In the recent Scrum Coaches Retreat that I attended, I saw a
pattern where the majority of the topics presented for discussion centered on
organizational transformation and implementing agile correctly. The topics
ranged from change management traits for individuals and organizations, executive
leadership behaviors, coaching approaches for executive leadership, coaching
for non-technology groups to implement agile, facilitation techniques for team
trust, and scaling agile for coaching within an organization. Having established,
led, and managed a program management office (PMO) in a healthcare IT and
professional services industry and with a strong desire on leadership behaviors
through project management and product development, I joined the team on this
theme seeing an increasing focus around executive leadership behaviors for
leading organizations to embrace agile successfully (“Build an Agile
Organization Executive Coaching”, 2013).
Following the agile principles of user story development, our
group with backgrounds from multiple industries began identifying the major
categories of persona in today’s leadership that lacked understanding or came
with a traditional mindset in transformation. These observations were later
shared across the various participants from numerous countries during our daily
retrospectives to further refine our persona categories. The major themes of
persona classification of executives evolved are listed as follows that I have
reordered in a continuous spectrum of the knowledge of agile in their implementation
challenges.
Resistant: The
executives that fall into this category are those that have a generational gap leading
to a resistance in change. The relevance to current ways of managing projects
or understanding product development is not in the radar screen for taking the
organization to the next level. These leaders are more task-oriented managers
than leaders who feel challenged that agile may not add value. “It has been
working for me and so I see no need for agile” is the theme behind such
leadership.
Never heard of agile:
The executives that fall into this category are open to ideas but are
unfamiliar with the agile framework. This
group’s lack of understanding may arise due to many reasons such as their own personality
towards new learning, lack of initiative, and firm’s industry representation to
understand new trends. These members often rely on the experience of others bringing
in consultant experience or another senior member to implement the transformation.
If the consultant or the senior members fail to apprise of the executives of
the implementation challenges in product development, skills reorientation, and
the structure required for agile development to thrive, then, these executives
lose faith in Agile.
Big Vision: These
groups of executives understand that their current structure is not in line
with their big vision for growth. They recognize that they need to develop
products differently for competitive position of themselves in the marketplace
or excelling in doing things efficiently. They have heard of the agile
framework through their own due diligence to implement their growth ideas and
look forward to their delegates for support.
Misinformed:
Similar to object oriented programming where the subclass inherit
characteristics of super class, this
group of executives have had bad experience from the earlier bad implementation
in their organization or in a different organization. Their “bad taste” of
agile implementation shouldn’t be attributed to agile framework’s failure but
the failure of those leaders or consultants that didn’t implement a stable and
scalable solution.
Metric Oriented: Some
executives have an instinct to not just focus on the profit motive but
also establish key performance indicators. But lack of having correct types of
metrics and threshold to begin with may impede successful implementation.
Insufficient
Experience: This final group leans on those consultants or senior members
that are brought into the organization just because they have implemented agile
in their previous job. As Boyatzis and McKee (2005) noted, these high-profile members
need to understand the emotional makeup of the new organization and not just
their own personal success in their previous job. The reliance on a structure or
set of tools that they had found useful previously but failure to understand
the new organizational structure, impediments, and product makeup among others
add up to the challenge of insufficient experience that these roles bring to
implement agile transformation successfully.
In the end, the successful implementation relies on proper
coaching of the organizational executive for leadership behaviors that they
need to inculcate to succeed leading to forming a team that can coach and train
the organization. If the leadership has not bought into the fundamental twelve agile
principles for successful agile transformation and middle management members
like functional team leads and project management not trained on product ownership,
project team leadership, process governance, and client management, then, the
fragile leadership should be held accountable for agile framework’s failure.
Do you think there may be other persona besides these persona
classifications?
References
Build an Agile
organization executive coaching (2013). Scrum Coaches Retreat. Retrieved
December 17, 2013, from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4z_6rEkTP8k&feature=youtu.be
Boyatzis, R.E. & McKee, A. (2005). Resonant leadership: Renewing yourself and Connecting with Others
Through Mindfulness, Hope, and Compassion. Boston, MA: Harvard Business
School Publishing.
