¿Cuáles son las mejores formas de construir una organización ágil?

Being agile or achieving business agility is a mindset, unlike doing agile which is to follow prescriptive approach such as Scrum or Safe. One of the pillars of business agility is listening to the ever changing customer needs, which means being customer-centric. Listen to your customer needs and adapt your product to their needs. Your customers are the users of your product, the more you listen to them, the higher the satisfaction level.

"Fail fast learn fast". The earlier or faster you fail, the faster you will learn and grow. Hence, experimentation or the continuous improvement is the mechanism to try out different ideas, analyze the results and based on the outcome decide to continue or drop the idea.

I agree that implementing an approach like scrum is important, however, a company can’t use failed implementation approaches of the past to implement a different way of working. Agile transformations are referred to as journeys for a specific reason—they are journeys! Having a milestone on a chart showing when agile training is completed is a sure fire way to identify that your company is missing the mark.

Although it is important to implement a methodology, there is a caveat. I have seen organizations adopting say Scrum across the enterprise and teams, without understanding whether Scrum is the right methodology. For some teams or products Scrum can be the best option, however for others Lean can be a better option. This means context counts. Organizations should always look into the context first, and then determine which methodology fits best.

Empowering and trusting the teams is imperative in an agile organization. However, the process of having trusted teams depends on several key factors. Maturity level, seniority level, company culture etc. In other words, if the team is mature and working together for some time with high synergy, then empowerment works well. Otherwise, it will backfire, as the teams do not want to have ownership or be responsible. I have seen many organizations struggle with empowering their teams and this is one of the impediments in agile transformations.

In my experience, a lot of teams do not want to be empowered! Teams that have been in place for awhile oftentimes prefer to escalate to management to say “no” for them. Breaking them of that habit can be close to impossible.

In agile organizations there is definitely the need for tools and platforms. One word of advise is to not overload the teams with varieties different tools, as this will create a complex environment. Simple and easy tools like Jira will work well for most of the time.