I have often commented that we are at a time of unprecedented change, which requires us to question how we work in order to continue to add value. Therefore, human resources areas cannot live outside this reality.
We have found in agile frameworks and values a way of working that allows us to adapt to almost any change, focusing on the customer or employee, optimising efforts, and getting the best out of cross-functional teams.
If you know of another way to respond, do so, but don’t forget to share it as there are many practitioners looking for more alternatives.
If you have found a good answer in agility, we can tell you that not everything is going to be a bed of roses. In recent years we have learned a lot by accompanying business and HR teams taking their first steps with agility. There has not been a single one, in any sector, that has not started with great enthusiasm only to encounter serious difficulties shortly afterwards. We have always counted on them because we already knew that large companies have organisations designed for something else and professionals used to working in a different way.
With this in mind, is it impossible to implement agility in a large corporation?
Far from it, because in many places they have succeeded. Not all of them, not 100%, but they have radically changed their way of working and the results they are obtaining are spectacular, but we must persevere.
On the way, it can help you to have fellow travellers who have already experienced it and to anticipate the main difficulties that tend to arise, some of which are exogenous, the result of the organisation designed for something else, but others are from the team itself, for which changing the work dynamic after years of working and obtaining good results in another way can be a quantum leap.
The most common and complex difficulties we encounter in Moebius are the following:
You’ll fall into agile fatigue
The beginnings are easy because after the training sessions to get to know the frameworks and values, almost all the members of the new teams are very motivated to work in this new way and everything sounds good (autonomy, customer centricity, minimum viable products that you present directly to users and key people, …), but it is only after the first sprint that you come face to face with the harsh reality. Curiosity and fashion are good for to encourage you to explore but they have a very short lifespan. However, the changes that agility brings us are profound, they are not made in a day, nor in a couple of sprints.
You won’t find all the autonomy you need.
It is one of the fundamental principles of agility, i.e., to add value, teams need as much autonomy as possible to decide the form and scope of their deliverables. This point could be the subject of a book, but there are few projects in which the POs (the role in charge of guiding where to develop the projects) do not drop “recommendations” in their user stories, that the natural leaders of the silo “owner” of the initiative do not directly or indirectly influence, that a manager is not satisfied with being just another stakeholder and verbalises that it is better to go in the direction that he/she asks us to go, etc. An endless number of reactions of control over the team that must be managed little by little.
You will be amazed by your waterfall inertia.
It is the first “planning” (sprint planning session) and the first activities that the new autonomous team decides are to go deeper, get to know, ask even more questions, … we don’t take a step until we have the maximum possible certainty, it doesn’t fail. Few product owners have been asked about ideal formats for a minimum viable product. I haven’t seen it myself, but two colleagues tell me that the first decision of a couple of their teams was to appoint a project manager (which doesn’t exist in agile and which they try to avoid at all costs). There is no scrum master (the role in charge of making sure we work according to the agile framework) who doesn’t have to work hard at the beginning. It is the most normal thing in the world, traditional predictive work models have a series of phases that we have used for years and without them we feel dizzy.
You’re going to have a hard time in the face of uncertainty
Agility proposes inspection frameworks, i.e. it encourages us to make small releases of finished products to present to users and decide on how to proceed based on their reactions. That is the essence of agility, working on something without having any idea whether it is going to be valuable or completely useless. However, corporate environments have always strived for predictability, which is the opposite, that is, working with as much certainty as possible, but this is simply not possible in a VUCA context. The need to have everything under control has also had an important impact on a kind of uniformity of thinking. In the end, in order to follow the plan we all have to go along with one another, which inevitably leads us to think along the same lines. The person who has different, transgressive or opposing ideas to the general opinion is introducing uncertainty and that makes things more difficult, but giving new answers in unfamiliar environments requires collective intelligence and giving diverse points of view. Our habits mean that we are not comfortable there.
You won’t feel comfortable with the mistake
Closely related to the previous one but with important implications that make it difficult to implement agility in the first place. The majority of large organisations have a certain degree of politics, who more or less has little visibility in the company as a whole and, once again, for a large organisation to function properly, we must not make mistakes. As time goes by we all create a culture of absolute phobia of error, and HR professionals deserve a special mention as they suffer from this situation at a stratospheric level.
In short, incorporating agility into the way we work is a more profound change than it may at first appear. Like any change, it produces frictions caused by organisations serving a different way of working and people’s long-established habits. Therefore, being aware of these difficulties, reminding ourselves of the purpose for which we are doing things, celebrating progress and, above all, persevering, will help us to achieve our objective. In HR we have done this many times before and we have succeeded. This is not a different change, perhaps only that this time it is not optional.