This document was one part of the feedback from me when I left the H&M 2020-11-30. The purpose of this document was to shine the light on improvement from experienced Agile Coaches on the transformation from an outside-in perspective. Today – 2,5 years later – i hear that many of my friends at H&M are getting fired. This is one of many things i predicted in this document.

This document was handed over to Head Of Agile transformation and CIO on my last day at the company as i always do on my assignments. I have in this post renamed people for privacy reasons.

How this document was done

When leaving my assignment as agile coach I always offer the organization a review from my perspective with previous (approx. 20) agile transformations as reference. To start with I asked the other senior agile coaches to contribute to the analysis I did with a SWOT approach. This board served as the input and in total four senior agile coaches contributed to this: https://easyretro.io/board/7ff94af0-b3c0-46cd-ad7a-992e1c1791fb/1a0659c9-1810-4006-adb2-48f8ebc57362

This work lives in Jira here: https://hmgroup.atlassian.net/browse/CCTAGWOW-764.

Then I put each card in a cluster/category and below is the data exported from the SWOT.

With the SWOT in mind I selected my top issues to improve and elaborated on these with suggestions on improvements.

SWOT

AC (category)

Opportunity (O in SWOT)

Steve Noteing and Mike Broad need to step up as strategic coaches to support the transformation. It is a waste to have experienced coaches in the teams when new ACs should start in the teams first and practice with them as mentors.
Some senior ACs to coach the coaches instead of being expensive consultants for immature teams.
We have a lot of experienced people both in teams and within the AC community – how can we get the most of everyone.
Huge number of people (coaches) with diverse backgrounds and experience could bring in interesting points of views, ideas and observations to the transformation.

Threat

What happens when at least half of the ACs will be redundant next year?
The company will be flooded by AC without experience by 2021
Unclarity about what happens after all teams have been ”waved”, what are the expectations, may create loss of momentum and apathy.
AC is trained in theory but not in practice. A lot of not qualified but certified AC will be on the market.

Strength

Great experienced Agile Coaches on board.

Weakness

Only 53 ACs in Wow gathering
69 participants/ACs in the WOW gathering but no one had a question about the WOW function. PS?
No coaching of supporting functions.

Transformation

Strength

Great guts to start a transformation like this
High ambitions and people in general are positive and the need for change.
Great spirit and engagement
The transformation seems to have good support from higher management
No SaFE certifications
Organization values match very well those of agile (at least in paper)
“Hostile takeover of IT”.
High D in ADKAR when let pop

Weakness

McKinsey approach (copy and paste)
Low scores in the surveys. 40% answer rate and 3,8 in average.

Community

Opportunity

Arena to be the ”war room” for the transformation and ”ungdomsgård” for ACs.
When we become WE the transformation starts for real.

Weakness

Is the AC community too large? When asking a question in agile CoP channels it’s almost the same people that answer and share information.
Sometimes you get information or questions on the side – that gives me the feeling that not all actually use the network with competencies.
Ofelia steaming another step on fragmenting information. Low maturity in community building.
It is quite difficult to build a network in the current setup.
No community
Community’s (Teams) are not active.
Psychological safety is low so people fear of asking questions.

Culture

Weakness

No WE
We and them culture The company/Consultants/TCS/Etc
Consultants educated in roles on behalf of employees.
No guts coaching TCS in Agile
Too many consultants to drive engagement in the change. They have another agenda.
Everyone has worked +10 years in The company. No perspectives.

Threat

Differences in how employees and consultants are treated, when consultants are in many cases most of the team. It may create future problems for commitment, knowledge transfer, etc

Strength

Everyone has worked +10 years in The Company. Strong culture.

Education

Strength

PO-prepp ambition great
There is good material available for supporting different activities in the transformation.
Great teachers

Weakness

A lot of defect slides within PO-prepp, not corrected.
In early sessions questions were not answered. Just reading from the PPT without facilitation skills.
Powerpoint material from McKinsey
Sprint 0 is more stressful than valuable
Students not active
No practice aligned with theory.

Feedback

Weakness

Feedback is focusing on grades rather than improvement.
NO feedback culture

HR

Weakness

HR not aboard
No onboarding processes
No growth process in HR
No offboarding process in HR
The diversity culture is just a facade
Psychological safety is low in general.
No learning path defined
Fear om challenging the strategy
Headhunters without skills on agile are contracted within The Company
Quote: ”The company is a sect”
No one in HR skilled with agile
Recordings of workshops waste and create an unsafe environment.
I lead and develop myself is not supported.

