How to facilitate leadership participation, not just buy in

1© 2016 Scaled Agile, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 1.V4.0.0© 2016 Scaled Agile, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
How to Facilitate Leadership
Engagement, Not Just Buy-in

2© 2016 Scaled Agile, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 1.
Leading causes of failed Agile projects
SOURCE: VERSIONONE 11TH ANNUAL STATE OF AGILE™ REPORT
© 2017 VERSIONONE INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
#STATEOFAGILE

Barriers to Agile adoption
SOURCE: VERSIONONE 11TH ANNUAL STATE OF AGILE™ REPORT
© 2017 VERSIONONE INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
#STATEOFAGILE

The bad news…
Organizational change initiatives have a high failure rate
– 70% (Kotter, 1998; Burke, 2011)
– Two-thirds (McKinsey study, Meany & Pung, 2008)
Resistance to change is the the most common cause
– Especially for Agile transformations (Ghani, Bello, & Bagiwa, 2015; Fiampolis & Groll, 2016).

Many perspectives on leading successful change

Kotter’s model for leading change using SAFe
Step 1
Establish a sense of urgency
Step 2
Create the guiding coalition
Step 3
Develop a change vision
Step 4
Communicate the vision for buy-in
Step 5
Empower broad based action
Step 6
Generate short-term wins
Step 7
Never let up
Step 8
Incorporate change into the culture
Create a
Climate for
Change
Engage & Enable
the Whole
Organization
Implement &
Sustain Change
Train and empower core team of SPCs, LACE
Inspect & Adapt
Value Stream Workshop
Train key leaders and managers
Socializing SAFe and 1st ART launch
PI Planning event
System demos
Portfolio Workshop

7© 2016 Scaled Agile, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 1.71.
Step 1. How to identify and increase
urgency

How?
As leaders, how would you create a sense of urgency for your Agile
transformation, but not panic?
 Start with an Economic View
 Creates a common and compelling vision of the future
 Quantifies the reason for change and makes it visible
Goal:
 Create Lean Leadership for Agile/SAFe Adoption (LACE)
 Sustainable shortest lead time
 Build a SAFe portfolio vision to reduce WIP

Benefits of an economic view
 Reduces complacency and fosters a sense of urgency
 Creates a common and compelling vision of the future
 Helps unlock the intrinsic motivation of knowledge workers
through a clear sense of purpose
 Supports the creation of a decision making framework
for alignment and prioritization at all levels
 Quantifies the reason for change and makes it visible

The management challenge
Only management can change the system
It is not enough that management commit themselves to quality
and productivity, they must know what it is they must do.
Such a responsibility cannot be delegated.
—W. Edwards Deming
“…and if you can’t come, send no one”
—Vignette from Out of the Crisis, W. Edwards Deming

The responsibility of leadership in a transformation
An Agile transformation is expensive!
– Shouldn’t there be a measurable ROI?
Leadership is responsible for the success or failure of the initiative
You can delegate the task, but not the responsibility – Byron Dorgan

Step 2. Implementing a guiding
coalition

Create a guiding Scrum team
• Gain Executive participation
• Run this as an Agile team on a modified schedule
• Main goal – remove impediments to SAFe Adoption
• Define the Vision
• Determine how to make the team’s activities and progress visible
to the organization
• Create initial backlog
• Define a release plan and roadmap
Identify initial
team
members
Conduct initial
kickoff
session
Conduct
second kickoff
session

The Leadership Scrum Team
Each Leadership/LACE team of 3-9 people should consist of:
– Senior Leaders that have sufficient authority to
change the system
– Should have representation from Business,
Finance, Program, and Team
- Preferably Scrum Masters, Product Owners,
Release Train Engineers, and Product Mangers
– Is assisted by an Agile enterprise coach/SPC

Roles and responsibilities
The executive team should choose a Scrum Master and Product Owner
Write stories and build a backlog
Must use the same tools and metrics
as any other Scrum team

