How are you resolving your agile transformation blockers?

Teams leading agile transformations can encounter multiple challenges along their journey including changing the mindsets of senior and mid-level managers, transitioning from a focus on specialists to developing generalizing specialists, educating and effectively engaging delivery or control partners and reducing the time and effort required to deploy deliverables once they’ve been deemed production ready. Worse yet, it can sometimes feel like a game of Whac-a-Mole – as soon as your team resolves one hurdle then another two surface.

How about being agile with your transformation!

Treat each of these blockers as a work item in a backlog. Collaborate with stakeholders to identify appropriate acceptance criteria to help you know when you’ve successfully resolved the issue. Size the work items with your team. As with all preliminary estimates in agile don’t aim for precision but rather for consistency. T-shirt size them or if you feel creative use an alternative fun sizing taxonomy (Decepticon-sizing?).

Prioritization will be a challenge. Just like managing a backlog of product requirements, it’s rarely as simple as letting business value be the sole determinant of priority. Many of these hurdles will be interdependent. You might also want to incorporate relative uncertainty into the ranking process by tackling higher risk and impact hurdles first.

Once you’ve prioritized these blockers at a high-level your team should decide whether it is worth disaggregating them into smaller hurdles. Techniques such as story mapping could then be utilized to help you create a release plan for resolving the issues.

Now comes the tricky part – socializing the plan with your senior stakeholders. Assuming they accept the list of blockers and their relative priority you will want to share it with delivery teams and control partners across the organization. This will increase their confidence in the transformation as well as helping to manage their expectations regarding the resolution timeframes for specific blockers.

A critical step is to adapt and evolve the plan as your transformation progresses but don’t obsess over creating the ideal plan. As new blockers get identified by delivery teams, size them, prioritize them and add them to the backlog. Use information radiators to share status. For example, you could post a list of which hurdles are being actively worked on, which ones are “on deck”, and a burn-up chart with an up-to-date forecasts of when the backlog will be cleared. Your team should also decide whether a sprint-based or lean lifecycle makes sense given their capacity and maturity.

Resolving a backlog of organization blockers can seem an insurmountable task but take the opportunity to increase buy-in and provide a showcase for the benefits of being agile.