Making agile stick?

Using psychology is key to our success

Agile transformations aren't process oriented. They're people oriented. This means we take an approach with people change management at its heart. These things help create an agile mindset.

How does it work?

You’re not going to get faster delivery, lower costs, and higher productivity if people don’t change the way they work. When you want to change to contemporary ways of working, you will need to change people’s actions and behaviours. 

A+B-C
As people change their actions (processes, practices) and their behaviour (value-driven ways of working), then a long-lived, agile culture will emerge. Ultimately, this is how to create an “agile mindset“.

We look for actions and behaviours

When people’s actions and behaviours are agile, these are the signs our coaches look for, encourage and reinforce. 

Actions

Sprinting, Limiting WIP, Reducing Batch Size, Minimising Waste, Continuous Improvement, Visualisation.

Behaviour

Transparency, Collaboration, Empiricism, Focus, Openness, Respect, Courage and Commitment.

Frameworks to help guide our clients

ZXM uses Prosci® ADKAR® as the foundation of our engagements. We assess teams, leaders and executive’s readiness to change, and align communications and coaching plans to the stage of change.
ADKAR for agile adoption
ADKAR for agile adoption

Starting with people with a desire to change

Identifying a group that has a desire to change is key to starting with agile. These are people who likely already have an awareness of the benefits that agile can bring to them.

We help managers start with a few teams and then help them to learn how these people adapted to changing the way they work. 

Scaling to the program

As team’s ability to be agile strengths, and we see signs of both actions and behaviours, we work with leadership to scale agile to the program. 

Empower executives

We train and coach them to manage the new human system of work, particularly where prioritisation of strategic initiatives and managing risk is concerned.

Mentor Change Agents

We create the capability necessary for you and your leaders to understand the actions and behaviours to encourage and reinforce.

Train teams

We help them to work collaboratively at scale, plan, delivery and integrate work in a low-risk way. We do this trough a unique mixture of training and on-the-job coaching.

Sustaining your change by building your own agile capability

After 6-9 months, the temptation is to pull your foot off the accelerator. This is a high risk time when people feel they know enough about agile to go it alone. Without sufficiently strong leadership, and a strong agile group cultural dynamic, the culture can easily slip back into old habits. This behaviour puts your investment at risk.

We put leaders in control of building an internal agile coaching capability so that organisations can sustain and grow their own agility.

We don't want you to go backwards!

Sustaining our client’s business agility is vital. 

Our clients’ leadership and Lean-Agile practitioners receive monthly coaching and training sessions in order to keep up-to-date with the latest patterns and practices. This helps you reap the maximum benefit from your investment in agile.

Where we focus

graph

We deploy metrics

Our Agile IQ tool is key to understanding agile culture - actions and behaviours - and where leaders need support to strengthen their emerging agile culture.

We develop your internal agile coaching capability

Our coaching program helps turn your managers into change agents using systems thinking.

We support your leaders

Psychology and human change is a complex science. Our agile consultants keep you in touch with the latest agile trends to support you to influence cultural change.

How long does it take?

Using our frameworks, consultants and tools, we see agile actions emerge in as little as 3 months. Scaling to the program, in a way that supports cultural change, can take up to a year. The larger the system of work that we’re helping to change the longer it takes to change the entire culture.

Case Studies

Is it time to create an agile culture?

Talk to one of our experts now.

agile iq academy logo 2022-05-05 sm

Enter your details

search previous next tag category expand menu location phone mail time cart zoom edit close