Sample leadership team meeting calendar

Agile leadership team implementation techniques
Getting leaders time is difficult, take what they give you
Ensure the leaders are getting value from the meeting or
they will stop coming
Must be trained as Lean-Agile leaders (i.e. Leading SAFe)
Communicate that the success/failure depends on leadership
participation, not just buy-in

Results
Teams will notice the participation of the leaders and take
the transformation seriously
Leaders will understand the pain that teams experience during a
transformation
Leaders will be able to read Scrum/Kanban artifacts
– They can understand and pull their own status information
Starts the transformation to Business Agility

Step 3. Develop a change Vision

Develop a change vision
Clarify how the future will be different from the past and how you can
make that future reality
Example: the vision enabled the PMO to understand their role in the
transformational leadership and address the impediments to safe
adoption.
Work with the PMO and the business to build a SAFe Program Vision
 Build a backlog to advance Lean-Agile adoption
 Mitigate Impediments via Inspect and Adopt Workshops (I&A)

Characteristics of effective visions
Imaginable – a picture of what the future will look like
Desirable – appeals to long-term interests of a
diverse population of stakeholders
Feasible – realistic, attainable
Focused – provides guidance in decision making
Flexible – allows individual initiative and new
alternatives in light of changing conditions
Communicable – easy to communicate, can be
explained in five minutes (or less)
- Aspirational, yet realistic
and achievable
- Motivational enough to engage
others on the journey
Result: The teams start thinking
about how to apply their
strengths in order to get there.
Vision: A postcard from the future
Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard,
Heath and Heath, Broadway Books, 2010
Kotter, 1998

Strategy - how do we succeed?
Diversity in
roles and
levels
represented
within the team
Time & Commitment
Involvement of
Agile Coach &
Mentor

Step 4. Communicate for buy-in

Communicate for engagement
 Train everyone and launch the trains
- Role based training: e.g. Leading SAFe, SAFe for Teams, PM/PO, etc.
- Workshops (e.g. VS, PPM, etc.)
 How would you share
the vision with everyone?
- Make results/metrics “visible”
- SAFe Toolkits
- Continuous training for leaders and teams
- Engage the [Agile] PMO

Sample leadership team vision statement
For XYZ product teams and leadership, who need to continuously
improve their delivery of high value solutions, Agile @ XYZ is a
set of products and services that matures teams, builds stronger
partnerships and trust, and promotes sustainability.
Our Agile 2016 goals include:
 65% of application development projects are Agile
 100% of Agile teams report KPIs
 Agile teams operate at a SHU level of maturity
 Active Agile leadership teams in all IT organizations
 80% of organization team members have
completed SAFe training

Sample leadership team roadmap
Q1
Agile growth
to high
maturity level
• Implement Agile leadership team, including BU participation
• Department leadership attending SAFe training
• Team members attending SAFe/Agile training
• Agile teams reporting KPIs
• Agile teams using KPIs in retrospectives
• Agile teams working toward SHU maturity
• Coaching of teams
• Agile leadership teams established and operational
• Assess Q1 teams
• Coach new app dev (project) & production support teams
including KPI’s
• Recognize team progress (advertise all wins in the journey
to become Agile)
Q2
Agile
sustainability

Sample leadership team backlog
As a member of the PPM,
I want see a visual
representation of all
projects in progress,
so that I can see
capacity matching.
As a member of the
leadership team, I want
a all projects prioritized
by CoD and WSJF, so that
I can make economic
trade-offs.
As a member of the
finance team, I want to
measure an average rate
of return for all existing
projects, so I can make
investment decisions.
As a member of the PMO,
I want an efficient project
review process, so that
cycle time will be reduced
and feedback will be
faster.
As a member of the
development teams,
I want a system team
established to reduce
integration cycle time and
increase quality.
As a member of the
development team, I want
a DevOps team, so that
I can development
environments can be
setup faster.
As a member of the
leadership team, I
want a standard Agile
assessment all teams,
so that we can help teams
that are struggling to
adapt.
As a member of the
leadership team, I want
SAFe Portfolio Level
training, so that we can
implement a holistic
portfolio Kanban and
improve project cycle time.

