Agile Change Management Case Studies

Release Notes Updated Chapter: “Beyond Kaizen to Kaikaku: Two Patterns That Transform Good Scrum to Great” https://lnkd.in/eASMHWPg Overview The latest update to First Principles in Scrum: Implementing Scrum and Agile Practices introduces a transformative chapter focusing on two core patterns, the “Happiness Pattern” and “Scrumming the Scrum.” These patterns enable teams to elevate their Scrum practices from incremental improvements (Kaizen) to radical transformation (Kaikaku), driving significant productivity and morale enhancements. Key Enhancements 1. Happiness Pattern Introduction: • Purpose: Establishes a precise tool for identifying high-impact impediments through happiness metrics. • Method: Prompts team members to rate their happiness on role and organizational level, with a focus on identifying actionable changes for the upcoming sprint. • Outcome: Empowers teams to convert broad dissatisfaction into specific improvements, driving iterative yet impactful changes. 2. Scrumming the Scrum: • Description: A systematic approach to remove the most significant impediments identified through the Happiness Pattern. • Implementation: Ensures that high-priority impediments are tackled at the start of each sprint, creating a streamlined focus on improvement before other sprint tasks. • Impact: The combination of these two patterns results in a rapid, compounding performance improvement through continuous focus and feedback loops. 3. Case Studies on Rapid Transformation: • Scrum Inc.: Highlights how one-week sprint cycles, happiness tracking, and empowerment led to a 500% performance boost and rapid resolution of major impediments. • Microsoft: Demonstrates adaptation to Scrum in a large organizational setup using temporary solutions for immediate action. • Toyota: Details the shift from large team sizes to smaller, empowered Scrum teams, achieving a full project turnaround in six months. 4. Key Takeaways for Agile Leaders: • Pattern Precision: Emphasizes the importance of exact pattern implementation, advocating for one-week sprints and iterative action on impediments. • Kaikaku Mindset: Encourages leaders to foster a culture of continual transformation, aiming for revolutionary changes that drive productivity and team satisfaction. • Transformative Leadership: Urges leaders to inspire teams by sharing a vision for improvement, supporting self-organization, and embracing bold actions. 5. Common Pitfalls & Solutions: • Addresses common errors such as defaulting to two-week sprints, treating happiness as a lagging metric, and implementing multiple improvement stories per sprint. • Provides guidance on focusing on one high-leverage improvement per sprint and reinforcing the synergy between Happiness and Scrumming the Scrum patterns.

In the last 12 months, Demandbase has increased our product deployments by 50%, while increasing sprint predictability by 30%, and decreasing production bugs by 10%. This required a MASSIVE change management and committing to Full Ownership within the *shift-left* framework. Here are the 5 big lessons we learned in undergoing a company transformation to increase product velocity: 1. Align everything to a “why” Our leaders started by being clear, consistent, and confident on the “why” of the massive change in processes. We need greater velocity. Why? Because we need greater product iteration. Why? Because go to market teams face a lot of challenges and need our product to be more effective. Why? Because our mission is “to transform the way B2B companies go to market.” 2. Develop common vocabulary When you ask people and teams to do new things you need a new common vocabulary to signal and explain the change. This vocabulary needs to be introduced intentionally and modeled consistently by leaders. It’s hard to have massive change without massive change in the way teams communicate. 3. Embrace Detractors & Skeptics early The tendency is to focus on early adopters of change and build momentum from there. The problem is resistance can become entrenched and the longer it persists the more momentum it can take on. This is why it’s important to embrace detractors and skeptics early. Often they have very legitimate concerns or have been burned with something similar before, so they need to be heard and their opinions integrated, but also need to be held accountable to the new standards. 4. Track & Measure participation and desired outcomes It’s critical people involved in the change know what is expected of them and what the desired outcomes are. This requires knowing what the key actions are to track (an example for us was all scrum teams developing a shift-left plan in the Q124) and knowing and measuring the desired outcomes (velocity, predictability, and quality measures were our north stars). 5. Maintain focus We used every opportunity with the team we had to focus on our *shift-left* transformation. Every monthly R&D All Hands, the bi-annual R&D insights, and our annual India R&D keynote. We treated this change as our sole programming in R&D for the year, each event building on the last and making the transformation more tangible. It’s exciting to be a part of a major change management effort that exceeds the goals set out. The immediate business impact is important, but just as important is the confidence built in the team seeing what can be accomplished together. Thank you Umberto Milletti, Jason Muldoon, Luis Teixeira, Ohad Atia, and Sean Malone for being inspirational leaders!

Replacing "Agile" with engineering to achieve true agility - Walmart case study. https://lnkd.in/e_7nbXMv From the article: "After years of "Agile Transformation" followed by rolling out the Scaled Agile Framework, we were not delivering any better. In fact, we delivered less frequently with bigger failures than when we had no defined processes." "having the teams focus on Contract Driven Development (CDD) and evolutionary coding was critical. CDD is the process where teams with dependencies collaborate on API contract changes and then validate they can communicate with that new contract before they begin implementing the behaviors." "we needed to make sure that all of the tests required to validate a change were part of the commit for that change." "we are not simply creating unit tests. We are looking at every step, starting with product discovery, to find ways to validate the outcomes of that step. We are designing fast and efficient test suites. We are using techniques like BDD to validate that the requirements are clear. Testing becomes the job." There's much more, but I am near the char limit. (This was posted in reddit here: https://lnkd.in/efbwSN6i) #agility #leadership #agile