Information

Weakness

Information silos and confusion
Low maturity on transparency
Communication has not been handled in the best way. Even when there is lots of information, this has not always reached the people being affected by the changes. (Around 6 weeks ago I met a person who told me ”I have now a new team and it is called Sprint 0”)
No information about teams and product areas
No information strategy – big confusion on what to find where

Leadership

Opportunity

When leadership is on board use them to be the role models

Threat

Leaders (DL, PM, PALE etc) easily fall into the old way of working and have a hard time to work through the OKRs. Gets more action oriented than vision,
Management too optimistic about progress

Weakness

Management not skilled or trained in agile WOW.
Many former project managers are now being transformed to agile coaches without the core understanding.
Transparent OKRs for managers drives the change

Metrics

Threat

The metrics set for measuring the results of the agile transformation seem a bit arbitrary and difficult to measure. Double the impact in half the time by 2023, what does this mean? I haven’t been able to see any base line. Also, the metric about having an average of 3 in the maturity assessment
Backlog balances do not include specific measurement for the transformation.

Weakness

AMA is micromanagement. Each team should own their own journey toward 2Impact, 2Value.
Double impact, half the time is a bad goal. More a decent vision.
No realistic plan for half the time, double impact.
Lack of focus and clear objectives in the organization. When we have 8 objectives and 5 prioritized initiatives for the coming quarter, they don’t make any easier the prioritization for the teams
No idea how to measure speed and value in Jira.

Misc

Weakness

The Union
No definition of team.

Office

Strength

Great location

Weakness

Office not optimized for our WOW

Recruiting

Opportunity

Easy to attract experienced ACs
This big transformation is attracting a lot of attention. If it goes well, it can be a powerful way to promote the company and attract talent.

Strength

Insight in that we need more employees and hiring.

Roles

Weakness

Too much on PO plate creates stress
PAAC role not specified (and redundant)
The PAAC role redundant
The Competence Role incompetent
PAM and PALE not agile
The SM role has not been given enough importance. This has a direct impact on the teams
Some people in key roles, such as POs, are still being trained now when they start with a new team. They are inexperienced and the expectations on them are huge
Big confusion about ScM hat
The ScM role is a hat and or taken seriously. Job is offloaded to PO.
The degradation of the Scrum master

Strategy

Threat

Not get momentum and go back to status quo
No plan for how to onboard/educate after the waves.
20% impact on PO-prepp, Bootcamp etc. will drive back to basic behavior after the waves. ”

Weakness

Strategy broadcast has operative KPIs
OKRs not including agile effort
Not engaging experienced PO in strategy work
No onboarding of management (bottom-bottom approach)
No maturity on the discovery of the delivery.
Agile competence ”above” team level is not getting their hands dirty with a focus on PowerPoint.
Should be in the teams.
Epics are projects in disguise
No business agility

Weakness

Alibi SaFE implementation inspired by McKinsey.

Team

Weakness

Teams are not real teams. (product team)

Strength

PA product exploration is a great ”frontrunner”.

Tools

Strength

Office 365 support is excellent with some great teams.
Great strategy with ”slim config on Jira ”

Weakness

Low Atlassian maturity
Atlassian support weak
Usage of freeware (Miro etc) without alignment with security restrictions
Being forced to use mainly free tools for facilitating online activities is very limiting and frustrating. It feels like I must spend time finding workarounds instead of focusing on the stuff that really adds value.
Confusion and no clear directive on what tools are mandatory.

Transformation general

Strength

Great guts to start a transformation like this
High ambitions and people in general are positive and the need for change.
Great spirit and engagement
The transformation seems to have good support from higher management
No SaFE certifications
Organization values match very well those of agile (at least in paper)

Weakness

Bottom/Down approach instead of ”marinated”.
In the original plan psychological safety was in. Taken away in the waves.

