Culture will always influence the use of agile approaches. Organizational culture is a continuum that reaches from highly predictive plans to lean startup where everything is an experiment.
Agile approaches might fit well with lean startup culture, but highly predictive organizations can still move towards agile approaches by encouraging empirical measurements, small experiments, and learning.
In order to successfully meet expectations of the business, project leaders should take the time to assess where emphasis is most often applied in their organization. Often there is a priority depending on the culture and requirements of the organization’s business environment. For example, a mobile telecom project has a greater bias for speed, where a government program may have a greater bias for generalization and stability.
«Culture eats strategy for breakfast» – Peter Drucker
This statement stresses the importance of people’s commitment and passion for the cause. The success of any change you plan to implement depends on the team. If the people who are driving the strategy aren’t passionate about the change, or are even apathetic about their job, then there is little chance for implementing the change.
Implementing a new agile approach in an organization is recommended to be undertaken incrementally. The change process can be treated as an agile project. Each of the changes can be treated as an experiment, which is tested for a short period of time to determine the suitability.
Use Kanban boards to track progress, showing the new approaches already in use, those being tried and those still waiting to be introduced. Rolling out changes in a transparent and appealing way improves the likelihood of their success.
Since project outputs are delivered more often in agile approaches, it is important to prepare the organization for these little but frequent changes. The business needs to be able to incorporate these outputs at an increased pace. If the organization resists the project’s output, then the targeted return on investment is delayed.
Agile approaches entail a high degree of change. More frequent handoffs between teams, department, or vendors may require a strong collaboration. Iterative prototypes involving rework might be viewed negatively by the organization.
The Agile Manifesto was first published in 2001. A dramatical increase in agile approaches for managing projects occurred since then. These approaches are no longer limited to certain sized organizations and the IT environment, but they are successful in many settings. The delivery of values depends on inspection, adaptation, and transparency. This is your journey – learn, experiment, gain feedback and experiment again!
