Migrating to Agile is more than changing your process. It also requires a change in culture. For most companies changing culture is the most difficult part. Improve performance, innovation and motivation to work with the agile methods. These methods can energize and streamline the operation of a business or its services.
Detect a need for Agility in your Business or Service
To detect a need for agility in your business, large or small, or within one of its services, you can rely on signs:
- The customers are no longer a product or service that makes the dream and go somewhere else,
- There is a decline in creativity or the rate of production of new products or services,
- Gradually replacing the genuine commitment of employees (especially the talent and Generation Y)
- The overall performance decrease,
- A challenger has emerged, and threatens the business with new approaches.
This list is not exhaustive, but it points reactivity needs, motivational enhancement, innovation, agility which can provide concrete answers.
Adopt an Agile Management Style
For the company, the entry into this new cycle involves new learning… but also a lot of unlearning! The managerial goal is to break gradually and peacefully with the best process to move towards an agile leadership. For this, we must abandon the operating mode, which is the management of the old cycle – where managers were supposed to hold the knowledge and apply to passively.
Conversely, agile leadership frees the capacity of individuals. It is based on a realization: the face of growing complexity, the company fits with the most complex and the most powerful tools available to it: brains.
Recovery and the involvement of all brains, all employees and stakeholders, is therefore a key issue. But they also involve a lot of unlearning to move towards a model based on the delegation, and especially on intrinsic motivation. Performance and human development, therefore go together: we must succeed in involving.
Be Inspired by the Success of Agile Methods
For IT professionals, the notion of agility is quite familiar. The agile manifesto, published in 2001, was clearly intended for the management of IT projects. Its main objectives were to improve software quality and accelerate the management of IT projects.
Agility is characterized by an eco-system that goes beyond purely aspects of “method”. This is a culture built around four values that inspire and 12 principles that guide employees. All this has been ‘burned’ in a manifesto of agility in 2001 (www.agilemanifesto.org). Today, several sets of agile practices, also called “Agile” support the values and principles of agility.
Build on your Successes and Expand the Positivity
There are various ways to integrate agile methods in its organization. One of them is to build on the strengths and the company’s success (rather than trigger audits and other failures analysis practices past…). This approach is called based strength (force directed or solution). Firmly focused on the present and the near future, it has the advantage of being lighter and much more motivating.
In summary, we will identify together what works and build on it and align the energy to go to an attractive future.
However, an overly optimistic position that would deny the difficulties, is not defensible. The thrust of agility, is to learn walking and therefore frequently correct its trajectory and their learning.
Control Your Change
Agile culture can make its way into the business in different ways. It is good to educate people through lectures or to “meet-ups” as he organizes more and more often. But the best is often small workshops in order to “taste” and therefore to measure the appetite for culture.
In case of a favorable decision, to maintain control of change, every company must be able to define its agile ambition, company path, steps and resources to be allocated, and that in a short-term goal of empowerment.