And the reasons for that are entirely obvious – impending economic crisis, unstable business environment of the post-pandemic world, increased competition, market transformation, shift to customer focus culture, and many more force companies to seek a more flexible approach to running a business.

If you are no stranger to the aforementioned challenges, it’s the right time to consider Agile values and principles as a new direction in uncertain times.

I’ve been practicing Agile for around 6 years. First as a software development methodology, and later for other processes in the company – marketing, human resources, etc. From my own trial and errors experience, the shift to Agile mindset is full of challenges. It took several months until we worked out an Agile adoption strategy that perfectly fits our company goals.

It resulted in improved workflows, increased business performance, higher revenues, reduced time to market, and satisfied customers.

I’ve packed what I learned into simple steps that’ll help you reform business processes with Agile thinking within a much shorter time frame.

A Six-step Guide to Make Adoption of Agile Workflow a Success Story

Step 1: Explore the Agile Сoncept up and down

Most businesses start shifting to Agile without a clear understanding of the concept.

There are two reasons why you need to dive deeper.

The first is expectations. You need to understand how this set of rules works in order to define a clear-cut intended outcome. Even in software development, we start a new project by acquainting our clients with the basics of Agile terminology and workflows – we wrote a step-by-step guide, stated another way, an Agile tutorial, that helps people understand what to expect from the process and determine areas of responsibility.

The second reason is to define your ability to apply Agile principles or adjust them to the needs of your organization.

In case you are unfamiliar with the Agile, its main idea, as a software development methodology, is to split the project into small parts (called iterations), each of which is focused on releasing a small valuable piece of the product as quickly as possible and learning from the feedback. This feedback is used for further improvements.

One of the authors of Agile Manifesto, Dave Thomas says that to improve the agility of the whole organization, you should follow a cycle of simple actions, namely:

• find out where you are at the moment;
• take small steps to your goal;
• adapt your understanding in view of what you’ve learned; and
• repeat.

Here is a case in point.

In 2017, global food and beverage leader PepsiCo suffered a decrease in growth rate. Searching for a way to boost top-line growth, the company came to an Agile mindset. By adjusting its principles to their internal needs, the company managed to balance the adoption of new technologies with a focus on clients and staff. For PepsiCo, agility meant a less formal, less rule-based, and more fruitful way of working. This venture resulted in a completely new company culture, better growth rate, stoked innovation, and increased employee satisfaction.

Step 2: Check out Precautions and Challenges

Although Agile is able to bring huge business value, it is more successful in certain situations than in others.

As far as the whole Agile software development life cycle is based on principles of flexibility, teamwork, small-scale units and transparency, it’s adoption in large organizations may present certain challenges.

It is quite an issue to apply changes across the entire corporate chain, starting from processes to operation, culture and behavior. The most critical thing Agile demands is a shift in behaviour. It should be evident for each and every team and department like delivery, risk, HR, finance etc.

Thus, large organizations need to be aware that embracing Agile at scale may reveal certain problems which are not evident when embracing it for individual projects or within small and medium-sized companies.

Additionally, there are certain types of projects when full Agile adoption can be questionable. They are mostly long term projects with a stable set of requirements where mistakes may be catastrophic for the whole company.

On the contrary, Agile is well suited for projects where the problem is complex, solutions are still unknown, changes are possible during the process, and the team works in close collaboration. Such conditions are common for a number of processes like product development, marketing campaigns, supply-chain operations, sales activities, recruiting, allocation of resources etc. While others, like accounting, legal branches or other types of strictly regulated units, using Agile may be quite challenging.

But challenging doesn’t mean impossible.

The best way is to analyze the operational model of departments in your company and decide which activities are better suited for Agile, that is, where you can break a complex problem into parts and hand it to a multifunctional transparent team. In this way, you are proceeding to the next significant step.

Step 3: Draft a Kick-off Plan

Starting has never been easy, so start small.

