Agility Isn't Optional Anymore

Firstly, you should never simply pursue Agile for its own sake. Agile transformations need to be built around defined business goals or outcomes. Do you want to improve time-to-market, enhance product quality, or foster innovation? By articulating specific objectives, organizations can align their transformation efforts and measure progress effectively.

Be sure to consider the desired people outcomes as Agile ways of working require a mindset and culture shift. By having a clear problem statement, you can align the transformation efforts and measure progress effectively.

The role of clear leadership support cannot be emphasized enough. Agile Transformation is as much about culture as it is about processes. Leadership buy-in is crucial for driving cultural change, allocating financial resources, being open to experimentation, and removing organizational barriers. Ensure that leaders and managers understand the benefits of Agile and their role in championing the transformation effort.

Understanding the current state of the organization is essential for crafting an effective transformation strategy. This involves assessing existing processes, culture, and organizational structure. 

Our Ascension approach includes sending Marketing Agility assessments to marketers and their stakeholders to get a pulse and baseline across seven different areas. Combined with insights from interviews with marketing members and stakeholders to gain deeper understanding into what’s working well and what's not, it gives leaders a detailed view of why change is needed, and where to focus the transformation efforts.

As Agile transformation is a holistic approach to change, it’s critical that you understand which processes may need to change to support Agile ways of working. Value stream mapping is a great tool to identify bottlenecks, delays, and waste that slow down the flow of work. Any of these impediments could be the root cause of why your teams are struggling to perform and get work done. 

When developing your strategy, identify redundant processes, and take an inventory of the work that flows through the department to identify non-value-added work, and communication breakdowns or barriers that slow down your organization.

Developing a compelling vision for the future state of the organization can help inspire and drive the transformation forward. This vision should articulate how Agile principles will drive value, improve efficiency, and enhance customer satisfaction.

During the transformation, you’ll also need metrics to measure success and make adjustments. Be sure you create metrics you can track that tie back to that overarching vision. That means defining the key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics to track the progress and impact of the Agile Transformation. Whether it’s increased delivery speed, improved customer satisfaction, or higher employee engagement, find metrics that align with your organizational goals.

Agile transformations, like anything Agile, shouldn’t begin with a massive detailed plan filled with documentation and slide decks. That said, creating a roadmap for your Agile transformation can help you stay on track. What’s the difference then? A roadmap should be far less detailed and evolve as your transformation takes shape and new information becomes available.

Assemble a guiding coalition, or Business Agility Transformation Office (BATO) to steer the transformation. This group functions as the core drivers of the transformation, working with any external consultants or coaches and ensuring hard-won advice and lessons filter down to individual teams. This group also functions as centers of knowledge and cheerleaders, supporting everyone in the organization through the challenges transformations bring. During an Ascension, this group executes on the transformation backlog developed based on insights gained from the design phase.

Build Your Agile Transformation Plan

It’s clear to all of us in marketing that the rapid pace of change is only accelerating. Success requires the ability to adapt and evolve based on new information. Fortunately, one of the biggest advantages of being an Agile organization is the ability to manage change effectively. But how do Agile organizations manage change, particularly during an Agile transformation?

After all, too much change too fast can cause tremendous disruption and lead to high levels of burnout. But changing too slowly is equally fatal. Striking that balance requires a structured approach that ensures change happens at a regular cadence.

At AgileSherpas, we break this process down into four steps: Plan, Do, Check, Act (PDCA). This is a repeating cycle, where you determine what needs to change, implement a potential solution, check the metrics to see how it performed, and act based on that information. That last step is crucial, because organizations often implement changes to address problems and then just move on. So even when the problem remains, it gets put back on the backburner until someone decides to tackle it yet again.

But by ensuring you check in to see how your improvements are actually affecting the initial problem you addressed, you can ensure adjustments get made promptly. This points to a crucial difference between traditional and Agile change management: in Agile the process is continuous. Instead of only being triggered by a crisis, teams are regularly pausing to look at their processes and figure out what could be improved. 

