Making significant changes in any organisation can be incredibly difficult. Implementing agile can help streamline this process, however, encouraging everyone to get on board with a new methodology often requires a significant amount of effort. Agile coaching solves this problem. An Agile coach can work with your team, provide guidance and keep the business on task, saving time, money and resources.
Our Agile Coaching Support improves team performance and ensures that agile practices take hold, resulting in high performing teams and projects that deliver value to their customers faster.
Starting Your Agile Audit Journey
Imagine waking up tomorrow morning and your government announcing that, with effect from 9 am, the entire country will be required to drive on the other side of the road.
You’ll still need to get from A to B but the way in which you do so will be very different. The road signs are in the wrong place; road markings are incorrect; junctions are set for traffic moving in the opposite direction.
Chances are, there are going to be many mistakes on your journey and some of them may well be major. Some of them may call into question the rationale for the change. People may be vocal in their dissent and attempt to foment a rebellion to reverse the change. After all, what’s the benefit?
Achieving change will be difficult. Just having the government tell you to do it, isn’t enough. Having support from car drivers only isn’t enough. Switching parts of the vehicle driving population to driving on the other side of the road in stages is not enough.
For the change to be effective, it needs to be holistic. It needs majority support. It needs leadership and there needs to be solid reasoning for the change. Starting on an agile transformation is like this.
Here’s our advice to improve your chances of success:
1. Understand and Declare Your Reasons for Change
It’s not enough to ‘do agile’ simply because you think your competitors are. It’s not enough to ‘try agile’ simply because you believe you can get more work done. It’s not enough to ‘go agile’ simply because it’s the flavour de jour of the business world.
As one client put it: “I chose agile because it made work enjoyable again. Enjoying my work made my home life more enjoyable too!”
Have a compelling reason to change. Share it across your organisation. Garner support at every level.
Agile In Audit can help you by facilitating discussions that can identify a clear reason to change.
2. Measure Improvements
Decide on how you want to measure the benefits of the change. This will be influenced by your reason to change. Take a measurement now, before the change occurs because you’ll want to see whether any of the following work is benefiting you.
As one client put it during a pilot: “Even if all we change is this one piece alone, we’ve saved 2 months’ work in every year!”
Agile In Audit provides two primary ways of measuring effective change. They require us to spend a short time on-site with you, to acquire the relevant metrics. We’ll continue to perform these measurements over time and use these metrics to help target coaching effort in your chosen areas and also to measure the effectiveness of those efforts.
3. Form an ATET
Setting the initial course of an agile transformation, and then adjusting that course can be made much easier with the creation of an Agile Transformation Executive Team (ATET). This team consists of senior executives and managers that are empowered by the organisation to make decisions and remove impediments.
As one coach put it: “I wish we had formed the ATET sooner. Transformation is made so much more effective when the organisation’s leadership are involved.”
Agile In Audit can help by advising on the setup of your ATET, facilitating ATET meetings, offering strategic advice and acting as agile advisors.
4. Get Training
Experience has shown us that delegates that are trained are much more likely to make a success of an agile transformation. It also saves you from the time lost due to learning ‘on-the-job’. To get the most benefit from the training, run it across all levels in your organisation so everyone has an understanding of what’s about to happen.
Agile In Audit have created the world’s first, audit specific, scrum training course. This two-day event teaches scrum within the context of audit and follows it up with the AIA-SF assessment. Auditors can earn their AIA-SF certificate by passing the stringent AIA-SF assessment.
We’re also able to teach more advanced Scrum Master, Product Owner and Scaled Scrum courses. These courses are authored by scrum.org, the organization headed by Ken Schwaber, the co-creator of scrum.
5. Identify Internal Candidate Coaches and Scrum Masters
Your staff will enable you to create, then grow, your own ability to progress. While we’ll always be there to help you, we first want to help you to help yourself.
Agile In Audit are experienced in identifying candidates to adopt these new roles. We provide advanced training courses to help your agile coaches / scrum masters to grow into their new role. Once appointed, the majority of our agile coaching effort is invested in these new appointees so you can take ownership of your own transformation.
6. Get Agile Coaching
Trying to make that difficult journey from A to B will be made a lot easier if you have an expert on board that knows how to do it. They’ll help you to form muscle memory and get you to the point where you can manage it on your own.
Agile In Audit can help by providing agile coaching support. We generally advise a short-term engagement initially where we provide agile coaching support immediately after your training and then at key points thereafter (usually sprint review, sprint retrospective and sprint planning). This enables organisations to grow at their own pace and learn by doing.
If the need arises, we can also provide longer-term agile coaching support but note that we don’t want to fill your organisation with a glut of highly paid consultants. We don’t want you to become dependent on us. We don’t want to leverage every opportunity to earn revenue from you.
We do want to provide value for you. We do want to put you in charge of your agile transformation. We do want to use your money wisely.
Next Steps
Why not contact us for a chat and see if we can help you? Or, come and meet us at the Agile In Audit Meetup group. We look forward to hearing from you.