WOW team

Weakness

WOW stream team has no goal and mission – just working.
No transparency from WOW stream team (demo)
No direction in what’s mandatory and what’s optional.
Sprint themes not communicated well.
Low scores on training, tools etc.
Playbook static and too extensive. Not inspirational and not directional. So, what is it for?
Manager: ”The new ACs should shut up and listen”
It seems that the opinions from the coaches are not really considered for improvements. When talking to some people I get the feeling of ”yes, this is interesting, but we already have a plan and we are going to stick to it”.
Some WOW people not experienced from agile

Summary

In this part I summarize the SWOT and put it into my observations. Each part is ending with a recommendation on how to move forward.

Agile coaches

150 Agile coaches were told to be recruited to serve 350 teams. With that said it is expected the role of the agile coach as we know it needs to be reviewed. At the same time, it is said that the main job for these ACs is to coach the teams. The balance was 50/50 on consultants/employees and with that said a huge education effort will be needed to find work for them. On the other hand, we reduced the importance of the Scrum Master to a rotating assignment rather than a role. And as the Product owners were on the school bench as well, a lot of unskilled people with just theory sessions as support was running the ship now.

Before my assignment here I classified agile coaches in three categories

The Scrum master as we know him but now upgraded with a new title. Often promoted by big consultant agencies or brokers.
The priest has a brand-new certificate and preaches the book, often SaFE.
The qualified with +10 years of experience and perspectives, often contractors with a too high price tag.

After this session I will add one more category and that is the new manager. This is what we produce here with the reskill approach. A lot of former mid-level managers now enter the world of agile but their manners with Gantt charts and resource allocation will expose them when they hit the real teams.

I started the initiative about creating an AC community called Arenan. It is still a great idea but waiting for Corona to end to be materialized. But we have in the meantime tried to create a virtual Arena in MS Teams called the Agile CoP. But looking into statistics there are 150 ACs in 10 channels posting four (!) posts each day and getting 10 replies. Going into detail the active people are, five Senior Agile Coaches produce 50% of the discussion and 90% of all ACs are not contributing at all. I guess psychological safety has a role here why people don’t ask and grow the community.

Advice:

Reinstall the ScMs and put the ACs in pull-mode. That is, the ACs to serve teams, managements etc. with administrative and facilitation tasks primarily on demand and make ScM great again. Take care of the qualified ACs and set them closer to management.
Soon at least 50% of the ACs will be redundant as all ACs become if they don’t get back to their old work.
Put focus in creating a safe community where everyone including management contributes.

Management and leadership

In june we started 10 experienced agile coaches as a result of a need for “coach of coaches” but soon we understood it was 100% coaching of teams. We also understood that it was a trick to get great ACs into the organization, bypassing the Union as they at the same time gave a lot of old school managers the sack. A big part of the role as an experienced AC is to challenge the status quo and we did. But the management resisted with famous words like “can these ACs just shut up and execute our plan”, not knowing they were unmuted. We experienced coaches became a threat in the new roles of the management and were not listened to. I gave a lot of feedback to existing efforts, but I got no response. A handful of the other ACs did this as well but when not speaking with one voice it was easy to neglect.

I wanted the WOW group to have public demos on their ideas before execution, but we were only there to execute them, not challenging them. Some of them had bad implementations of agile but also many great things they would get our support in. The material we executed upon was powerpoints very similar to those I recently seen at another company, with the McKinsey brand removed. The WOW group was a beacon in the agile sea with a Gore-tex entrance for other than the core managers. With maximal non transparency and far away from the daily work unless monthly sessions speaking to the people. At least from the perspective of the operation. I should later join this group as a result of my complaints and then understand it was not Gore-tex, rather nuts and bolts on the door. The people outside this core team were considered annoying and we senior agile coaches were.

PAM and PALE were the closest managers we saw. At least they were present at the PI-planning for a start. They did not have any education for this effort and were seldom into demos and other events. The role of the PAAC was their only support, taken by a senior manager who added senior to her new agile coach title without any previous experience and still on the school bench. I know as I was her mentor. She soon understood I was in her way for her ambitions, so we ended the mentorship not letting me get close to her management.

But the biggest defect of the organization setup was the “Competence lead”. That role was to be an infiltrator in the teams working 50% with teamwork but also 50% as undercover boss and “leading competence” and setting the salaries, all things our traditional “group managers” do. As an AC I had a Competence lead as well. But she was always on the school bench learning to become an agile coach and did not support me or challenge me. Fortunately, this role has not been executed by design yet and could be aborted.

