Zavemtem, Monday December 5th, CIONET Belgium's last Community Event of the year: "the Fuzzy Organisation" assesses what the deal is with your Agile Transformations. Undeniably, "Agile" has earned its place in the corporate world and will stay there for a while. But how successful are these Agile Transformations and how do we continue to improve our way of working further?

The answers to these questions are diverse and complex. To provide the participants with plenty of opportunities to identify key take-aways for accelerating their transformation towards organisational agility, the conference consisted of four main parts:

1. Presentation of the results of the Agile Monitor study
2. A panel discussion with Digital Leaders from four leading organisations that are well on their way towards Enterprise Agility
3. Moderated discussions with peers in breakout rooms and the opportunity to deep dive into the cases presented during the panel discussion
4. Networking with peers

Part 1: The Agile Monitor

CIONET and INNOCOM jointly conducted "The Agile Monitor" study. Between April and September, the Belgian Community was surveyed and 13 interviews were conducted with Belgian Digital Leaders. The Belgian findings were then compared to the global situation as presented in the "15th State of Agile report". We kicked of the conference with a presentation of the key findings  by Mattias Vral, Enterprise Agile Coach at Innocom. 

1. Relentless customer focus
2. A clear, agreed company-wide operating  model, including: An agile way of working (Mindset and governance) and an Intentional organisation (re)design, aligned with that operation model (Structure and governance)
3. An integral, agile change strategy
4. HR as a transformation partner

Part 2: Panel Discussion

The Agile Transformation is a means to an end and not a goal in itself. So making it clear to yourself and the rest of the organisation, why you embark on this journey is the first key prerequisite. The most common objectives are:

1. Improving Business - IT alignement
2. Accelerated software delivery; and 
3. Enhanced ability to manage changing priorities

According to our panel, it's even more important than before to give the organisation a clear direction that provides your empowered employees guidance when they take decentralised decisions. This requires strong alignment within the executive committee and a clear vision of the future direction of the organisation. 

Most organisations look at existing practices and frameworks and want to avoid having to re-invent hot water. All of these frameworks have proven their strengths and weaknesses. Although the clearly provide guidance and inspiration, one shouldn't expect the "one size fits all" definitive answer that works for your organisation. They need to be used wisely, not blindly and the extend to which they are to be used is strongly dependent on your organisational culture. 

Early involvement from HR as a transformation partner is important. However, according to our panel, Digital Leaders should be aware that when they scale their Agile approach from IT delivery to the organisational level, the HR department often does not have an adequate understanding of what this all entails. 

The integration of DevOps is another accelerator for your agile transformation. This is clearly known by our panelists and they acknowledge its importance. One of our panelists stated: "Although, we clearly see the benefits, fully implementing DevOps throughout the organisation remains a big challenge and a focus point for the near future."

It is clearly possible to start scaling your agile transformation to the organisational level before you make DevOps part of it. However, you should consider this a transformation debt that you'll have to pay off at some time. 

Part 3: Breakouts

The lively discussions in the breakout rooms made it very obvious that, despite the fact that most organisations started their Agile Transformation several years ago, the end state has not been reached yet. Good progress has been made on reaching the objectives, but a lot of challenges remain. 

This is clearly a domain, were every organisation has to find its own unique solution. However, you don't have to do it all on your own. The ability to discuss with peers within a trusted environment, clearly is a great accelerator. The last word on Agile Transformations hasn't been said yet and we'll most certainly devote additional CIONET events to this topic.

Part 4: Networking

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