I have written extensively about this in my blog – check the
Agile Transformation tag to see all related posts.
Today, I want to focus on one of the biggest obstacles to Agile transformation: organizational buy-in. Get it right, and people will be excited and motivated to shift to new ways of working. Without it, your transformation efforts are likely doomed.
Let’s face it: people generally don’t like change, especially when it affects them directly. Even if we understand that the upcoming change is beneficial, the power of habit is strong, and getting out of our comfort zones isn’t easy. Your motivation and determination need to be strong, and the incentives must be extremely appealing to change the old routine and adopt new ways of working.
Another problem is that not many people are familiar with Agile. For many, it is no more than a buzzword. Throughout my career, I’ve encountered numerous people with an "Agile allergy" who say, “I’ve tried it once; it was horrible. We spent all our time in meetings.” The deeper you dig, the more you realize something was fundamentally wrong with how Agile frameworks were implemented. But once convinced that Agile is bad, it’s tough to change their minds.
In this blog post, I would like to suggest a simple and elegant way to gain your company's buy-in, help them understand what Agile truly is, and simultaneously get them motivated and excited about the upcoming change. This approach revolves around the concept of an Agile workshop, specifically designed to address these challenges and turn skeptics into advocates.
This is a workshop that I have designed and implemented numerous times with my clients. It is called Agile WoW (short for Agile Ways of Working but also the effect it always produces) and it serves three main purposes:
- Hands-On Agile Experience: Help participants get hands-on experience with Agile ways of working and compare it with the waterfall approach, reflecting on the pros and cons.
- Customer Engagement: Understand what it means to engage the customer in the product development process and how important it is to keep receiving detailed feedback as frequently as possible.
- Principles of Servant Leadership and Growth Mindset: Understand the underlying principles of servant leadership and growth mindset.
Quite a lot of valuable learnings, right? And you can get all of it within only a couple of hours!
The workshop is divided into two sections (behind the scenes we call them Waterfall and Agile, but for the participants, it is "Part 1" and "Part 2" as we don't want to prime them, especially if they are skeptical about Agile). Each part takes roughly one hour, and with interventions and breaks, you should plan for at least 2.5 to 3 hours. The workshop can be done for any number of teams (each team is 5-7 people), but you need to ensure each team has its own table (or floor space) and you need to prepare in advance materials for each team: role cards, a big set of Lego, and some craft supplies (pipe cleaners, stickers, colored paper, etc. – each team gets a different set of materials).