Agile principles are simple and straightforward, but changing the way you have done things for decades is not easy. Organizations large and small face significant challenges in transitioning their culture to agile practices and methods. You didn’t get where you are overnight, so you’re not going to change things that quickly either.
In successful agile transformations, there is a team of organizational change agents focused on supporting and promoting the change. New York Times best-selling author Dr. John P. Kotter outlines this concept in a Harvard Business Review article outlining eight reasons transformations fail.
At Platinum Edge, we call this an agile transition team.
A transition team runs as a scrum team concurrently with a pilot scrum product development team. The transition team follows what we call an agile maturity roadmap. The agile maturity roadmap lists the organizational-specific challenges preventing the organization from becoming more agile and potential solutions to those challenges. The transition team’s goal is to work toward those solutions tangibly each sprint, and to implement those solutions each release. The transition team also promotes those organizational changes and successes to the rest of the organization.
Make sure you setup your organization for transformation success with a strong and focused agile transition team.
