Phew! What does the start of an agile transformation involve?
If you're also asking yourself this question, you've come to the right place. In this short series on the start of (agile) transformations, we want to address this question and shed light on the stages that are relevant to us.
The first blog post deals with the legitimized status quo as an essential background foil for a change project. In the second part of the series, we look at the components of a legitimized target image.
The visualization is intended to serve as a small cheatsheet. The blog article follows it and describes the essential content.
Let's get started!
A precise analysis of the current status quo is an essential part of any change process. The status quo is primarily about the actual state of the current situation. Nevertheless, a status quo analysis already contains a component of the target state. However, the emphasis is clearly on the actual state. You can see this in the top left of my visualization.
By and large, the status quo is about three key perspectives and clarifying three fundamental questions:
Necessity: Why do we need to move? The familiar "why" gives the change project an overarching meaning and serves as a fixed point of reference for further actions.
Necessities in practice: We have to offer work in agile teams because we are seeing a high departure rate among our employees. They express a desire for more self-organization in the teams. Or: We receive feedback from our customers that we react too slowly to requests for changes to the product.
Urgency: Why should we start as soon as possible? This is about the time aspect of change. What will we lose if we wait any longer?
Urgency in practice: If we continue to use the current program, we will lose the required security updates from 01.01.2024 and risk attacks.
The vision part addresses the target state of the change: Where should we be heading?
Even if it is tempting and many people like to immerse themselves in the solution space. In the status quo, the vision is not (yet) in the foreground. Nevertheless, a rough guiding vision makes a lot of sense as a thinking map.
At this point, think of it more as a North Star that can provide overarching alignment during the Change.
It is also important at this point that we can only have a rough vision, especially at the beginning of a complex change project, because it is highly likely that this can change during the course of the change through inspection and adjustments (caution: current status of the error).
Essential: Clarity!
One thing is essential when shaping the status quo: all points of necessity, urgency and vision need as much CLARITY as possible. There is a wide variety of methods available to you as a transformation team.
What can help us with clarity?
It can be helpful, for example, to become aware of the business impact of the existing status quo/the current situation or the problem and to collect various data on this. How much money are we wasting? How slow is our time to market? What is the problem doing to our employee satisfaction? Are our customers waiting? Data provides clarity.
The overview of the data situation and the business impact provides a good basis for analyzing the problem in more detail. Only a certain group of people can grasp the extent of the problem with data alone. The majority of people also need a verbalization of the problems that can be identified from the collected data. Verbalization and contextual reference provide clarity.
Pictures often tell us more than words. We can take advantage of this form of clarity through appropriate visualization. As humans, we process good data visualization, graphic elements and images differently than data and words. Images speak to us more subjectively in a very specific way and create rapport and a point of reference. The difficulty for you as part of the transformation team lies in finding the right visualization.
Perhaps you are also dealing with a very haptic type. In this case, the Lego Serious Play approach offers an alternative. Did you manage that? Congratulations: visualization creates clarity.
How can we gain clarity about the current status quo and the visions of the employees/people affected by the change project?
Interviews and surveys are a valid option. In other words, a direct exchange with the people affected. Here, wishes, fears and anxieties can be addressed.
What do good interviews look like?
We are dealing with complex change projects here, so it is not simply a matter of flipping a single switch. The change addresses social systems and we cannot know a priori exactly how the social system will react to the change. If the budget allows, the use of qualitative interview techniques has proven its worth in surveys. Here, data is collected using semi-standardized interviews.
Open, narrative-generating questions are well suited. These provide more information than closed questions to which only yes, no, don't know answers are given. A purely quantitative approach is rather difficult to interpret. It is extremely difficult to perceive the current 'mood' from quantitative results (facial expressions, gestures and body language may also play a role here).
A compromise can be a mixed-method approach: For example, a qualitative survey with supplementary quantitative survey components. Or an initial larger quantitative survey and a selection of qualitative surveys based on these results.
All surveys have one problem in common: They generally do not work exhaustively in a business context and do not fully meet all quality criteria:
Validity (measurement actually measures what is to be measured)
Reliability (measurement provides the same results when repeated)
Objectivity (results of the measurement are independent of the interviewer and the interviewee)
Fulfilling these quality criteria par excellence is rarely possible in practice, unless we are in a laboratory setting (and that would also provide us with results that are difficult to interpret in relation to our change project)
Should we do without interviews because of this 'shortage'? Clear answer: No. Interviews still provide us with the most relevant information within the organization for a change. Here we learn first-hand what makes the organization tick.
How do we achieve acceptance/legitimization of the status quo at the start of an agile transformation?
Our visualization revolves around the concept of legitimacy. How do I get the status quo to be accepted and recognized as the current reality?
The picture shows that there can be very different perspectives on reality. In extreme schools of the Constructivism the thesis that the reality of each individual is self-constructed is propagated even more strongly.
The aim of stable legitimation is to collect the relevant perspectives and integrate them into our picture of the status quo. In this way, we increase the likelihood that the subsequent change and the current status quo will be accepted and recognized as the "smallest legitimized common reality".
How do we achieve this in interview settings, for example?
First of all, as an external consultancy, we make sure that we create mixed interview teams between internal and external interviewees: the aim here is to open up the interviewees. We also pay attention to the hierarchy: if a manager interviews their employees, the results are saturated with answers of social desirability/bias.
In addition, we have had good experiences by surveying a representative cross-section of the organization.
The highlight is that the individual groups receive the results for review after the interviews and are explicitly asked for their commitment. Are the results correct as we have interpreted them? Do you agree? The next group receives the results that have already been reviewed.
Like a kind of quality sieve through which the results are constantly refined and comitted from review to review.
Here, too, we are already using the incremental delivery approach and establishing inspection and adaptation.
Overall, the status quo report should contribute to the transparency of the current status quo and provide a North Star of where we can go next. A good, adequate preparation of the results and a transparent approach to dealing with them are challenging but rewarding.
In the best case scenario, everyone can view the results in anonymized form. The status quo report also fulfills another important function: it is also a core element of the change because it can be used to derive success factors and, if applicable, KPIs or OKRs against which the success of the subsequent change can be measured.
What happens next?
In the next part of the series, we will look at the path to a legitimized target image. You will again receive a small, visualized target image with an accompanying blog article.
Would you like to have the visualization as a file?
Please send me an e-mail to: akademie@wibas.com
Do you find change and (agile) transformation just as exciting as I do?
Feel free to meet me at our next training course on Certified Agile Change Manager
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