You have your daily stand ups planned, your backlog is groomed and your requirements are written down as user stories. Your agile coach has implemented a form of Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), and all your developers are delivering code in sprints. You’re sorted.
But what about the rest of your organisation? Are they on board? Do you have support from your executives? Is there a culture of trust and openness? Basically, do you have the agile mindset?
Agile mindset
A lot of organisations forget that the framework and processes come in later and are less important than the Agile Mindset.
What is this mysterious agile mindset?
- Focus on Business Value: focus less on the fixed plan that was defined months or even years ago. Instead focus on the value you want to deliver towards your customers
- Pride and ownership: be proud of what you are building and feel responsible, as a team, for what you are doing
- Embrace change: change, whether good or bad, is part of life. Nowadays, change comes often and fast, and by not resisting change but embracing it, you don’t trail behind the competition. You are part of the innovation on the market
- Collaborate and learn: create a learning environment. Knowledge is one of the key assets of any good team. By creating an environment where learning is promoted, teams are able to experiment, fail fast and keep delivering optimal business value. As Henry Ford once said: “The only thing worse than training your employees and having them leave is not training them and having them stay.”
The goal of agile is to be able to quickly deliver business value. This means changing more than just your delivery teams. You need to shorten your decision-making cycle, empower your teams and instil the agile mindset within your entire organisation.
To be truly agile, focus on these three pillars:
- Agile culture: not only your delivery teams, but the entire organisation needs to be on board and support the new way of working
- Innovative strategy: meet digital disruptors head on and understand how to evolve your core products and services before your competitors do
- Effective technology: make technology work for you. Don’t become dependent on the limitations of technology stacks, but use technology to enable your business value delivery
That’s where our transformation teams come in. Devoteam strongly believes that having a team to support you through your different transformation activities can enable you to deliver the value needed to retain, attract and satisfy customers.
Devoteam as transformakers
Our multi-disciplinary teams help you navigate through the technical struggles, your business and functional needs and help you drive change though your entire organisation. This allows us to quickly adapt to your needs, and ensure we have the right skills to meet all of them.
A typical transformation team consists of a(n):
- agilist and change champion: this person drives the change within your company, taking a framework agnostic approach and works with you to help move your organisation towards a value driven mindset
- business expert and challenger: he/she knows and understands the business you are in and helps you move from “we’ve been doing this for years” to thinking outside the box and pushing innovative ideas
- technical engineer and critical hacker: this person knows what your current application landscape looks like and will give you a view on how your architecture should look like. They also break things down to make sure we meet all QA standards and deliver quality solutions
Questions or you want to know more about our Agile approach? Continue reading our Business Agility Transformation offer. If you have questions or you want to talk more in detail, don’t hesitate to contact our expert Ash Sarin via email or phone.