Who’s Leading Your Agile Transformation?
There are all sorts of Agile coaches, consultants, and practitioners out there. Each with different strengths and weaknesses. Each with different skill sets and experiences. But, they’re not all created equal, and they’re not all meant to be the face of a Transformation.
In this clip, Mike Cottmeyer discusses what type of leader should be at the forefront of your Transformation and why it’s so important to the success of your next Agile initiative.
Video Transcript
From an organizational design perspective within a consultancy. We’ve learned a lot of things the hard way and a few of them I’ll share with you guys. One of the big challenges we had is that people have different focuses. There are people that are like really heavily practice focused. There are people that are process focused. There are people that are technology focus. There are people that are what I would consider like good managers and people that can like orchestrate work. And then there are people that can create space and align executives on vision and things like that. We have to be able to populate a team with all of those different kinds of skill sets, right? Because what you guys don’t want to do is have a coach on your team, get audience with your CIO and start talking about Scrum, right? It’s just not a good strategy, right? And what we’re doing to ourselves industrywide is that we are equating Scrum, SAFe, Agile in general as a team level delivery practice, okay?
And that’s how people like—when I start to use that language—feel like:
“No, no, no, no, no, no. I’m talking about business Agility. No, no, no, no, no. I’m talking about digital transformation. I’m talking about enterprise change management.”
Well, I am too, but as soon as I use the word Scrum, or SAFe, I get relegated into a corner and we’re doing it to ourselves, right? Because our practitioners are getting audience with the wrong people sometimes. Okay? So as a leader of change within your organization, you guys have to understand who in your enterprise can create and hold space with executives. Then there’s like a tier of people that can kind of fill the space with a well run, well thought out kind of engagement strategy. Can do a lot of this analysis around theory and approach and reference architecture. And then you’re gonna have a group of people that just like, they show up and they can work with teams, right? And it’s awesome. And they’re great at working with teams. They’re just not the people that are great at casting vision.