program selection system

Adopting agile in a large organization is qualitatively different than it is for small organizations. It is not just a ‘scalability’ issue. In larger organizations, the adoption of Agile—even if it is ‘simply’ an isolated project here or there—will generate ripples of change that reverberate much further into the organization than we expect.

In this session we will investigate several ideas and concepts related to organizational change in order to equip managers and coaches with a means for approaching the transition to agile in their organization. We offer no particular ‘solutions’ here. Rather, I want to present some perspectives that I have come to think of as essential for large organizational change. Among the ideas we’ll be investigating are:

• Top-down vs. bottom-up change
• Planned, episodic change vs. Emergent, continuous change
• Change that is ‘Native’ and ‘Organic’ vs. change that is imported and based on ‘best practices’

As we will see, all of these views have a place when considering Agile adoption. However, my own bias, based on my work with nearly a dozen companies, tends toward approaches that are emergent, continuous, holistic, and organic. This particular mix of change approaches acknowledges:

1. The role of senior leaders as progenitors of the images, metaphors, narratives and minimal enforcements that will power the transformation initiative;
2. The need for the importation of ideas and competencies from outside the organization, for instance, through external coaches and through exposure to external training of staff;
3. Finally, accidents and inadvertent discoveries that come about when informal change movements are allowed to rise from the staff ranks in an unstructured and unmediated fashion.

These principles are discussed within the context of at least one real-world large-scale agile adoption effort which the presenter himself helped to facilitate.

Target Audience: Agile leaders and managers in organizations who are just beginning the agile adoption process, and coaches and consultants who help them.