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Companies and businesses may succeed in today’s market only by delivering product increments to customers rapidly and reliably. Organizations need to give prompt responses to their customers’ feedback. If you own a small company, agile training for its transformation will be a straightforward process. The reason is you may align everyone by gathering them in one room and designing a shared understanding process.
However, if you have a big company or a complex organization, you have to undergo agile transformation carefully by following legacy architecture. However, the question is, what must management do for a successful agile transformation? Here comes the role of agile leaders, who help in bringing agility without compromising the overall business value. In this blog post, we will discuss different aspects and steps followed by good leaders to obtain agile transformations.
Agile Leaders, their Functions and Characteristics
Agile leaders are professionals who foster agile ways to work and think. They create a positive environment to motivate teams to perform their tests in the best ways. Leaders play a vital role in the successful agile transformation. Many organizations have a single key person to act as a leader. A solid understanding of the critical role makes an organization transform and avails plenty of benefits.
Activities of an agile leader
- An agile training provider is responsible for setting up high-performing teams.
- Agile shapes the business environment to achieve success.
- An agile leader plays the role of an agile coach to train newcomers and motivate other individuals, who often stay resistant to changes.
- Overall, leaders take the necessary steps to bring changes to the organization.
Characteristics of an agile leader
Leaders responsible for accomplishing agile transformation goals must have the following characteristics-
- A positive mindset to achieve continuous business growth
- Self-awareness related to their strengths and weaknesses
- Good leaders always take responsibility for the results
- Leaders must stay humble and open to others’ feedback. These people should demonstrate openness and curiosity.
- Agile leaders are great listeners and they express empathy towards other employees.
- Leaders have to show their courage while handling risks.
- The best leaders always empower other people and trust them.
- Good leaders always focus on optimizing the entire organization instead of dealing with its specific part.
Stages to Accomplish Agile Transformation
Now, we will discuss the agile transformation stages for a business organization.
Step 1-Create leaderships via coalition
Agile transformation requires changes in almost every part of a business or a company. Simultaneously, it needs the right support from top management. Hence, agile leaders must make sure that the business executives stay on board and well aware of the future changes.
Step 2-Determine the right vision
We must develop a few good ideas of where we will go before we begin the agile transformation training plan. The plan consists of a working hypothesis to develop a structure, metrics, and governance, which we elaborate progressively during the transformation. We have to understand the patterns to create teams at scale. Moreover, we have to find ways to orchestrate different teams to accomplish each task.
Step 3-Create a transformation roadmap
We have to give some ideas to the business organizations about the actions we take, the number of hours we need, and the benefits we reap from the investment. We will refer to the transformation as expeditions and intermediate outcomes as base camps.
Step 4-Create a 90-day rolling plan
The leadership team behind agile transformation must meet to plan forward, check the progress and adjust various things depending on the requirements. The objective of a 90-day rolling plan is to get a specific view of what will occur in the upcoming days or months. The 90-day rolling plan must be similar to the PI or Agile release plan. Moreover, it must enumerate different things in the organization, which will influence the upcoming period of 90 days.
Step 5-Checkpoint for 30 days
You have to follow the sprint cycle to assess the work progress periodically. In this step, you have to check each step related to transformation, retrospection, and adjustment.
Step 6-Re-assess the vision
You have to re-assess the vision statement again according to the evolution of our understandings at the course of our transformation process.
Step 7-Sequence the outcomes with completed activities
We know that creating improved business outcomes is the prime objective of agile transformation. Accordingly, we must justify the investment via hypotheses statements, conducting regular experiments, demonstration of outcomes, and pivoting according to whatever we learn. Even though we do not know each activity before, the goal is to sequence the obtained outcomes. Simultaneously, agile transformation management must ensure to tie back the completed activities into the required business outcomes.
Step 8-Link the investment with outcomes
In this step, we take steps to trace the system improvements to analyze tangible business benefits. Moreover, you have to highlight progress against the baselines of business metrics to executives. The goal is to link the investment with measurable outcomes we achieve explicitly.
Stage 9-Communication management
Transparent and regular communication on progress will lead to energy and excitement. Hence, we have to manage communication from executives’ round tables to various signs and diverse information radiators available.
Step 10-Safety for involved organizational members
Lastly, the agile transformations must analyze the right fit of every people in the renovated organization. This will create accountability, clarity, and measurable progress for every individual.
Conclusion
Therefore, with the consistent efforts of great agile leaders, organizations and companies will expect to get business agility and flexibility promised by agile methods.
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