Xebia Articles

Today, more than a third of all companies have embarked on some form of Agile transformation. Some are further along than others because their industries require agility to survive. Leaders of these companies face the arduous task of transforming their legacy organizations while still delivering sustainable financial performance to the stakeholders. These leaders need to conduct this transformation correctly — to get it right.

This article is published in . Agile NXT is the magazine full of inspiration for professionals on the emerging Agile journey. Theme of #2: New Insights for Agile Performance Management.

If you’ve ever wondered if Agile coaching is effective or worth the money spent, you’re not alone. Your customers probably do, too. Let’s look at how one manager who grappled with these same questions came to measure the value of coaching and using methods of Data Science to discover which interventions work and
which don’t.

With 95% of all business processes impacted by human activity, intervention at the right moment can elicit lasting behavioral change—and with it, organizational change.

The term “arms race” describes an escalating competition between nations for superiority in the development and accumulation of weapons. The concept has been further applied to a number of disciplines and situations (evolutionary biology, mathematical decision making, logic and computer science, amongst others) in which escalating competition arises from two or more opposing groups striving to outdo one another. This concept can also be applied to the field of innovation, whereby competition between companies occurs for superiority in the development and accumulation of innovative products. This is termed an “innovation race.”

As we move from the old world of hierarchy and planning to the modern world of self-steering and agility, it is clear to all people witnessing this paradigm shift that our day-to-day behaviors must radically change. We need to increase our sense of ownership, be more proactive, communicate more, be less afraid to fail, but maybe most importantly, we need to stop managing other people and increasingly lead them. 

Some people may think we no longer need managers in this Age of Agility, but I strongly disagree. Without capable Agile leaders, we’ll never manage to break free from the chains that bind us to the old world. But how do leaders learn how to lead in this new world?

The global business community seems to agree, we’re now entering the third wave of digital technology in which artificial intelligence will be the main driving force. In tremendous ways, and at an unprecedented speed, this third wave will revolutionize the way we interact with each other and corporations interact with us. Whether we are eating, sleeping, working, sporting or relaxing, a world without digital tech has become unimaginable. We’re seeing the first signs of
this all around us already. Take, for example, how the insurance provider Lemonade (Lemonade.com) uses AI to determines a customer’s risk profile, or how speech analytics is gaining ground in call centers.

In my book, “Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time,” I explain how Scrum reduces team sizes and breaks down projects into short-term goals, improving speed and quality of work in an immediately visible way. In real-life situations, where complexity exists beyond theory, a scaling framework must be able to demonstrate results.

According to a study on custom-developed applications conducted by The Standish Group in 2014, only 20 percent of features are used “often,” 50 percent are “hardly ever” used, and 30 percent are only used “infrequently.” In other words, if you have a budget of one million to build a custom application, you could immediately save half of it if you knew which features weren’t relevant for your end-users.