Hey! What's up everyone? Welcome back to
my channel. Joshua Partogi here.
Delivering another content for you from
Brisbane, Australia. So today I would like
to answer the question that I often get
from people: "how do you start agile in
the company?". In fact, several people also
have left comments on this channel with
this question. Manny who is based in
Sydney, also asked me this exact question
during my last livestream. On that live
stream I promised him that one day that
I'm going to make a video to answer his
question. Now if starting the journey
towards agility at your company is one
of your goals for 2023, stick around,
because I will be back right after this
one.
[Music]
In this video whenever I say agile, it is
referring to the lowercase 'a' agile or
"the whole company's capability in
delivering value to the customers
continuously and being competitive in
the market". To avoid confusion between
the lowercase 'a' agile and the uppercase
'A' Agile I'm just going to say "agility"
throughout today's video. Now let's get
back to today's topic: "how to start the
journey towards agility in your company".
The fact is, there is no single right way
to start the journey towards agility.
Because every company is different, every
company is operating in different
industries and has different business
models, every company has different
legacies or history, every company has
different leaders with different
leadership styles, every company has
different people with different
backgrounds, different preferences,
different motivations, different
expectations, different life values and
principles and the list can go on and on.
At the end of the day, every starting
point and every journey towards agility
is different because every company
consists of different human beings. There
is no single absolute starting point
towards agility. What works at other
companies may not necessarily work at
your company. You need to inspect and
adapt what works for your company's
contexts. In today's video folks, I will
give you four quadrants as a guideline
for you to lead your company towards
agility. With these quadrants I do hope
you can identify a starting point and
the path towards scaling agility that is
fit for purpose with your company's
contexts. Alright folks before we see the
whole four quadrants, let's start with
the horizontal spectrum first. In this
spectrum, you either start the journey
from the principles first or the
practices first. In some companies, people
prefer to start with the principles
first or as I often say start with the
"Why". Not many people like starting the
journey with the principles first,
because some people may see principles
as too abstract and not practical. But
from my personal experience, companies
with many deep thinkers prefer to start
the journey with the "Why" first before the
how. And another spectrum you can start
with the practices first. Practices,
unlike principles are concrete and more
practical. Practices is about the "how" and
sometimes it is also about the "what".
Within some companies, the people in
there prefer to start the journey
towards agility with concrete practices
first. Now let's talk about the vertical
spectrum. In the vertical spectrum, it
tells you at what level you want to
start the journey towards agility in
your company. In the top spectrum, you
start at the senior leadership level
first while at the bottom spectrum you
start at the smallest entity in the
company first. In most cases, that
smallest entity would be a team or it
could be a department like marketing
department or I.T department or it could
be the people operations department.
Alright folks, after seeing both
spectrums, let's see the whole four
quadrants. So in quadrant 1, you start
the journey towards agility in the
company by emphasizing the principles to
people at the senior leadership
positions first. In some companies, it is
much more powerful to talk about the
principles to the senior leaders first.
Those principles may be about the theory
of constraint, lean principles, Scrum
values and principles, Complex Theory,
psychological safety principles, servant
leadership principles,
etc. In some companies, emphasizing
principles to the senior leadership
level first might not even make a dent.
So in quadrant 2, we start agility in the
company by emphasizing concrete
practices to the senior leaders first.
These concrete practices may be,
Evidence-based Management, Beyond
budgeting, value stream mapping, sociocracy,
etc. In many cases, you will see some of
the senior leaders at your company
prefer principles first while some
others may prefer concrete practices
first. So sometimes, you need to sway
around between the principles and the
practices to these senior leaders,
depending on who you are talking to. So
only you know the characteristics of the
senior leaders at your company. Now in
quadrant 3, you start agility by
emphasizing the principles at the team
level first. Besides Scrum values and
principles, other principles may be the
DevOps three ways, 12 agile principles,
extreme programming values, design
thinking,
etc. Some teams prefer to start with the
"why" first because they do not want to be
constrained by certain practices and
they prefer to come up with their own
practices as they evolve as a team. In
many teams though, when you start with
the principles first, they may see it as
too abstract, too confusing, too fuzzy and
too ambiguous. In that situation they may
demand you to tell them the concrete
practices first. So in quadrant 4, you
start agility by emphasizing concrete
practices at the team level first. Most
of the teams I have worked with wanted
me to tell them the concrete practices
towards agility before the principles.
Scrum might be a suitable starting point
towards agility for your team. Or if your
team is a software development team who
are highly technical you might want to
start with extreme programming practices
or DevOps practices first. Or you may
start with kanban by visualizing the work,
limiting the work in progress and
optimizing the flow of value using flow
metrics, and then show them how you can
be more agile after identifying the
bottleneck in the whole system. Or in
some cases you may incorporate Lean UX
practices so designers and engineers can
work together without handing off work
over each other. From these quadrants I
do hope you can create a strategy to
start the journey towards agility at
your company. I cannot tell you which
quadrant you should start first and
which quadrant you should go next
because I don't know your company, in
some cases you may start in the middle
influencing both the senior leaders and
the team. At the same time in some cases
starting in the middle may create a mess
or a confusion or it might reduce your
focus because you need to be all over
the place. In some cases, you might not
make much progress when you are
spreading yourself too thin. If you have
quite a high position in the company or
people from senior leadership position
have trust in you, you may start
influencing the senior leadership level
first. You may want to start a senior
leadership level first because people at
the staff level are quite skeptical that
things will change unless the senior
leaders are changed first. You may also
want to start influencing the senior
leadership level first because you are
working in a global multinational
company and you know that grassroots
movement may take ages in companies at
this scale. Once you have influenced the
senior leaders, the message can trickle
down to the bottom and throughout the
company. You may need to work together
with the Human Resources or the People
Operations Department to spread the
message throughout the company. In some
cases, influencing the senior leaders is
tougher especially when you have not
gained their trust or because they want
you to show the evidence first before
scaling out agility throughout the whole
company. If you are not in a leadership
position, in some cases it is better to
start at the team level first or in one
department first because trust has not
been gained from the senior leaders and
it is much easier to influence our
colleagues who might be at the same
level as us. When you start at the team
level first, basically you want to create
an alliance to influence the senior
leaders so that you can give evidence or
prove to the senior leaders why the
whole company, including the senior
leaders needs agility. So again folks
every company is different, hence the
starting point towards agility for every
company is also different, but I do hope
these quadrants and some insights that I
have shared with you in today's video
can give you a starting point to start
the journey towards agility at your
company. Thank you for watching today's
video until the end everybody. If you
found today's video valuable, don't
forget to click that like button down
below and also don't forget to subscribe
to this channel if you are interested to
see more contents like this one in the
future. And lastly, I would like to thank
you for all of your support to this
channel throughout 2022. Happy holidays
everyone, hopefully you will have a
wonderful journey towards agility next
year.
I'm fading to black now.