Agile transformation works well when it’s initiated and spearheaded by the top management. Before the leadership can effectively push the change downstream, it’s important for the decision makers to understand how this transformation works. Logicworks BT Agile transformation practice has more than 25 agile certified industry thought leaders who work with leadership team to make sure that they are properly trained and support what agility means to the organization and then build a guiding coalition in order to carry out the transformation activities across the organization.

Make sure that leadership identifies a compelling reason to adopt agile so that there is a purpose and commitment. The biggest challenge in the agile transformation is the existing cultural and organizational barriers. Every member of the organization needs to understand why the shift to Agile is taking place, why they should change the way they do their job and make an emotional commitment to change and respond with more excitement and determination than fear.

Agile transformation works best when the leadership has the buy-in and communicate the purpose of change and impact to the organization to the rest of the organization so that it allows every member of the organization to understand and accept why they need to change.

The biggest challenge with agile transformation is the piggy bagging project centric approach. This occurs mainly because agile transformation itself is carried out as a project. Our experts in products alignment would help to steer this from project to product centric approach. This starts with identifying all products, grouping and mapping them under different product groupings and business work streams. This allows for the vertically sliced product teams to be aligned across different products and provide a 360-degree view of product centric organization and allows for easier collaboration across the organization.

We help our clients to build persistent agile teams that will outlive their current work. Many organizations have agile teams, but they are project-specific and are dissolved when the project ends. Every time you modify or form a team, it incurs a "J curve": Productivity dips before eventually rising again. So, it stands to reason that if a company wants to maximize product flow, it should work hard to ensure that teams remain stable for long periods of time.

It’s important for the governance team to understand what value has been delivered before expending the cost. We helped our clients by working with finance to understand how the products they had identified aligned with their financial categories. They then incorporated those categories into ADO, Microsoft's agile work management tool. They had previously added all the products to ADO, so now they added the financial buckets at a higher level and nested the products within those buckets.