Step 5. Empowering others

Empower others to act
Train Lean Agile Leaders to remove barriers
 Mitigate fear
 Be aware of too much “happy talk”
Change leadership culture to ask powerful questions:
 How can I help?
Decentralize appropriate decisions to the team
Work together with PMO to remove impediments to Agile/SAFe
adoption

Removing barriers to empowerment
 Align organizational structures to the vision
 Provide holistic workforce training (technical and soft skills)
 Align information and systems to the vision
 Confront supervisors who undercut needed change
 Create cross-functional teams of teams aligned to value
 Decentralize appropriate decisions to the team
 Leverage the PMO or LACE (Lean Agile Center of Excellence)
to remove barriers

Step 6. Using SAFe®
to produce short-
term wins

Produce short term wins
Create some visible, unambiguous successes as soon as possible
- Use fact-based objective metrics and KPIs
- Advertise! Create a newsletter
 Encourage transparency
- Leaders were trained to understand
and use Agile Tools and metrics
 Keep focus on short term goals but…
 Don’t sacrifice the long term vision!

Sample leadership team metrics
0
5
10
15
20
25
IT Agile Projects - January 2013
Open Approved Projects
Agile Projects
KPIs Reported
Agile Summary
59% of Projects are Agile
19% of Agile Projects
Report KPIs
150
88
19% of Agile Projects
11% of all Projects
SALES
RES
DATA
SYS
FINANCE
APSYSTEMS
GMFKSYSTMS
REPORTING
ENTSYS
HARDWARE
TESTING
CUSTSERVICE
BILLING
INTERNALSYS
PMKFACILITY

Focus on short term wins and long term goals
 Leadership team should attend bi-weekly System Demos
– Encourage active participation – be present and engaged
 Celebrate the successes
 Communicate open and honestly about impediments
and impacts to PI Objectives
– How can the leadership team help?
 Engage PMO or LACE and CoP to leverage wins
 Advertising wins helps build momentum

Step 7. Don’t let up

Don’t let up
 Press harder and faster after the first successes. Be relentless with initiating
change after change until the vision is reality.
 Failure does occur and is accepted, as long as you
understand why
 Retrospectives and Inspect and Adapt Workshops
 Teach leaders to welcome change!
 Foster a culture of continuous learning
– Book Clubs
– Coding Dojos
– etc.

Relentless improvement
 Ensure that I&A results are identified and actionable
 Measure teams and ART improvement by performing
quarterly assessments
 Coach leaders to understand the reasons for failure
and how to improve
 Monitor portfolio and value stream metrics
 Include vendors and suppliers

Step 8. Sustaining the change

Making change stick
Examples of regressing to old patterns of behavior
Re-introducing project orientation in budgets, documentation, progress reporting,
requirements management, phase gates, etc.
Multi-tasking team members to multiple teams
Compromising integration of the system each iteration
Accepting other measures of progress besides working software/systems
Having only “representatives” conduct PI Planning
Allowing the “tyranny of the urgent” to replace relentless improvement

Create a New culture and keep the train on the tracks
Hold on to the new ways of behaving and make sure they succeed,
until they become strong enough to replace old traditions
Working with and coaching RTE’s, PMO, executives, teams
Value results
Teach teams and leaders to hold the date sacred
Metrics/KPIs to measure change
 At every level!

The antidote – anchor changes in the culture
Culture change is hard – it comes last, not first
Foundations for embedding change into the culture
– Enforce new norms of behavior (SAFe practices)
– Reinforce and exemplify shared values (SAFe principles)
– Recognize results and encourage new behaviors
– Create a safe exit ramp for those who cannot adapt

The secret to change is to focus all of
your energy, not on fighting the old,
but on building the new…” - Socrates
Final thought
 Leading successful change that becomes permanent begins and ends
with leadership
 To be a transformative, Lean-Agile leader requires life-long learning. Kotter
suggests developing these habits:
– Risk taking and moving beyond comfort zones
– Humble self-reflection (and 360 feedback)
– Solicitation of opinions and new ideas
– Careful listening to insights from others
– Receiving new ideas with an open mind

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