Facilitating Change in Decentralized Bottom-Up Agile Transformation
Jaakkonen, Antti Johannes (2022)
Julkaisun pysyvä osoite on
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:amk-2022060716000
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:amk-2022060716000
Tiivistelmä
The purpose of this master’s thesis was to create a holistic understanding of the causes for perceived slowness of development organisation and to create a compelling plan to improve it in one of the Finnish telecommunications operators.
The project's initial goal was to investigate one development area and understand why the lead time of development initiatives was slow. The plan later evolved to cover most of TC1’s development areas as the performance of a single area was not a product of only that one area. Several interdependencies were revealed between the development areas, structure and management model of the line organisation and how the business lines were organized.
As TC1 aspired to be an agile organisation in scale, this work bases the theoretical framework on studies, literature, and research from lean, agile, DevOps, organisational change, leadership, and management domains. The hypothesis was that improving development organisation performance requires participation from people, process, and technology domains throughout the organisation and not just from the specific development area.
TC1’s speciality was a strong bottom-up agile movement with different beliefs about what agile is and what it means for the company in every sub organisation, making the ongoing agile transformation bottom-up and decentralized. The chosen research & development method was used to bring people around the organisation together in structured and well-facilitated workshops.
The workshops built on top of previous research and, when applicable, referenced the findings ranging from managing enterprise-wide work in process issues down to technical practices and end-to-end testing. The Workshops were structured to cover creating the mission, vision and the overall goal for the change initiative down to roles & responsibilities, key values and principles and assessment of how development organisations were organised.
While the change plan created in the workshops had almost unanimous support from the workshopping participants, many of whom were top management representatives. The management team ultimately did not accept the plan.
Some success still resulted from implementing parts of the plan in a few company areas. Implementing parts of the plan in parts of the TC1’s organisation resulted in almost complete eradication of the original pain point that triggered the work behind this thesis.
The used method looks functional in many similar cases and organisations with bottom-up leadership traits. The workshops yielded many universally usable concepts that are not necessarily new. Still, the in-depth look into what problems they aim to countermeasure can be valuable to many in a similar situation to TC1. The work also made it painfully clear how the lack of a shared and commonly understood vision and reasoning behind agile organisational aspirations can impede or slow down much-needed changes. For that reason, the standing recommendation for future initiatives is to establish a shared understanding of what agile means for the whole company before anything else.
The project's initial goal was to investigate one development area and understand why the lead time of development initiatives was slow. The plan later evolved to cover most of TC1’s development areas as the performance of a single area was not a product of only that one area. Several interdependencies were revealed between the development areas, structure and management model of the line organisation and how the business lines were organized.
As TC1 aspired to be an agile organisation in scale, this work bases the theoretical framework on studies, literature, and research from lean, agile, DevOps, organisational change, leadership, and management domains. The hypothesis was that improving development organisation performance requires participation from people, process, and technology domains throughout the organisation and not just from the specific development area.
TC1’s speciality was a strong bottom-up agile movement with different beliefs about what agile is and what it means for the company in every sub organisation, making the ongoing agile transformation bottom-up and decentralized. The chosen research & development method was used to bring people around the organisation together in structured and well-facilitated workshops.
The workshops built on top of previous research and, when applicable, referenced the findings ranging from managing enterprise-wide work in process issues down to technical practices and end-to-end testing. The Workshops were structured to cover creating the mission, vision and the overall goal for the change initiative down to roles & responsibilities, key values and principles and assessment of how development organisations were organised.
While the change plan created in the workshops had almost unanimous support from the workshopping participants, many of whom were top management representatives. The management team ultimately did not accept the plan.
Some success still resulted from implementing parts of the plan in a few company areas. Implementing parts of the plan in parts of the TC1’s organisation resulted in almost complete eradication of the original pain point that triggered the work behind this thesis.
The used method looks functional in many similar cases and organisations with bottom-up leadership traits. The workshops yielded many universally usable concepts that are not necessarily new. Still, the in-depth look into what problems they aim to countermeasure can be valuable to many in a similar situation to TC1. The work also made it painfully clear how the lack of a shared and commonly understood vision and reasoning behind agile organisational aspirations can impede or slow down much-needed changes. For that reason, the standing recommendation for future initiatives is to establish a shared understanding of what agile means for the whole company before anything else.