How to Bring Agile to Scale in Your Enterprise

No matter how many articles you read touting the benefits of going Agile in your organization, and no matter how much you may want to do it for a number of very good reasons, there is no getting around the fact that an Agile transformation can be challenging.

It’s a huge undertaking, and not just for the production teams that are changing the way they manage projects and get their work done. It affects the entire organization, from top to bottom. If the transformation does not go smoothly, or if certain departments or levels of the enterprise resist change, it can spell disaster for the entire undertaking.

Fortunately, this doesn’t have to be the outcome for your company.

Ways to Ease the Pain

There are proven, effective, and simple ways to “ease the pain” of an Agile transformation, help scale Agile across the entire enterprise, and make the entire process faster and more sustainable.

The keys are commitment, training, and coaching.

•Commitment is a vital first step. A transformation is a long-term effort that is likely to run into some snags along the way. Scaling Agile from project teams to the program level and the portfolio level will require more time and effort than many other company-wide initiatives to succeed. Buy-in from all levels of the organization is important so that the level of commitment is uniform across the board.

•Training ensures that everyone involved in the transformation is educated on what’s going to happen, how their team and personal role are affected, and what will be expected of them going forward. Executives will need specialized training to ensure that they are able to set and monitor long-range strategic goals without jeopardizing the transformation or making things unnecessarily difficult for those underneath them.

•Coaching offers a form of mentorship or extended guidance from a qualified Agile professional who can help keep a transformation heading in the right direction, anticipate pitfalls along the way, and help leadership stay the course until Agile is the enterprise’s standard operating procedure.

Getting Help

While one or more professional Agile trainers or coaches can help give every stakeholder valid reasons to commit to the transformation effort, and make it easier for them to follow through, the commitment really needs to come from within.

Once that is established, however, training and coaching don’t have to be a difficult or costly endeavor. As the largest Agile training organization in the country, cPrime offers a huge array of options available for any company to learn how to scale Agile and to make their transformation successful and sustainable through professional training and coaching.

If you’re already committed to going Agile, why not give us a chance to take you the rest of the way?

Ready to take control of your Portfolio?