For the third of our five keys to successful transformation we will look at the importance of starting small and growing with success. It is very common to see organisations that are attempting to transform to Lean and Agile ways of working to attempt to ‘scale’ too early in their transformation, often off the back of a limited proof of concept or ‘pilot’. There is a belief that now that the concepts have been proved, the simplest and quickest way to transformation success is to roll out a set of training and restructure the whole organisation – boiling the ocean. This is done in the hope of ‘getting transformation done’ and frequently without understanding or considering the characteristics that made the POC a success. These attempts at ‘transformation at scale’ inevitably end in failure. It is only by scaling success that the overall transformation can succeed.
Identifying opportunities where transformation can succeed
One of the main reasons that transformation POCs or pilots often succeed is that the organisation actively seeks out good candidates for the new way of working. This means looking for areas that are not constrained and are actively seeking to adopt the new way. Often these opportunities will be ‘green field’ involving the development of new technology and working practices, as well as operational processes.
Continuing this process of identifying good candidate areas for change is a critical factor in helping a transformation gain momentum. Credibility for the new ways of working is established by having increasing numbers of real world, in-organisation examples of success. As the number of examples grows, the capability of the organisation to adopt the transformation target state grows, as does the capability of the people involved.
The questions in the organisation move from “how can we work like that?” to “why are we not working like that?”
Organisations that are not focussing their transformation activities around opportunities and areas that have the greatest chance of success are by definition going to encounter more problems and failures. This often has the effect of stalling the transformation as it becomes too hard, at best this will result in a slow, frustrating and expensive transformation where key resources are wasted on areas that are not ready or unable to change. Organisations that are unfocussed in their transformation activities often expend their energy in an attempt to ‘boil the ocean’ yielding little in the way of value for their investment.
Focus on building internal capability
An important element to a successful transformation is a focus on building new capability within the organisation. While it is recommended to have support from a credible 3rd party organisation at the beginning of your transformation, organisations that are successful plan from the beginning to build internal capability in both the new ways of working and transformation itself.
Focussing on creating internal capability creates a number of benefits that contribute to overall transformation success. The first of these is that people internal to the organisation are seen as driving the change and are therefore more able to motivate and empower others. They can use their existing networks and relationships to promote the benefits of transformation and demonstrate that it is owned by the organisation and not a 3rd party ‘consultancy’. The second major benefit is that building internal capability will over time reduce the reliance on any 3rd party transformation support, reducing cost and making long term change more sustainable. The last benefit is quite obvious but often overlooked; it shows meaningful investment in the people of the organisation, providing new skills and demonstrating that they are at the heart of the organisations’ future.
Organisations that have not planned on building internal capability from the start of their transformation are typically reliant on expensive 3rd parties for long term support. This will usually burn through their budgets quite quickly and leave the organisation without meaningful or sustainable change when the consultants eventually leave.
Scale based on success and available opportunities
A common mistake in organisational transformation is where there is a desire to scale too quickly. A desire to scale transformation quickly is understandable – we want to have all of the benefits of our desired target state as quickly as possible. However, scaling prematurely is counter productive and often reduces the effectiveness of your transformation through the dilution of expertise and the inclusion of parts of the organisation not yet ready to transform.
Organisations that have successful transformations tend to base the rate at which the scale is based on feedback from the organisation. They look at where they have been successful, understand why they were successful and use this insight to target the next areas for transformation. They do not prematurely force the transformation into areas and teams that are not ready. They promote readiness as a good thing, and help support readiness for change by seeding people from previously transformed areas of the business into newly ready to transform teams. This approach ensures that it is transformation success that is scaled rather than just directing ‘training’ or ‘coaching’ at all areas of the business.
Organisations that do not scale based on success and available opportunities often introduce poorly supported wholesale change into an organisation that is not ready for it. The resulting chaos is what ends up being scaled – not the desired new ways of working or target state.
Organisations that scale success and target receptive elements of the organisation are scaling an already successful model which is promoted by people who have seen it succeed.
Flexible best practice approach – no dogmatic application of frameworks
The desire to adopt frameworks and methodologies wholesale is a common and understandable element of many transformations to Lean and Agile ways of working. It is easy to choose to adopt ‘Scrum’ or ‘SAFe’ or ‘Less’ or ‘Kanban’ and say ‘this is what we do now’. Each framework or methodology has clear rules and guidance on how to put it into practice. There are specially designed training courses, tests and certificates to prove how well you have learned the method and even the opportunity to go on and teach others. They provide a one stop shop for all of your needs – and invariably lead to poor results.
Organisations that have successful transformations do not seek the wholesale adoption of frameworks and methodologies and do not try to ‘sheep dip’ their people to transform them. They recognise that each framework or methodology is appropriate within a particular context, and all have good and bad elements. They will use this understanding to produce a flexible ‘what works for us’ approach to their new ways of working, which will be improved and refined with each successful implementation.
Successful organisations will use frameworks and methodologies as a starting point for their transformation, and use help from trusted advisors with real life experience to help them decide how and when to use them. They will use a ‘test and learn’ approach allowing teams the autonomy to try using different practices and will use feedback from these teams to generate an approach that is suited to both the specific organisation and its current stage of agile maturity.
Organisations which look to simply select and apply a single framework or methodology typically focus on the dogmatic implementation of it. In doing so they often forget the reasons that drove them to want to transform, and rarely get the benefits sought. Truly adaptive organisations have a wide tool box of practices and techniques which they can deploy at will to solve problems. This is a much more valuable target state than a perfect implementation of a framework.