The accelerated pace of innovation has brought not only a world of possibilities, but also new expectations. To remain competitive and respond to changing market conditions, organizations need to create an agile delivery model. Relying on flatter, less hierarchical organizations and moving towards more outcome-driven product teams, quicker feedback cycles and shorter release schedules can enable faster responses to market demand.
This change doesn’t happen overnight. Changing the culture of an organization to enable and adopt behaviors that focus on continuous learning, experimentation, and adaptation is critical.
A culture of Agile can look and feel like the following characteristics:
- Failing Fast and Small through continuous testing, iterative development, establishment of feedback loops, and he use of continuous deployment techniques. Business and performance metrics are used to determine effectiveness rates that are used to drive investment allocation.
- Blamelessness is required to generate trust amongst teams and encourage teams to accept failure as an opportunity for continuous improvement. This is essential in enabling team environments to be a “safe space” where failure is encouraged as long as lessons are learned and teams use those lessons to support future decisions.
- Product vs. Project emphasizes that teams are organized based on long-term products, as opposed to short, differentiated projects, to enable a capabilities based culture.
- Objective Key Results (OKRs) can drive culture change by measuring agile teams, establishing a common purpose, and providing transparency throughout the organization.
- Leadership takes on the role of the “quarterback” and not the “coach” of teams, empowering the right people in the right roles.
Our point of view on Creating and sustaining a Culture of Agile defines a Culture of Agile and why it is so critical to the success in meeting the fast-paced dynamics of our environment.
