Driving change within your own company is often a laborious process, and resistance is frequently significant. In most cases, however, this is not because the underlying idea is poor. If the groundwork is not properly laid in advance, no matter how good an idea may be, the risk of it failing is extremely high.
We simply tend to reject new things at first. "We've always done it this way" is, however, a phrase no company can afford today.
But what groundwork needs to be laid so that teams can successfully implement projects? What lies at the heart of a successful agile transformation? Alistair Cockburn, one of the pioneers of the Agile Manifesto, has been using the "Heart of Agile" for around two decades. Consisting of four essential imperatives, it is designed to help implement change more easily and effectively at the same time.
Collaborate
Working closely with others helps to generate and develop better starting points. Communication is the be-all and end-all in a transformation.
Deliver
Introducing a change is best done incrementally. This leads to an understanding of how the world really works and allows for flexible and forward-thinking adjustments.
Reflect
Regular reflection should take place on what has been learned from the collaboration and the introductions.
Improve
There is always potential for improvement: the direction of an idea, its technical implementation, and internal processes can always be refined.
Taking Agility to Heart
All well and good, but what is the point of it all? Alistair conceived the Heart of Agile as a guiding compass. Agile as a term has become somewhat overused and unnecessarily inflated. The Heart of Agile leads back to the original idea. The four overarching concepts are intended to help, in a greatly simplified way, to focus one's own energy on critical actions. The terms are deliberately kept very open, so that everyone can find their own suitable path from them. That is why he does not see the heart as a fixed method, but rather as a foundation for each individual to discover how they can better collaborate, communicate, experiment, learn, and reflect.
Alistair Cockburn is coming to codecentric in Munich on March 12 and 13 for an exclusive workshop: In "Operating from the Heart of Agile", he will show how projects can be improved in a simplified way based on the Heart of Agile. All interdisciplinary stakeholders involved will be addressed within a single process, and their productive networking will be developed. The industry is irrelevant, and prior knowledge of agile working methods is not required. codecentric AG is offering a number of external places for the training.