Chapter 9. Shaping the Agile Organization

In 1955, Rosa Parks, an African-American woman, refused to give up her seat to a white person after the white section was filled. She later said in an interview that, "I would have to know for once and for all what rights I had as a human being and a citizen." (Charles Marsh, 2006, The Beloved Community: How Faith Shapes Social Justice from the Civil Rights to Today.) Her values of equality, rights, and citizenship were made clear that day when she told the bus driver to go ahead and have her arrested as she would not move from her seat. She was in fact arrested, and subsequently went to trial; her actions sparked a Women's Political Council distribution of 35,000 brochures that called for the boycotting of Montgomery buses. That boycott continued for 381 days! The courage of Parks defined a moment in the Civil Rights Movement in the United States.

When was the last time you took a stand for something? You don't have to be a president to find your...

Will Agile cause a ripple, or a tsunami?

An executive once said to me, "We want to do Scrum so that we can get a culture." And I said, "But you already have a culture. It's there. It just may not be the one you would like to have."

Very often, the existing organizational values don't match the Scrum ones. And, well, in most cases we wouldn't expect them to, at least initially. After all, you're probably initiating Scrum (or being asked to initiate it) for a reason. Many executives and managers say, "We want to do Agile because we need to do more with less, have better quality, or deliver faster." Others unfortunately think that the Scrum framework will solve all of their problems. What they fail to understand is that teams and the greater organization must adopt the values to appropriately apply the principles. By valuing and trusting the people, and their knowledge and interactions, the organization will find the right Agile solutions through its people. It's just that management classically...

Culture change requires a multi-faceted approach

Because Agile is focused on people and on keeping process at a minimum, transitioning to an Agile culture requires a multi-faceted approach. An organization, working with and through its ScrumMasters, should help product managers think about incremental value and backlog management, assist Human Resources in determining new goals and measurements for employees, shift everyone's mind-set toward building in quality, use adaptive and just-in-time planning techniques in the project management office, and boost team performance. Continuous improvement surrounds all of these facets like a safety net, yet efforts across these facets should be integrated and synched on a regular basis. For example, as teams discover various tools and practices that help them do their jobs better, this information should be synchronized with Human Resources so that teams are allowed and encouraged to utilize new ways of working. Sometimes, the existing HR and performance...

Self-actualizing individuals create an Agile organization

Self-actualizing is the result of a person fulfilling his own individual potential. It was coined by Kurt Goldstein and utilized in the familiar Hierarchy of Needs by Abraham Maslow. According to Maslow, in order for an individual to self-actualize, a person's physiological, safety, love, and esteem needs must be met first.

In his studies Maslow found that self-actualizers had the following common traits [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-actualization#Maslow.27s_hierarchy_of_needs]:

• Efficient perceptions of reality—that is, the ability to judge a situation fairly and honestly. Self-actualizers can readily identify dishonesty.

• Comfortable acceptance of self, others, nature—shortcomings in self and others are accepted.

• Spontaneity—bringing creativity and energy into daily life.

• Task centering—having a problem to solve or a mission to fulfill.

• Autonomy—ability to work and solve problems independently.

• Continued freshness of appreciation—constant...

Don't go it alone

As a ScrumMaster, you will encounter some challenging issues as you first try to create a successful team and then influence the organization. Whatever you do, don't go it alone. Meet with other ScrumMasters to discuss issues and potential solutions. Find a Scrum Buddy and create Agile learning opportunities across the organization; many larger companies hold Agile days in which outsiders will come to speak and talk with people. You are in such a better place than I was when I first learned Scrum—there are LinkedIn groups, blogs, twitter accounts, articles, and books galore on how to be successful with Scrum.

Tip

I once worked with a team in which everyone was so sensitive. Now, I'm a sensitive soul, myself, but they were just over the top. Every meeting you would hear at least five times sentences prefaced with, "Now, I don't mean this in the wrong way toward him," or, "I'm not being critical about this person, but," or, "Please don't take it this way…" It was ridiculous...

