For agile processes, it is more important to focus on culture than the adoption of processes. Developing an agile culture could have a huge impact on a company’s long-term success. There are many organizations that have benefited from implementing agile culture changes.
Culture versus process adoption has been a topic that most companies choose to overlook and hence lose more than they gain. Simply the adoption of agile process is not enough.
Does culture beat process?
When you are a part of a culture, you value particular things, communicate in certain ways etc. Often, participating in a culture implies a particular process. For example, most of us identify with the following process flow as being ideal to achieve success:
Now this is the most ideal process that people follow. Of course, some people would dislike and argue that it is not written anywhere, but we all know it anyway. Processes vary by geography, social status and lot of other factors. The point here is that while culture does not dictate a precise process, cultural values supported by teaching structures embedded in cultures and enforcement structures lead to a commonly understood process.
Creating an Agile company culture
Most organizations tend to apply a set of Agile practices when they think about going Agile. This provides insights into the mechanical elements of agile, but the cultural elements are overlooked.
Adopting an Agile culture should be considered a change initiative and should be thought through thoroughly. The following activities might help you to move to an Agile culture:
- Recognize that moving to Agile is a cultural change
- Share and embrace the Agile values and principles
- Move to an end-to-end view of delivering value
- Adapt your governance to focus on value
- Evaluate the willingness of employees
- Get continuous feedback from customers
- Adopt a reward system to align with new culture
Assess executive support
Implementing agile culture
Ultimately, an organization’s goal should be to start living the values and principles that help them develop the culture they want. But they should know that being agile does not mean they can predict the future, or estimate development time. The belief system should be focused on emergent architecture and growing software incrementally.
Organizations should understand that agility is not a technology or science or product, but it is a culture. A culture can be rich and varied and described in many of its forms. But a different culture is very difficult to learn as many values are hardcoded in our brains during a long educational process. The same thing applies to agility. It can be learned by seeing it being done.
