Agile transformation in established companies

From a recent experience:

One event which happened recently reminded me of how hard change could be.

I was visiting a club for a speech competition. I had already competed and organized competitions for 4 years, so I know the rules and the process. For this example, lets pretend that experienced members in this club behave like an established corporation. They had been there for a long time and they know the ins and outs of what needs to happen.

And now imagine there is a new person who is in charge for the competition. The competition and the briefing was done differently, and they performed some processes aka rules, differently.  This person can be considered as a new hire for the corporation.

It was interesting to observe. Because the competition was running quite smoothly, but I could see some already experienced people looked confused since no one of them expected such a way of conducting the competition.

Lets not focus on the discussion if this fresh approach was better than before. The fact remains that people already experienced in one process looked a bit surprised by this new execution.

“Resistance to change is the primary obstacle towards Agile transformation”

Change is a hard thing, especially if companies had invested years in established processes which still work, as the old saying goes: “if it ain’t broken don’t fixed it”.

Unfortunately, there are many examples of how established companies with market dominance are losing their positions, market shares and even existence, because they refuse to change.

One way a company can battle such resistance of change is by investing in their staff and certified them in the methodology they are planning to use. That way everyone will be on the same level of understanding how they will work and will have a common vocabulary, which is very important in the process of adopting the new approach.

“Investment in education of the staff and their certification is a clear indication that the company is focused and committed to successfully complete the Agile transformation journey”

Since I’m a certified Scrum master, I could make a prediction about what is the situation with Scrum at the moment.

A simple google shows that only in USA there are over 100 000 IT companies the data is from 2016 [1]. If we assume only 20% of them want to use scrum, this makes 20 000 only in USA.  lets say that on average they have 100 people, since we have big companies and small companies. This means that only in USA there are 2 000 000 million employees. So how many people understand scrum. One indication I would like to use is the number of certified professionals.

“2 000 000 employees in IT companies in USA/which I assume are interested in adopting Scrum/ and there are around 250 000 certified Scrum professionals worldwide.”

According to Scrum.org there are 132,160 Scrum masters certificates issued. If we combine them with Scrum Alliance, we can assume that there are 250000 for the entire world. Which shows that there is a clear need for more trainings and certifications for the employees in order for the Agile transformation to be successful.