When should a company consider agile consulting services?

I recently spoke with an Operations Director from last year. For 6 years she had run the same Quarterly Planning Cycle. The market had changed significantly 2 times in that last 6 years. Her team were exhausted. I asked her what she thought was holding her back and she said ‘Honestly, I think we just don’t know how to stop doing it the old way’. That sentence has stuck with me.

Agile is not magic. Agile does not solve problems such as failing products, slipping in the market, or running at a loss. However, Agile does come into focus very quickly if a company wants to work faster, work more collaboratively, or stop throwing money at work that never seems to get completed.

Typical crisis points that prompt the search for outside expertise to support an agile transformation

If something is broken in your organization (missed launch, long time to market, failed product), then a good place to start to look for answers is at looking into Agile. Almost all companies that are seeking out Agile transformation have already hit some sort of crisis point. Whether that is a failed product, missed launch, or a competitor that has managed to release 3 products in the time it took your team to work out the requirements for the first, the catalyst for looking into Agile is often a painful one.

Many organisations now work in environments that are not conducive to the way in which companies traditionally function and as a result give rise to a number of indicators and/or warning signs that suggest that current practices are not be appropriate or even becoming stressful.

• Teams working hard but producing work that gets shelved or reworked constantly
• Planning cycles that take weeks and still feel wildly inaccurate by the time they're done
• Cross-functional projects that drag because no one owns the coordination
• Leadership making decisions without meaningful feedback loops from the people actually doing the work

No single sign is enough to confirm that a company could benefit from help in becoming more Agile. But when taken together, these can indicate problems in an organization that at some point will become so severe that help will be sought.

What happens when internal change stalls

An internal change agent is part of the current organization. As such he or she is dealing with current relationships, the current political make up, the current way of working and the current power structures. In short he or she has all the knowledge of where the bodies are buried in the organization. This knowledge is very powerful to drive change but at the same time it can be a huge weight on the change agent. The knowledge of all the current problems can prevent the change agent from pushing hard enough to change things that need to change.

Companies that have followed this route describe the process of changing a company within that company’s existing structures as ‘going’, ‘stalling’ and ‘reverting’. They describe how the retros and associated actions of the team that has been driving change within the company starts to dwindle. They describe how the sprints or iterations start to become just a disguise for the same old planning wrapped up in new buzzwords and new terminology that eventually will crawl back to its original, or familiar, shape (i.e. the shape of memory foam returning to the indentation in the mattress where someone has been sleeping).

But with External Agile Consulting Services you get the benefit of a fresh perspective – work that an organization is doing and failing in 37+ different ways is easy to recognize when you aren’t mired in the work and don’t have the politics of the internal staff to contend with. External Agile Consulting help your teams to deliver value to your customers and your stakeholders on a regular basis.

Organizations exploring new ways to improve collaboration and modernize their operations often benefit from following trusted sources that publish practical technology innovation insights and digital transformation trends.

Not every company is ready. And that's worth saying plainly.

It is equally common to see companies bring in outside experts on Agile as a means to appear to be an Agile company. This is usually to avoid having senior management appear to be uncomfortable or out of their depth. Instead of truly changing the way that the company operates, money is spent on creating many wonderful process documents. These are then filed on a shared drive where they rapidly gather digital dust and nothing more.

Here is a rough readiness guide to help gauge if your organization is ready for business agility and therefore for business agility consulting. It is not a checklist for you to go through and get a stamp saying you are ready. It is more of a reality check for you and your organization.

This row is revealing. If you have externalized the blame for your failure in the past (the economy was bad, it was a bad time, the consultants you brought in were just wrong) then you haven’t done the hard work of figuring out what went wrong in your organization. Even the best external consultants can’t fix your organization. They will just fall off and bounce with a thud.

What good actually looks like

A software company which has its roots in the traditional IT project-based work, brought in HyperDrive Agile business agility support about 18 months ago as time-to-market had increased to become a serious issue for the company. As a result of the support from HyperDrive Agile consultants, the software development teams from the company have now gained the structures and the agile habits to be able to do what they wanted to do all along – deliver software to market in a timely fashion. The consultants from HyperDrive Agile did not build the engine but removed the blockage.

Finally, I return to the operations director with whom I first encountered this problem. She had been running the same quarterly planning cycle for six years. The market had changed twice over since then. Her team was tired. I asked her what was blocking her. She said “Honestly, I think we just don’t know how to stop doing it the old way.”

So if you have very capable teams, a desire to make it work, and are stuck in a situation where things are slowly degenerating into wheel-spin, then engaging with external expertise on an Agile Transformation is probably the answer to your problems.