The result of all this is that embracing change becomes fundamental to the mindset and practices of Agile organizations. Instead of change being something that occasionally comes down from senior management to make everyone’s work harder for a while, it’s something that happens all the time and produces real measurable benefits. 

Managers and team members also have input over the entire process, flagging things that can be improved, suggesting improvements, and discussing how they feel about the results. So not only do you end up with better performing teams, the people on those teams feel engaged and supported. We've built Ascension this way based on working with clients across multiple industries and seeing the benefits of adapting the transformation approach based on data.

Learn More about Agile Ascension

Famously, the original Agile manifesto emphasized the value of flat organizational structures. This has led to a long-running belief that Agile simply won’t work in a traditional (hierarchical) organization. That said, if you want to implement an Agile transformation without making any changes to your organizational and team structures, you’re probably not going to be successful. So what are your options?

First, you need to understand why the Agile approach to team structure is so important. Traditional team structures create silos, with the digital marketing team having to work with the design team having to work with the content team, etc. Coordinating and collaborating between these teams is time consuming and inefficient.

Agile teams instead aim to be cross-functional, which means they have all the people needed to complete that work from start to finish. The resulting internal handoffs are faster and everyone shares the same context, resulting in more efficient work. When that isn’t possible, Service Level Agreements (SLAs) can ensure expectations and processes between teams are mutually agreed upon and understood. This and other Agile practices creates stable and effective teams ready to adapt, evolve, and improve within your Agile organization.

Now that you understand Agile team structures, how does all this apply to Agile organizational structures?

While flatter organizational structures are preferable, they’re not the only way to be Agile. Using Agile planning practices can help create strong links between the strategic vision developed by senior leaders and the practical on-the-ground knowledge held by teams. You have clear causal lines connecting individual tasks all the way up to those strategic objectives.

While you ideally want the fewest possible layers of management between team members and senior leaders, Agile organizations can and do have managers. The difference is in what those managers do. Instead of command and control style management, they evolve as Servant Leaders focused on the development and support of individuals and teams. In addition, they should serve as that crucial link between teams and senior leaders, ensuring information about on-the-ground realities and strategic objectives flows freely in both directions.

In Ascension, we have a keen focus on developing managers as they play a critical role. They’re closest to the teams and information, often shape the culture, and are very effective in shifting mindsets and supporting individuals in understanding Agile.

Unlock Better Team Structures

Once you’ve had a successful Agile pilot or have implemented Agile in one or more teams, you’ll probably want to expand it throughout the marketing function. However, even when you’ve found early success, the scaling process brings its own set of opportunities and challenges.

The first thing to bear in mind is that the foundation of successful scaled agility is an Agile mindset. Sure, it’s easier to get everyone to just start having daily standups and working off a Kanban board, but without the mindset in place you’re not likely to see real benefits in the long-run.

But why? The reason is that no two Agile teams are identical. You’re always going to need to make adjustments as you go. An Agile mindset helps ensure those adjustments enhance your agility instead of taking away from it. Developing that mindset often requires beginning with training and coaching to build a solid foundation.

Once you’ve got the foundational elements like training, coaching for support, and an Agile pilot in place that delivers value, you can begin scaling the Agile practices themselves. Just be sure you scale at a pace that isn't so slow that you lose momentum, and not so fast that you cause disruption. Use your experience with Agile pilots to optimize your processes and serve as an example to everyone else in the organization that Agile can and does work.

At this point, you can begin drafting a scaling plan. This shouldn’t be a hyper-detailed breakdown of every step (we’re scaling in an Agile way) but instead should be more like a roadmap that plots where you want to go. The goal is to gradually ramp up your Agile adoption over time. This both enables you to address issues that arise on a smaller scale and ensure your Agile support resources like BATOs or coaches aren’t overstretched. Armed with your roadmap, you’re ready to start scaling. Just remember, it’s going to be a learning process and you’ll need to adjust as you go.

Learn How to Scale Agile Marketing