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Agile Transformations
The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

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Scott Ambler
• Helps enterprise-class organizations around the
world to improve their processes and organization
structures
• Thought leader of:
– Agile Modeling (AM) method
– Agile Data (AD) method
• Co-creator of the Disciplined Agile (DA) framework
• Author of 20+ books
• scott [at] scottambler.com
• Advisory Board, ScaleFree
• Advisory Board, SEMAT
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@scottwambler

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Agenda
• The Ugly: Challenges with Agile Transformation
• The Bad: Questionable Strategies
• The Good: Strategies for a Disciplined Journey
• Parting Thoughts

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The Ugly: Challenges
with Agile
Transformations

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Change Efforts have a
Lousy Track Record
• Average success rate of change
initiatives 34%
– Standish Group, 2011
• Reasons
– Lack of a structured change
management process
– Irrational human behavior
– Treating change as linear
process initiatives
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Culture is Hard to Change
• Typical goals of agile transformations
– Build high performance motivated teams
– Optimize enterprise groups for agility (such as
finance, architecture, UX, QA)
– Centers of Excellence/Communities of Practice
– Incorporate agile governance
– Alignment with HR/People Operations
• These goals require culture change
• Cannot force people to change
• Change must be negotiated continuously
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The Bad:
Questionable
Strategies

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Agile software teams are building awesome race car
engines…
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…but they are surrounded by organizational
tractors
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Questionable Strategy: Focus Solely on Software Development
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Questionable
Strategy: Let
each area/group
determine how
they can
transform –
“Divide and
conquer”

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Questionable
Strategy: Hope your
problem will solve
itself

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Questionable
Strategy: Wait until
there’s a obvious
crisis before you
begin your change
journey

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Questionable
Strategy: Assume
that senior leadership
knows best
Don’t be silly, the staff will do what we tell
them.

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Questionable
Strategy: Believing
that you can
transform quickly

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Questionable Strategy: Assume everyone wants to go
on your improvement journey

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Questionable
Strategy: Adopting
an agile framework
because everyone
else is doing it

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Questionable Strategy: Assume that transformations
are straightforward

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The Good:
Strategies for a
Disciplined
Journey

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Delivery teams
interact with the
rest of the
organization, and
they need to
become agile
too!
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Enterprise
Architecture
Security
Finance Operations
People
Management
Procurement
IT
Governance
Data
Management
And many
more…

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Enterprise
Coaching
Team
Coaching

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Agile
Transformation
Effort Over
Time
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Agile Champions/
Sponsors
• Agile champions external to the team
can help support and promote change
• Help to accelerate agile
“transformation” in the organization
• Without executive sponsors in it for
the long term it is very unlikely your
adoption will succeed
• You need an internal Product Owner
for your transformation
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Continuous
Improvement
Process
Blade
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Establish CoEs and CoPs/Guilds
• Centres of Excellence
– Typically staffed full time by
“experts”
– Temporary
– Ensure consistency of
approach and messaging
– Provide leadership and
purposely disseminate
information
– Enterprise & Team Coaches
• Communities of Practice/Guilds
– Part-time responsibility staffed
by practitioners (could be
guided by CoE)
– Long-term
– Shared learnings and
experiences
– Improve their collective craft
over time
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A Disciplined Agile Centre of Excellence
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Invest in Coaching
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Disciplined Coaches Focus on Mindset and Skillset
Values
Principles
Lifecycles
Process Goals/Blades
Decision Points
Practices/Strategies
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Mindset
Skillset

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Leanchange.org
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Executive
Workshops
- Education
- Vision
- Guiding
Principles

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Several “Big
Visible Charts”
will help
communicate
our vision &
progress
against it

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Minimal Viable Changes (MVC)
• A Minimal Viable Change is a change that you believe is small enough to be
successful that balances disruption and organizational value
• Experiments
• Steps to incorporate the change:
1. Agree on the reason for the change
2. Negotiate the change
3. Validate the option (introduce the improvement)
4. Learn & verify improvement
• How to identify MVCs?

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Tool: Insights, Options, & Approved Backlog of
options
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Insights MVC Options Approved/Next
As a process decision
framework, DA provides a rich
set of options to choose from
Example:
- Insight: QA requires more details to test from
- Options for MVC:
- More detail in use cases
- Supplement stories with screen mock-ups
- More detail in acceptance criteria
- QA participates in all conversations
Having selected an option
for an experiment, it is
moved to the approved/
next backlog

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Pulling MVCs from the Backlog
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Work
grouped
by Vision
goals

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Work in
Progress
board

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Part of “Introducing” the change is negotiating with the
change recipients.
Eg) Why should we redesign, collocate teams, and keep them together?
Questions Guiding Principle
How long will this team be together? Teams improve over time, striking/disbanding teams is expensive,
learnings lost
Do we have 100% dedicated Developers and
QA?
Anything less that 100% is an excuse for non-commitment, hurts
team morale, very costly due to task switching, reduced
accountability
Who are the team members’ managers? Team makeup is often suboptimal if tied to functional hierarchy
What is the team size? Ideal team size is 5-9 people
Is a PO/BA dedicated? Busy? A PO/BA should be dedicated
Is team collocated? Productivity and collaboration increases dramatically with
collocation
Is this a feature or component team? Most organizations have a mix
Is this a “whole team”? Reduced dependencies on resources external to team is beneficial

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Metrics
Design with
GQM
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Goals trace
back to Vision

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A Strategy
Board helps tie
high level
objectives from
the Vision
canvas to
smaller
enablers
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From Transformation to
Continuous Improvement 44
• This is a journey, not a destination
• Once the key transformative work has been complete, the
transformation changes more to a continuous improvement
approach
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MVC example:
Redesign &
collocate teams
DA106: Disciplined Agile for Managers
www.disciplinedagileconsortium.org/
da106
Functional Manager
- Equities Teams
Team Member
Team Member
Team Member
Team Member
Team Lead
Architecture
Owner
Leopard Team
Team Member
Team Member
Team Member
Jaguar Team
Team Lead
Architecture
Owner
Functional Manager
- Fixed Income
Teams
Team Member
Team Member
Team Member
Team Member
Team Lead
Architecture
Owner
Maserati Team
Team Member
Team Member
Team Member
Porsche Team
Team Lead
Architecture
Owner

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Another example
Get plans out of MS
Project & make
them visible.
(no hidden work!)
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Another example:
Replacing detailed project charters &
requirements docs with 3-day Inception phases
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Another example: Workspace design
No need for meeting rooms!!
Fosters continuous collaboration
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Some Advice
• Communicate, communicate, communicate
(town halls, radiators, wikis, lean coffees) –
radical transparency!
• Have a Product Owner for your Transformation
• Executive sponsorship is critical
• Coach and mentor people over the long term
– Everyone and at all levels of the
organization, not just IT
• Get some help from experienced Enterprise
Coaches
• Hire coaches who can help you to “be agile”
AND to “do agile”
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scott [at] scottambler.com
Twitter: @scottwambler
DisciplinedAgileConsortium.org
DisciplinedAgileDelivery.com
Thank You!
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Would You Like This Presented
to Your Organization?
Contact us at ScottAmbler.com
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Scott Ambler + Associates is the thought leader behind the Disciplined
Agile Delivery (DAD) framework and its application. We are a boutique
IT management consulting firm that advises organizations to be more
effective applying disciplined agile and lean processes within the
context of your business.
Our website is ScottAmbler.com
We can help
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