How To Overcome Team and Technical Agility Challenges?
The challenge for enterprises is to move at the speed of business while maintaining quality and control. In response, many organizations are turning to team and technical agility as a way to increase speed and responsiveness. However, adopting these agile practices can be difficult, as they often conflict with traditional enterprise processes and culture.
In this article, we’ll explore how to overcome these challenges and implement team and technical agility in your organization. We’ll look at fun analogies and real-world case studies to help explain the concepts. In the end, you should have a good understanding of what it takes to be agile, how to overcome the biggest hurdles, and what benefits you can expect to see.
What Is Agility?
Allow us to present an analogy that can help explain agility. Imagine you’re driving a car from Point A to Point B. The fastest way to get there is to take the most direct route possible, without making any stops along the way. However, if there’s traffic on that road, you may have to take a detour.
This is what agility is all about: being able to change direction quickly in response to the environment around you.
In the business world, agility is the ability to rapidly respond to changes in market conditions, customer demands, or technology. It’s about being flexible and adaptable, so you can make the necessary changes to stay ahead of the competition.
There are two main types of agility: team agility and technical agility. Each comes with its own set of characteristics and challenges, which we will discuss in the following sections.
Team Agility
Team agility is the ability of a team to work together efficiently and effectively to accomplish their goals. It’s about having the right people in the right roles, with the right skills and knowledge, so they can rapidly respond to changes.
To be agile, teams need to be cohesive and have a shared sense of purpose. They need to be able to communicate openly and efficiently, and they need to trust each other. They also need to be able to work independently, so they can make decisions quickly without having to wait for approval from a manager.
Common challenges with team agility include:
Communication breakdowns
Lack of trust
Siloed departments
Inflexible roles
Lack of autonomy
Technical Agility
Technical agility is the ability of an organization’s technology stack to rapidly adapt to changes. It’s about having a flexible architecture that can be easily updated or modified as needed.
To be agile, technology needs to be well-designed and easy to understand. It should be modular, so individual components can be swapped out as needed. And it should be scalable, so it can handle an increase in demand without breaking down.
Common challenges with technical agility include:
Complex architectures
Lack of modularity
Lack of scalability
Inflexible dependencies
Fragile systems
Overcoming Agility Challenges
The biggest challenge with agility is that it often conflicts with traditional enterprise processes and culture. To overcome this, organizations need to make a commitment to agile principles and practices, and they need to have the right tools and infrastructure in place. The following case studies show how two organizations were able to overcome these challenges and implement agility in their organizations.
Case Study: Barclays Bank
Barclays Bank undertook a broad strategy that included Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) and agile coaching in order to bring agility to a large scale. The objective was to help teams make simpler process decisions and enhance productivity through people-first coaching. In addition, many workspaces were reconfigured to be more collaborative and less individualistic.
Result:
The Barclays Bank strategy worked, increasing throughput by 300% and reducing code complexity by 50% on 80 apps. Test code coverage also increased by 50%. A total of 800 teams within the company successfully adopted an agile approach, reporting greater levels of happiness and speed when launching new products. The agility displayed by Barclays allowed the company to improve their new customer rates in a post-Covid environment and create guides for small businesses based on their positive experience.
Case Study: Fitbit
Fitbit, a leading wearable technology company, adopted SAFe to help meet the demands of their holiday-oriented product delivery schedule. The Management Office Director decided a pivot in mindset and approach were needed, and started small by converting 12 Scrum teams to SAFe. The company created cross-functional teams that focused on fast delivery, scaled up team growth to improve onboarding, and improved objective visibility with 2-month forecasting.
Result:
With SAFe, the team achieved a record-breaking four new products and 22 million devices shipped in the first year. They also noted increases in overall speed and team engagement.
Moving from a traditional, waterfall approach to an agile one is a challenge for any organization. It requires a commitment to agile principles, the right tools and infrastructure, and a willingness to change the way teams work. However, the benefits of agility – increased speed, flexibility, and customer satisfaction – make it worth the effort. With the right approach, any organization can overcome the challenges of implementing agility and reap the rewards. Agileseventeen can help your organization make the transition to agility. We offer a range of services, including agile coaching, SAFe training, and more. Contact us today: talkagile@agilseventeen.com