An Agile Adoption and Transformation Survival Guide

by Michael Sahota

There is a con­sid­er­able con­fu­sion in the Agile com­mu­ni­ty between adop­tion and trans­for­ma­tion. Change agents from var­i­ous orga­ni­za­tions talk about adopt­ing Agile and not about trans­form­ing their orga­ni­za­tion cul­ture. The con­se­quence of this is under­tak­ing such an impor­tant trans­for­ma­tion with­out hav­ing the full buy-in of the peo­ple, with­out under­stand­ing the orga­ni­za­tion­al impli­ca­tions. Usu­al­ly this leads to failure.

There are not so many mod­els in the Agile com­mu­ni­ty that may guide change agents in their trans­for­ma­tion­al approach­es. The Michael Saho­ta’s book is a sur­vival guide pre­sent­ed as a frame­work that helps any­one to under­stand and plan Agile change work. This frame­work is also use­ful if work­ing with Kan­ban and Soft­ware Craftsmanship.

The basic con­cept behind this frame­work is that “if you do not man­age the cul­ture, the cul­ture is man­ag­ing you”. And, in addi­tion to this, Peter Duck­er’s quote is also very enlight­en­ing: “Cul­ture eats strat­e­gy for break­fast”. Indeed, no mat­ter how care­ful you pre­pare a strat­e­gy for change, if it is not aligned with the orga­ni­za­tion’s cul­ture, you are con­demned to fail.

Part 1: Agile in Crisis

Part 2: Agile Culture

Part 3: Adop­tion and Trans­for­ma­tion Sur­vival Guide