Adaptation and organisational change
In the last Agile Practitioners Forum there was a debate about why there is a need for organisational change when using agile methods. At least 2 people were arguing that there isn't a need to bring about change outside the project. The majority, however, were saying that there comes a time when the wider organisation becomes a constraint and inhibits a project team's ability to improve further and achieve higher levels of quality and throughput.A bugbear of mine, and I've been harping on about it again and again and again, is how many organisations restrict adaptation to how they practice agile methods. Some practices are used and not others, principles are ignored or compromised, values are not understood and little is done to establish an ecosystem in which project success can be achieved. They refuse to entertain the idea that the organisation needs to adapt too. As George Dinwiddie says: Organisations want the benefits of Agile, but they don't want to give up the cubes and solo development work. They don't trust the team to self-organise and create valuable software, so they stick with organisational frameworks that prevent the very things they fear won't happen.
One of Brian Marick's themes about agility is that it's about acting to change the context more than it is about adapting to suit the context. Inevitably there needs to be some local adaptation because agility is in constant interplay with its environment. But organisations need to empower the people doing the work to ask themselves "what should I change about my environment that would enable me to work better?" and then take the necessary actions to bring about that change. When an organisation is trying to achieve agility, restricting change to just the project imposes a glass ceiling on a team's ability to get better. This is effectively capping human potential and that can't be good for the organisation going forward.
Tags: adaptation, organisational change
posted by Simon Baker @ permalink
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2 Comments:
Organization has to change, CUSTOMERS have to feel the need to change!
My 2 euro-cents.
PierG
http://pierg.wordpress.com
That's a very important point. When we introduce agile the first things that become very clear are all the organisational constraints. All the ways the organisation is broken. At this point many organisations retreat and revert to producing lose ends rather than complete, running tested features. This way they can hide the dysfunctions.
This is a time for celebration, however.
Only when we go through this phase will we start really collecting the benefits of the transformation.
The transformation does not stop in the team - you eventually have to transform the whole organisation. Once you really buy into the culture of constant improvement there is no turning back.
I believe this is for the better and my experience is that it is the most challenging part of the transformation process.
BTW - I'm hosting a session on the topic of how to introduce agile practises at the Agile 2007 conference next month.
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