Avoiding Scrum as a panacea

I don't know what part of the message people missed when they adopt the mind-set that, "Let's just do Scrum; it'll fix all of our problems." When people believe that Scrum is a panacea, they don't see the need to inspect and adapt. They become disgruntled over day-to-day things. One might overhear, "This Scrum process doesn't tell us anything! It's too gray. Not specific enough!" It's because the people missed the most important concepts: individuals and interactions over process and tools; courage and openness over fear and secrecy. But what happens in these Scrum-as-Utopia situations? Scrum gets the blame, because it is not an all-encompassing solution. Remember and help others remember that Scrum is a framework that exposes exactly what the organization needs to fix in order to be better at product delivery.

Why change? What blocks?

When I ask people what blocks them, their answers imply the elements of their own unhappiness at work. People want the benefits that make their lives easier, better, happier at work, and they want the obstacles removed that directly affect them. The QA person who raises his hand and says, "We want higher quality" is really saying, "I want my ideas about quality to be heard, finally." The product owner who says, "Deliver faster to customers" really wants to justify his pay, and probably wants to satisfy the customers, too. Sometimes people say, "Our managers block us"; the people are tired of their corporations, which are so steeped in command and control. Those who want a process that emphasizes visibility are probably tired of projects gone awry. People couch their own personal desires behind purported benefits of Agile. Don't get me wrong—I do believe that people also want their respective companies to be successful—but intertwined in there are some of their own...

Immunity to change

I stumbled across this test in an old issue of Harvard Business Review (November 2001). Robert Kegan postulates that people are immune to change because they have a competing commitment that prevents personal change (http://hbr.org/2001/11/the-real-reason-people-wont-change/ar/2). I found this compelling and applicable. Kegan created an exercise in which he asks people to respond to the following four questions:

• What is the new commitment that is being asked of me?

• What am I doing, or not doing, that is keeping my stated commitment from being realized?

• What else have I committed to that may be competing?

• What big assumptions have I made about the new commitment?

I found this interesting because sometimes the competing commitment feels like a violation of a value of loyalty or personal dedication to another person. Other times, it can be an intrapersonal conflict—low self-esteem, self-doubt, and so on. For example, a tester on a new Scrum team, Jane, was asked to work more...

Face it, Scrum might not be for your organization

Your job as a ScrumMaster is to take a stand. Be courageous. Laugh in the face of fear. Your mission is much bigger than to be an iteration manager or to create a burndown chart. You are attempting to change things for the better, enrich people's lives, and make work a better place to be.

I do not, for one moment, feel that it's fair to put all the responsibility on one person, the ScrumMaster, to incite and sustain change in an organization. But it must start somewhere. And if we wait on the perfect combination of events or people, change will never happen. However, you might feel overwhelmed after reading this chapter. Maybe you didn't know that this is what a ScrumMaster is chartered to do. Maybe you knew but hoped you didn't need to know! ScrumMaster as change agent was the ultimate vision that Ken Schwaber had in mind when he created the role. All of this gets lost in translation, when the practices override the mind-set.

At some point...

Summary

Creating a successful team is be tough, but shaping an Agile organization may be your career's most challenging task. The existing culture, openness to change, and a myriad of factors will influence your ability to bring change to your organization. Remember to create a shared understanding of the need for change, and to lead with values. Since Agile and Scrum teams are all about strong, self-actualizing people, you need to work with management and HR within your company to give people a chance to self-actualize. Band together with others and create learning opportunities within your organization. The inroads you make will also help in programs of scale, which we'll talk about in Chapter 10, Scrum—Large and Small.

Recommended reading

• The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement 1984-2004, Eliyahu Goldratt, North River Press

• A Sense of Urgency, 2008, John Kotter, Harvard Business School Publishing

• Leading Change, 1996, John Kotter, Harvard Business Review Press

• Fostering Organizational Learning: The Impact of Work Design on Workarounds, Errors, and Speaking Up About Internal Supply Chain Problems, Anita Tucker, http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/7156.html