One of the most challenging things I have had to do, is to implement Agile into an Enterprise landscape. With all truly global and large scale companies comes inertia – and to be quite frank, its a complete pain. Inertia is the laziness to start or the laziness to stop. Imagine your weekly shop at a supermarket / hypermarket – you put all the shopping into one trolley. The shopping trolley at the end is full and it much harder to start moving. It’s much like the problem faced when implementing Agile into large companies. You have to put a LOT of energy into something to get it moving due to the weight of heritage process and ways of thinking making it very heavy.
I have found though, that inertia can eventually be used for good. I have done it, I will explain…
Imagine a large programme of work that needs to be completed in short timelines, with high visibility and a need to show value quickly. I’m guessing this sounds familiar to anyone who has had to run a programme or project before…
At the start, implementing Agile (Agile is in my mind the method that will harvest results soonest) is VERY hard. It is (metaphorically) like trying to push a truck – not just a shopping trolley. At first, the energy needed to move the Agile concepts, the Agile way of working, the type of person Agile needs, the resulting Agile MI into the main stream is near impossible. It takes hours, days, weeks to get the ideas into the broader understanding of the people involved. Getting people to understand that things like Gantts aren’t going to appear, that the scope is not defined in a way that is clear, that the staff profile is not set in stone – all of this is completely contrary to what most people know and / or want to see.
BUT, and this is a big BUT, when you have managed to educate and explain, to get the core principles of what Agile is about, you slowly start to make an inch by inch movement. Setting out that you accept that you don’t know everything – recognising that you cant possibly plan what’s coming because its not been done before – clearly explaining that we will change scope based on what people recognise to bring the highest value – this all starts, slowly, to make sense to those involved. Delivery is important, VERY important – using Agile, if you aren’t able to show progress via a usable product, then you run a huge risk trust being lost. But if you do start to show delivery, start to show high value in short timescales, then things start to move from inch by inch, into inches, and then into feet…
Before long (in my case it was about five months) you start to see real progress made in delivery and acceptance of Agile.
Here is where the exciting values of inertia comes in, here is where you use its properties to your advantage. It’s not long before your record of delivery starts to become know – that the way of working starts to be seen by not just the direct consumers of the product being produced, but by people in the broader enterprise organisation. They recognise that Agile provides value, results and does it quickly.
This now starts to turn from a laziness to start and then becomes a laziness to stop – dare I say, a movement?! An Agile movement… Before long, people are asking to have presentations done to their team on Agile – and specifically wanting to know how they can use it part of their delivery. Within months of starting an Agile programme you can quickly find that you are the way of working that everyone wants to be part of.
It takes HUGE effort to land Agile in an enterprise landscape – if you want me to explain some of the vehicles to do this, then let me know; but once its landed, you will quickly find it becomes very hard to stop.