From my point of view “working agile” can have meaning only when it comes to the concept of teams. Imagine a medium size office (about 50) with 25 developers who are responsible for programming. So these developers are not all the staff. Every business needs more than just developers. They need to have marketing, Infrastructure, HR or even some staff for basic services such as cleaning. Can they all be agile? Can they be an autonomous team?
Working agile means to work iterative and incremental. In other word: delivering the product to customers in short time and get feedbacks from them and use these feedbacks to improve the product step by step. Now imagine a cleaner guy in an office who wants to work agile, clean a little bit, get feedback from the people, clean more, get feedback ,…… It is funny, isn’t it? Think about a security guy, he can’t say “I want flexible working hours, but I promise to watch very hard when I am at work.”
These are some very exaggerated samples for getting the concept of working agile is not for everyone. First of all when we want to think “Is agile good for us?”, we must think about our culture. Does our culture accept agility or do we have some rules and restrictions which we cannot change? Are our managers and leaders believe that this method may works for them and are they able to accept the risk? and many more questions of the same concept: “Are we ready to make the change?”
Culture is not an overnight outcome which we can change overnight. It comes with its history and experiences. To check if you can change your culture to agile one, first go to all the rules you have in your working environment. Review every of them and check for the history, “What was the case that leads to this rule?”. Now the hard part begins. You should check that if agile can overcome this cases or you should keep these rules. If you pass this level you can continue to consider more parameters.
Keep in mind that you have currently some members in your business and you can’t erase them all and start to hire new people. These members have their own culture and you may not be able to change all of them at the sudden. So at first try to make them familiar with this concept and explain what problems can be solved with this new system.
The big problem in many cases is that when we want to talk about agile, we start to name and describe some scrum practices which people may have no sense about what was the origin. I have participated in one agile workshop for a company. When the talk finished, trainers asked people: “What do you get from this workshop?” one of the answers which I could never forget was: “We should have less work and more meetings”. Do not allow this to happen in your office.
I will write more about transforming to agile later. Feel free to discuss with me about your office situation.
There is also a great book about agile adoption which is highly recommended and can be found in this link.