This summer, we led CAPED Agile for Teams training for more than 100 people at one of our clients. On the final day, one of the participants asked the CEO, “So, are we trying to be an agile company?”
The CEO definitely wanted them to be an agile company. After all, he’d invested a lot to get everyone trained. He’d budgeted for follow-up coaching for teams, including his executive team. But the question still came in, even knowing all that. There was clearly a “question behind the question.”
If a company is trying to be agile, does that mean Finance works in two-week sprints? Does Facilities need a Daily Scrum? Should every team attend regular release planning? Should each department use the same roles, tools, and meetings? Track the same metrics?
Making everyone follow the same process would be a strange definition of adaptability, especially given the first Agile Value of “Individuals and Interactions over Processes and Tools.” At the same time, if every team decides for itself what agile means, calling the whole company agile doesn’t mean much.
So we talked through three questions: How do we define an agile company? What should be non-negotiable for everyone at such a company? What should vary with the kind of work a team does?
At their request, I wrote down how I’d answer those questions.
Download What It Means to Be an Agile Company
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