I want to share some thoughts from an operational perspective based on real experience.

Going agile is nicely described by the co-author of the agile manifesto Jeff Sutherland and author of the bestseller 'The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time'. I usually start my introduction by talking about this book and most people think 'what has this guy been taking!'

Let's have a look behind the scenes and understand what's involved and what's different when your organization goes agile.

First of all you cut down delivery times of projects or products to market. That saves cost and at the same time makes the company more competitive. Second, you leverage the skills and motivation of your teams and let them embrace their creativity. The tiresome middle management battles will disappear and your organization no longer works in silos.

Being fast, less costly, lean and innovative are the outcomes if you really and truely go agile. Let's have a look.

There are rumors out there that Agile is about teams that decide, on their own, what and when they deliver their work - hence the outcome is unpredictable. It's actually the opposite.

The waterfall way of doing business is that you describe your requirements lengthly ahead of your project. Things may change when you start executing your project and your original requirements will not last for long. The problem in large organizations is that we have spent far too much time in defining detailed requirements which will most likely change - which is a waste of resource. In agile you have a high level plan of what you need to achieve, but you refine your requirements close to the execution of your work, because by then you have learned a lot and your requirements are much better understood and do not need to be reworked.

Large organizations work in silos. The business needs to describe what they want, purchasing then takes this to a supplier to negotiate a contract. The supplier builds the product, sticks to the contract and when testing the outcome, the business figures out that this is not what they meant to get. 50% of information is lost by handover between siloed departments. In agile you work every two weeks with your internal or external customer and the delivery team gets feedback if they are on track to deliver what is needed for the business.

Agile works in small teams across all the functions needed to deliver the result. These small teams are very similar to the special forces teams in the military, they are 7-9 people which allows optimal communication, they have all the skills to deliver the required mission. No cumbersome handover between silos, no fingerpointing, the team counts and delivers. You leverage the skills of your best experts on the ground who work cross functionally to leverage the creativity of diverse teams.

Teams in agile get the freedom to decide how to implement the agreed business outcome and organize themselves to learn how to improve this teamwork. But this freedom comes with very strong commitments. The teams commit every two weeks to deliver a working result. They need to standup in front of their customer and show a business outcome that has a value. Agile calls this demo or die, if you have nothing to demo, you have nothing. Half ready is not delivered. This creates a lot of positive energy and motivates teams to show results every two weeks to your customer.

In Waterfall you task people to deliver a piece of five day work in three weeks and this means you build a huge buffer in a lot of project tasks. This buffer actually sums up across the project and is unmanaged but does not help to deliver on time as only 50% of waterfall projects deliver their project value at the end, 18% get never implemented and approx 40% are above time and budget (Source: Standish Group).

It may happen that the business sends an application requirement to the software service center and then receive feedback after 3 weeks that this is actually not what software development needs to build a good application - or worse, they build the product and the business gets something that isn't fit for purpose. 

In Agile the business sits alongside the software development team and delivers the tasks together. They align daily and can raise any questions. The delivery is done in small incremental pieces which can be tested and demoed. The team designs, delivers and tests their results before they stand up in front of their customer to demo. The positive momentum of this collaboration in real time is enormous. The progress is transparent to the whole project team and organization. Transparency drives results and momentum.

The largest change is a cultural change and this hits management the hardest as we reported in this blog post. Hierarchical organizations will face a significant challenge. If you have led a large entity and you have control of your employees and the situation arose where another entity wanted something that you did not agree to, then you were able to block this initiative. Here comes the bad news, this power is gone. 

Your teams get tasks with goals to deliver. These goals support the company strategy. The teams accept the goals, organize themselves across the company by cross functional teams. The role of management is to agree on the strategic goals and objectives and afterwards to remove blockages for the teams to enable them to execute. As teams are self-organizing, you can't interfere or micro-manage any longer. You should not pull resources out from a team when committed. The team may fail to deliver but they do fail fast as they need to demo their results every two weeks, they learn and do better. Trust them, support them and you get much more than traditional methods will deliver.

We have conducted agile trainings where teams improve in three iterations on delivering work by 30 to 100% - by learning and improving on how to do work; by organizing themselves and by asking management to remove impediments.

Last but not least, if you are able to let a team focus on one project at a time, rather than doing three things in parallel, then productivity gets a boost. Teams and people get 50% more productive by doing one thing at a time and finishing instead of trying to finish three things in parallel. The set up time to restart a half ready task after doing something else is a huge productivity blocker.

Through two week delivery cycles called sprints, you get incremental business results and can adapt direction if market conditions change. 80% of business value is achieved with the first 20% of your efforts. This is what agile teams do, they prioritize together with their internal or external customer on what needs to come first and delivers the largest value. They are flexible to adapt directions every two weeks, if needed, to achieve the best result for the customer and the company. This makes trade off decisions very obvious and you will need to be ready to take them. 

Going agile gets the best out of your teams: creativity, motivation, excellent collaboration. You get self organizing teams supported by management to deliver results faster and being more innovative by leveraging all of your organizations' skills.

You shorten your time to market, you reduce cost and improve productivity. You focus on customer satisfaction and value delivery,

Companies like Amazon, Google, Tesla or the FBI are delivering great results through the agile approach. Innovative champions like Tesla, INGdiba and others are gaining competitive advantage to adapt faster to changing markets. There isn't hardly any organization that can afford to neglect the benefits of going agile.

You need to do three things to succeed: 

1. an agile mindset is key and this comes from the top and requires a cultural change, 

2. collaboration across the company needs to be the driving force and 

3. enable your teams for real time collaboration with the right agile toolset. Email and file sharing are not enabling agility and they maintain silos.

The agile approach has been proven to be much more successful than the waterfall methodology. Change in Culture is key to succeed, Management needs to adopt its role when working in an agile mode and collaboration of teams is a key success factor. Management plays a major role to succeed. 

Amazon, Google Tesla, INGdiba are trademarks of their companies