperate in real time, location-independent teamwork will be tiring and nonproductive.
ChangeMaker as a central contact
As a web-based tool, ChangeMaker allows you to work together on the same documents in real-time while always being up to date about the current status of your projects. ChangeMaker is a central hub for all informations (milestones. documents, etc.) where all relevant data can be accessed from anywhere at any time. Therefore, homeoffice and teamwork over distance are not an issue.
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Sources:
[1] https://hbr.org/2018/05/agile-at-scale
[2] https://www.manymize.com/agile-methoden#:~:text=Agile%20Werkzeuge%20werden%20meistens%20innerhalb,an%20Innovationen%20und%20die%20Unternehmensorganisation.