Together with 100 IT engineers we have been given the freedom to figure out how to transform from doing traditional IT Operations to being agile.

We use Scrum@Scale and Heart of Agile to remove debt; Organizational Debt in the form of old leadership structures that create unclear mandate for scrum roles and prevents organizing around products; Technical Debt that keeps us busy maintaining old technologies and prevents the creation of relevant cloud infrastructure products.

Our story is about how to fuel change through addressing frustrations.

Target Audience: Managers, Coaches, decision makers, Project Leaders, Practitioners
Prerequisites: Basic understanding of agile frameworks and methodology
Level: Advanced

Extended Abstract:
In 2017, we together with 100 IT engineers in an internal IT function of an old industrial company set out to transform our organization from being traditional and hierarchical to becoming agile. The fundamental premise was that the top management invited us to change and gave us freedom to figure out how we would accomplish this. In this process, we used different ‘compasses’ such as Scrum at Scale and Heart of Agile that on different levels helped us navigate what step to take next to facilitate the change.

What we have come to realize was that it has been our major frustrations that have helped us navigate with these compasses and make decisions, and that many of the sources for our frustrations have been different kinds of ‘debt’. Organizational debt in the form of ‘old’ leadership structures that created unclear mandate for scrum leader roles and prevented teams from organizing around products. Process debt shows itself in an ITIL operating mindset that kept us from reinventing ourselves as a ‘development organization’ with continuous deployment and end user focus. And technical debt kept us busy maintaining old technologies and systems and prevented focus on learning about the brave new world of ‘the cloud’ and creating new, relevant infrastructure products at high speed. So far our efforts have given us an unexpected happy ending, as even if we still have long way to go on to become truly agile, our changes so far prepared the organization for the unforeseeable: Covid-19.

Our talk is a reflecting experience report about the frustrations that we have met and acted on and on frustrations we are currently living with and trying to act on. It is about how we are slowly uncovering how the past is haunting the organization in so many ways – which is also the reason why the only way forward is a step-by-step process that cannot be planned up front.

We will provide examples from our past – where we have failed and succeeded but, most important, learned – and we will look forward at the challenges we have ahead of us in what we expect to be a 10 year journey towards an agile culture.