Making Change Stick – applying Agile Principles to Management & Running Organizations
Steven Denning is currently writing a book based on the work he’s been doing on this topic, titled “The Leader’s Guide to Radical Management: Re-inventing the Workplace for the 21st Century”, coming out in November 2010. More details can be found here.
He champions creating environments that foster the formation of high performance teams, and has identified that Agile software development approaches help to create a culture of high performance here.
In his new book he discusses the challenges faced in making organizational change stick – cultural change is difficult and there will be pressure to revert to the old ways of doing things. Making an Agile transition is a major change for many organisations and the resistance to change is often more than is anticipated.
** Steve provides some advice in the form of 10 practices for getting change right that you an read in a recent InfoQ article here.
Two practices he mentions include:
- Change will happen quickly or not all. Once organizational change takes off, it will happen rapidly. The process is viral in nature. The idea is a virus that is either growing and spreading and propagating itself; or dying and de-energizing people and spawning new constraints. There isn’t much in between. A top-down process that is grinding it out, step by step, unit by unit, is usually generating massive quantities of anti-bodies that will lead to mediocre implementation or even total failure.
- I can’t wait to discuss this with Steven at our 5/6 webinar – to see how the CMMI model of maturity affects this or not. Low maturity organizations can not handle massive changes – they need smaller changes as they mature. But I can see creating a wave that must be allowed to take off – or it will die. Just like waves in the ocean – if they hit a wall, they stop pretty fast !
- The top of the organization must support—and be supported. Although implementation of radical management cannot be accomplished by top-down directives or rollout programs, the support of the very top of the organization is key to creating the umbrella for change, for setting direction and heading off the inevitable “death threats” to the idea. Yet the top cannot make it happen alone. In a large organization, the top will need many others to communicate the idea throughout the organization in an authentic way.
- This will be a good one to discuss on the webinar on 5/6 with Steve as well. How authentic communication should happen is intreging to me. What is an “authentic” way? And how can the organization help? As an Agile-Lean coach to companies, I agree that the top can not do it alone. You need support and involvement of the organiation for it to succeed. And just like communication is often the death of any initiative, project or program…..it can kill the adoption of agile-lean in an organization if findings, changes, how people will be or not be affected is communicated…..along with much more news.
To read entire InfoQ article, go here
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