One of the critical factors in the success of agile adoptions is the organizational culture in which agile teams function. In his blog Agile Software Development, Dave Nicolette stated that “an agile team is most effective when it is part of an agile organizational culture“. I agree completely, but just what is an agile organizational culture anyway? There are probably lots of different answers to this question and all may be equally valid. But at the heart of the matter, an agile organizational culture is one that supports the freedom of agile teams to do the best work they can in their efforts to deliver quality software quickly.
There are plenty of large companies out there practicing agile in many different forms. They all have components of what most would consider an agile organizational culture. I’ve blogged about Netflix, whose CEO describes a culture of “freedom and responsibility” within their organization. I’ve also discussed the strides Microsoft has made in terms of supporting their Patterns & Practices lab in their efforts to become agile.
Ken Schwaber points out the example of Google in his book Agile Project Management with Scrum. Google sets aside time for Team members to pursue activities that are outside of their current Scrum Teams and that benefit the Google enterprise. Google gives team members 20% of their time to coalesce into interest groups where they can work together. This time can be spent working with peers in sustaining and enhancing their functional expertise, or researching and prototyping new ideas. Google developed Gmail this way.
An agile organizational culture has helped in successfully scaling agile practices across large distributed teams at Yahoo!. Yahoo! is now 2 ½ years into its adoption of Scrum, and has upwards of 100 teams and 1200 people (and steadily growing) using Scrum in the US, Europe, and India. Scrum is being used successfully for projects ranging from new product development such as Yahoo! Podcasts, which was built by a distributed team split between the U.S. and India and won a Webby Award, to heavy-duty infrastructure work on Yahoo! Mail, which serves 250 million users each month around the globe. Most (but not all) of the teams using Scrum at Yahoo! are doing it by the book, with active support from inside and outside coaches.
The reason I’m listing these case studies is because they are remarkable companies, doing remarkable things by organizationally and culturally supporting agile practices. I used them a few weeks ago at a company offsite meeting. I was trying to illustrate what agility looks like from a cultural and organizational perspective. I was trying to demonstrate what it would take for our company to truly adopt agility and provide a supportive environment in which it could thrive. However, a comment I received from one of my colleagues stopped me in my tracks. “Sure it works for them,” he said, “they’re huge. They can do anything they want to. We can’t do that here. We’re not Microsoft or Google!“ I was flabbergasted and didn’t know how to respond at first. I am a firm believer that you can do anything if you put your mind to it. I feel that way personally, and I feel that organizations should think that way as well.
I think that a fundamental failing of organizations today is a self-limiting attitude of complacency that seems to exist at many companies. Striving for mediocrity. “Accepting” our limitations. “We can’t do that because we’re not Google”. It’s easy for companies today to live in the middle ground. Average companies, with average organizational cultures, producing average products. As Seth Godin says, most companies “…smooth out the edges and go for the center“. I can’t accept that.
My question back to the naysayers is “WHY NOT?“ Why not do something remarkable? Why not change our organizational culture to become remarkable? Google, Microsoft, Netflix, Yahoo!… they all became successful precisely because of their ability to say “Why not?”. They became successful because they understood the value of organizational culture. They provided an atmosphere for free thought and forward progress. The decided not to live in the corporate middle-ground. I’m not saying that every company can do what Google, or Yahoo, or Netflix has done, but we can certainly learn from them. We can learn to change our culture to support agile teams. We can decide to do something different…we can become agile organizations. If one of the key criteria for the success of agile adoptions is an agile organizational culture, then I’d like to propose its antithesis: One of the main reasons for the failure of agile adoption is organizational complacency.
© Copyright 2007, ChrisSpagnuolo.com GeoScrum! by Chris Spagnuolo is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.
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