Identify the part or parts of the company you want to transform and how. After this, decide what Agile practices you will use taking into account all the elements like processes, people, technology etc.

Do not forget about Agile enthusiasts that will drive the adoption inside the units and defining time frames needed for such a transformation.This is how Agile adoption happened in one of the leading enterprises in wine making, Mission Bell Winery.

The company decided to use Scrum (one of the most popular Agile frameworks) to meet the criteria of Safe Quality Food Level 2 certification. They introduced Scrum training, set a goal and appointed Agile pilots in each department. After they noticed its positive impact, the company continued implementing Agile and increased the yearly finished goods inventory process by 90%.

Step 4: Build a Shared Vision

Business results are a collective effort. Moreover, employees feel personal and emotional commitment to their work when they work towards a common goal. This rule works perfectly in the Agile transformation process, too.

A clearly stated vision is more than a values statement or a mission — it is what guides your company through the changing environments. It presupposes that all team members should base their work on the same list of priorities.

A shared vision during the Agile adoption will help you measure the progress and success, as well as make major decisions.

CEO of Zappos Tony Hsieh states that one of the pillars of their success is explicit and transparent purpose statements on all the organizational levels. The whole company is operating like a city, where decentralized decision makers are united by common values.

Step 5: Adopt Experimentation and Continuous Learning at All Levels

Innovations are intimately related to Agile. In general, we can define innovation as an effective application of creativity focused on building a solution to cover people’s problems in the most cost-effective and flexible way.

This is exactly what Agile does.

The process is based on experimenting, testing, and learning from mistakes.

This is great for startups, but you can benefit from Agile in other ways. Just think about how your company works toward developing business strategies, or guidelines to senior executives, or product launch strategies. As a rule, these processes involve too much guessing and assumptions. In the end, you might even find out that you followed the wrong plan.

Instead, try to involve the stakeholders during the whole process, keep yourself up to date, thus ensuring your team is focused on what really matters. Testing, creating “safe to fail” tryouts and learning from mistakes gives you a great opportunity to respond quickly to changes. This is the heart of Agile experimentation.

This is how micro failures you can afford prevent you from macro failures you can’t endure.

Embracing the iterative agile lifecycle to building machines helped the farm equipment company John Deere to shorten the innovation project cycle up to 75%. Previously, they required about nine months to identify a new market opportunity and five to ten years to develop the product and bring it to market. With Agile approach, they can go from idea to a working prototype in just eight months.

Step 6: Shift from Authority to Partnership

The organization structure of traditional companies is synonymous with hierarchy – relationships between superiors and subordinates.

Agile organizations reject the authority. Instead, they opt for autonomous cross disciplinary teams. This requires partnership based on freedom, trust, mutual respect and managing by agreement. Without this critical shift, Agile is a waste of breath.

Leaders in agile companies are not inspectors, their efforts are aimed at supporting rather than micromanaging. They are creating environments where each employee is welcome to contribute to the process, take part in problem solving and take over the responsibility for the results. The seniority in such teams is based on depth of knowledge and behaviour.

A massive two-year research by Google found out that one of the common characteristics of high-performing teams is a sense of psychological safety that makes employees feel comfortable, talk openly, suggest ideas, and be comfortable enough to admit they don’t know something or disagree.

Introducing Agile to the legal team of the largest travel guides publisher Lonely Planet helped to improve productivity by 25%. Previously, the team suffered from exhaustive daily demands, lack of transparency in priorities, and unrealistic deadlines.

Implementing Agile thinking throughout the firmly established company is no easy thing.
These steps are the pivot point in Agile adoption aimed at changing the mindset of the business. Sure, it is only a start and much more work should be done further.

But a correctly applied iterative approach will enable companies to move faster than before, drive innovations, and adapt to the changing environment of here and now. Remember that any attempts to implement Agile practices independently may fail until they are combined with an Agile mindset!

In case you are interested in developing a solution for your business, check out our services proven by latest projects and drop us a line!