Advice on Agile transformation

This post will help to organization who has decided to adopt Agile but don't know where to start.The first thing that the organization leadership team need to brainstorm is what problems, issues they are facing now due to which they need change and adopt Agile.

Identifying issues/problems with the current delivery framework would help defining a goal that they want to achieve with the new Agile framework.

Some of the common issues that leadership often feels are in my opinion are:

• Though they have huge talent pool still they are delivering very less features to market and clients. 
• Though somehow the delivery happens with the current framework, the quality and satisfaction from customer is very less. They see a lot of issues in the product.
• Managing people and  aligning them to deliver a really complex and big project is getting difficult and as the current delivery framework has created a lot of chaos.
• Difficult to measure the value added by the current delivery framework.
• There is a role unclarity which often makes people demotivated as sometimes they dont know what they are expected to do.

Next step is to think about how Agile can solve these problems. In my opinion, Agile brings up a new culture in the organization. It pushes people to get disciplined and create a collaborative culture. Product development is a team sport and Agile creates the environment where multiple teams comes together and builds something that they can be proud of. Agile helps in fixing the role clarity issues by assigning ownership to the right people.

Now lets see what can be done to get started with Agile:

• Top management commitment is very much needed. They need to be trained first. They are the driving force.
• Agile principles then can be taken to multiple teams. 
• A culture of TRUST should be created where let team decide what they want to get the job done. let the team estimate the project instead of one person taking the job.
• A culture of COLLABORATION should be created where team should get a platform to talk to various people on various topics.
• A culture of TRANSPARENCY should be created where team can raise issues without any fear.
• A culture of CONTINUOUS LEARNING should be created where team learn while they build feature/product.
• A culture of OWNERSHIP is needed to make things happen.

In this process, Top Management need to be involved in the retrospection and they need to act as a servant leader to help the team in removing the blockers/impediment in front of them.

Hope this helps, please share your feedback and let me know if you have any other thoughts.