Page - 223 - in The Future of Software Quality Assurance

The Why, How and What ofAgile Transformations 223 4 AgileTransformations Because of the growing dynamism in the market and the need for far-reaching agility,manyorganisationsarerigorouslytransformingthemselvesintoagileorgani- sations.Theyareintroducingagile, top-downandorganisation-wide,asthestandard workingmethod.Such transformationsare usually introducedona largescale with very largebudgetsandagreatdeal ofmanagementattention.Besidesa newwayof working, also being introduced are reorganisations,new career paths, social plans, retraining programmes, etc. These are complex projects that take many months or evenyears tocomplete.Theyarealso extremelyradical and risky. Most large organisations have a great deal of experience with radical change. It is carried out in a planned and controlled manner using best-practices, project plans, experienced programme managers, complicated presentations, Gantt charts, and much more. With an agile transformation, such a systematic approach doesn’t work.This is because there is so much dynamismanduncertainty that a traditional plan very quickly becomes obsolete and needs to be adjusted very frequently and rigorously. In practice,with agile transformationsucha plan is onlyuseful in order to involveall the partiesbeforehandand to give them the feeling that their interests are being looked after. But you’re quite sure that the transformation will not go accordingtoplan. What does work is: carrying out the agile transformation in small steps. This way,bothcontrolledandagilechangesaremade.Thismeans thatanoutlineplan is drawnup, which is divided into small steps, with only the short term beingworked out indetail.Eachstepproducesconcreteintermediateresults,onthebasisofwhich the plan can be adjustedagainand again.Thismeans that adjustmentsare made on thebasisofconcrete resultsandexperiences. However, this requires a great deal of knowledge and experience with agile on the part of those who lead the transformation. Line and programme managers generally have insufficient resources and are therefore unsuited to carrying out the transformation themselves. VersionOne’s annual study (The 11th State of Agile Report, 2017) into the global application of agile in 2017 revealed the top 3 bottleneckswhen it comes toagile transformation: 1. Thecurrentculture (63%) 2. A lackofexperiencewith agile (47%) 3. Thecurrentmanagement(45%) Points 1 and 2 are also the responsibility of the management and this research shows that the management ismainly thebiggestbottleneckwhen it comes toagile transformation. Large-scale, top-down agile transformations require an approach that is itself agile. This makes it possible to achieve results quickly and to adjust them on the basisofconcreteresultsandchangingneeds.Aplancanbeusedtodothis,provided that it is set up iteratively. Such a step-by-step plan describes a rhythm on the way to thegoal,with interimadjustmentsbasedonwhatdoesanddoesnotwork.