Your IT team has adopted Agile. IT staff are reveling in their newfound sense of ownership, responsibility and purpose. Potentially shippable deliverables are demonstrated at the end of every sprint. Quality and waste elimination are pursued relentlessly. The rest of your business marvels at what’s happening in IT wishing that they too could become more agile and nimble. Now what ?
Agile is a different way of working. It leverages the power of cross-functional teams working collaboratively in co-located spaces. It may have started with IT but why limit the benefits of Agile to just IT?
These goals are common to all C-suite leaders. You need to think beyond IT to get your entire business agile and nimble. If you don’t, IT’s efforts no matter how courageous will hit a wall and be sadly sub-optimal.
You need to take your Agile transformation to the next level. How do you do that?
No matter how good IT gets in using Agile, their efforts will be wasted if the change to Agile starts and ends with IT. Agile is no longer an IT thing. Agile is now a Business thing. No matter how fast and efficient IT becomes, the overall business will fail if the rest of the business doesn’t change alongside IT.
Change is a team effort focused on a common goal and shared skin in the game. If the case for change or your “why” doesn’t conjure visceral urgency for all in the business then you’ve got the wrong case for change. If your change is led by only a few zealots or change champions then the rest will create drag. The speed and effectiveness of your change will grind to a halt.
For your business to unlock the full value and potential of Agile, the entire business from end-to-end needs to change. Everyone needs to be engaged from the beginning. You won’t succeed unless everyone succeeds.
Sub-optimization is evil – focus on global optimization.
Start with the end-to-end big picture.
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