JUNE 2020CIOAPPLICATIONSEUROPE.COM8IN MYOPINIONonstantly developing technological advancements, rapid changes in customer needs and transforming employee expectations are making our lives much more complex and complicated to have the right decision making in execution. To survive and thrive in competition, companies must transform how they act, react and interact with their ecosystem (employees, customers, shareholders...) in the new era of the competition.Agile by itself is a popular and a fancy recipe for those who want to become much more adaptive and flexible to stay in the game. It proposes achieving faster time to market, better innovation and higher customer satisfaction while empowering your employees on decision making and action taking. But, unfortunately, a significant amount of transformation attempts do not achieve these outcomes and turn into a struggling transformation story that causes bigger conflicts and disengagements in the company. When the story goes in this way then; people, process or management culture of the company become a root cause of failure. However, the underlying problem is that large companies are not built to operate in agile because efficiency and revenue oriented thinking require standardization, risk aversion, command and control management, common thinking and execution to keep the execution on track. In contrast, customer and innovation-oriented companies seek for diverse thinking, continuous feedback, empowerment, self-organization and ability to rapidly configure strategy, process and structures. Because they believe efficiency and revenue are not the goals of the company, they are the results of customer centricity empowerment.So, implementing a successful Agile Transformation not only requires an intense execution but also requires consistent shared ownership and openness to experiment new things. Here are ten major points you need to consider while driving your Agile Transformation: 1. Lack of alignment on the purpose and the definition of agile:`Purpose' by itself is the answer to a single question: `Why am I doing this?'. And `WHY' is the only question that derives other questions. So setting a clear definition of WHY will help other people to understand `why are they doing this?' and `what is expected from them? And What is my accountability to make it happen?. The alignment on the expectation and accountability will answer most of the questions and demystify your transformation ambition and goals.2. Focusing on doing agile rather than being agileContradicting to the common view, Agile is not only about principles and practices or Scrum, Kanban...etc. It's also about leadership, culture, accountability and customer centricity. So for sure, you should consider the right tools and practices for your organizational needs and dynamics but also should show a big focus on the role of leadership and agile mind-set growth. According to the 10thAnnual State of Agile Survey, focusing on being agile offers significantly better (15x) business results compared to focusing on doing agile.3. Driving change without changing the existing operating modelDriving a massive change without changing your organizations feel makes people like a rat in a maze. Consider the difference between a car on the road and a train on a train track. The car and the road are loosely coupled, so the car is capable of independent action. It is more agile. It can do more complex things. The train and 10 Blind Spots in Agile TransformationCErhan KoseogluERHAN KOSEOGLU, REGIONAL HEAD OF AGILE TRANSFORMATION, BSH HOME APPLIANCES GROUP
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