Thread by @tdpauw

You surely know this. Just to make sure we are all aligned.

An agile transformation without working on the foundations, i.e. instituting technical excellence and introducing #XP practices, is just a pure waste of time, energy and truckloads of money 💰.

Right?

When not working on the technical practices, you will just do agile. Not be agile.
In the end you are just introducing a new process on top of cruft bringing no improvement whatsoever to the end result.
You won't deliver better value sooner.
You won't have more engaged employees.

I once explained an agile coach I didn't really work on the process level but that I concentrate more on the technical foundations required for being agile.
He didn't really like I associated process with agile coaching 😁.

When you do work on the technical practices you will become really agile.
This will have a snowball effect. The more the technical practices improve, the more you will be agile as the easier it becomes to adapt to change. Resulting in increased employee engagement.

Investing in technical practices results in investing in people.

I am currently helping an org to improve their release frequency from 6 months to 2 weeks.
This org consists of 16 teams, in total 160 people, all working in one monolithic product.
4 months later they achieved that goal. Nobody believed that would be possible at the start.

We now worked on defining a new Improvement Kata. During my last visit I was surrounded by smiling faces. The sky was the limit now. This is a snowball effect.
Look at the right top corner what their vision is.
(I didn't suggest anything, they came up with that on their own).

Although they are aware there is still a lot to improve - a build lead time of 3h is just too high, a build stability of presumably 60% is too low - they conceive trunk-based development as achievable.

This worked for that org because there was a clear vision from the start.
All the merit goes to the teams, I just helped with clarifying the tech value stream, defining the vision and giving options. Based on that they improved in their own.

I did nothing regarding the agile ceremonies. We just worked on the tech value stream and technical practices.

On the other hand I've been involved in a "big-bang" agile transformation: 100+ coaches of which only 16 tech coach. It didn't work out.
There was no clear vision. Anytime I asked for it, they replied annoyed they of course do had one. But I never heard it.

Because there was no vision, coaches were never aligned.

The end result was: the agile ceremonies are some sort in place, nothing changed in lead time and quality, and lots of frustrations as it didn't change anything to the day-to-day work of the teams.

It is so rewarding to be thanked by the persons that were the most sceptical at the start of this journey because they achieved there goal in 4 months time. And to see it is precisely these people that now come up with the most challenging goals like trunk-based development.