Agile Removes Limitations—You Must Now Change the Rules

Option 3: Changing the Rules—Becoming the Agile Organization
Congratulations, you have decided to take the road less traveled and help your organization become better! Despite the difficulty of doing so, this approach will foster trust, gain additional support for the change, and leverage the great skills and knowledge of people in other teams and groups. It will also enable your teams to get more done when they aren't burdened with process for the sake of process.

I use a fairly methodical technique for this type of situation. It is proposed by Eliyahu Goldratt [1] in his various writings. Goldratt says that organizations make rules to operate in the presence of limitations. By rules, I mean rules, processes, structures, and other arrangements and things. Technology improvements remove limitations. For a change to truly take hold and succeed, the rules that were made to operate in the presence of the old limitations must be eliminated or changed, and new rules created to deal with new limitations. [1]

How can we do this? Follow these steps:

• Determine which old limitations the new process eliminates. For any process step or rule that you encounter, determine why the rule exists. Techniques such as the "Five Whys" and others can help you do this. Sometimes, documentation or experts in said process can help you do this even more quickly. Consult them if possible!
• Remove the rules that existed in the past to overcome the old limitations. Agile methods provide us with principles and practices that overcome many limitations of the past. Validate that the limitations the existing process or rule was made for are handled by the new method. Ensure that those who need the existing process understand this and adapt appropriately, and help them to do this.
• Determine potential new limitations. With any new improvement comes the need to focus on different limitations. This is what continuous improvement is all about. Identify the new, important limitations and adjust your processes and rules to deal with those.
• Repeat! Repeat this process and combine it with frequent retrospection. You'll soon be on your way to embodying continuous improvement in your organization.

All the rules that were made when older limitations existed, if they continue to be your modus operandi, will sap away the ability to improve continuously and embody the change you are trying to make, leech away energy from your change agents, and eventually result in a transition that is mediocre at best. This situation makes it appealing to create a hybrid method, such as combining the Unified Process with agile.

There are other aspects of agile transitions that are important to consider, but changing the rules is a major one that is often neglected due to how difficult it is. Any time you feel like customizing your agile process with something from your former processes, ask yourself if it is because you have found a rule that needs changing!

References
[1] Goldratt, Eliyahu. Beyond The Goal. Your Coach in a Box; unabridged edition (September 1, 2005).