Also, there was a strategic transformation approach to go “bottom up” meaning to start with the teams and then management. I have seen this strategy fail too often to think we are on the right way here. I always recommend a “marinated” approach where management exposes their weakness along with the teams and learns together. The “change curve” for each “layer” must be aligned.

Management is not active in the community and builds a culture of unsafety. The WOW group have made 5 posts per person since June while experienced ACs have done 50. I expect this is due to being afraid of asking questions they in their roles should know and expose weakness. This weakness is exactly where great leadership starts.

A great example of old school management was when the latest strategy broadcast announced metrics about the Agile Maturity Assessment and lead times without engaging the teams. No one spoke up and questioned this which verifies my idea about low psychological safety as well. The KPI said going from 8 to 7 days for a story to be done but when scanning Jira the current benchmark for stories is 69 days. I don’t think it is as bad as this as the data probably is biased from the new way of working. https://hmgroup.atlassian.net/secure/Dashboard.jspa?selectPageId=13193

Advice:

Please abort the roles of Competence lead and PAAC and make sure the team (including PO) steps up with support (and not only feedback once per PI) from PAM and PALE. Also make sure that all managers demonstrate the behavior we want. Such as exposing their vulnerability and giving credits to great work.
Set up a hub-and-spoke structure for WOW when
Make sure that management is onboarded at the same time, not after. Make sure they understand the importance of Psychological safety first and go from there.
Give the book Management 3.0 to all managers and do a book circle.

Psychological safety

Or PS as I call it. Having introduced PS as a cornerstone for server companies this one was trickier. PS was removed from the original education agenda by some reason, but I introduced it as a channel in MS Teams where discussion started. I also held a lightning talk on the topic where I exposed my weakness with a secret agenda on making the management comfortable to do this as well. This weakness from me was later held against me in my assignment and perhaps this was the reason for letting me go? To summarize my effort in PS it was hard when the culture is of type stampa silenzio. This was even more obvious when people contacted me on LinkedIn and encouraged my endeavors with the PS-mission, rather than speaking out loud. The company has the lowest PS I have seen. And that is a few. I Also held workshops with HR on the topic instead of HR holding this for me. More on this below on category HR and culture.

Advice:

Management stands up and makes it safe to fail. Expose your weaknesses and live by your core values about teams, open-minds and belief in people.
Add PS as slide 1 i all presentations and live by it.
Make HR the driver for this and engage the Union to get a great place to work at.

Product teams

Before joining the company, I thought of it as very mature but when seeing teams in action I know this is not true, except for the PX domain where we have some great teams. In the first wave the “Frontrunners” were schooled into the new WOW and a couple of them from the PX domain. Those frontrunners not being in PX domain were very immature and had product owners with a “can by myself attitude”. For these teams I applied a pull approach which I later understood I should not have done. A big defect in the setup is as told the weakness of the PO having too much pressure, the ScM stepping back and the infiltration of the Competence lead which will, at the best, make this a decent group of people and not a team. My idea is that teams cannot be product teams as much as football teams cannot be named Red Bull Salzburg, Kopparberg Göteborg or PSV Eindhoven. To get the WE feeling real TEAMS need to have an inner cause and this is not a product as the product will die when value is not created. The real TEAM is not, just shifting focus.

Advice:

Learn from PX and copy but first reinvent the roles with the ScM on top as the agile coaches.
Create real TEAMS with team missions rather than product missions and visions.
Let the teams create their own KPIs and OKRs.
Give the book Team Topologies to all teams to start their journey towards self management,

Roles and responsibilities

A lot of anxiety comes from the new roles that people have gotten from 1^st June. Especially the removal of the ScM has made the PO role more important and with this a lot of uncertainty. As I see it is a way of reducing “overhead” and moving this to the team under the slogan of autonomous teams. For now, it is very confusing for everyone what expectations we have on each other and what a team is. This makes people feel stressed and is a main reason for low scores in the surveys about how people feel in the transformation.

Advice:

To start with, every team creates a RASCI matrix and has a goal to remove this in favor of self direction for all teams. This approach gives a great starting point and a great foundation for discussion and improvement.
Let the ACs be Scrum masters to start with and make sure they school the whole team first in the “hat of the ScM”.

Education

The education did not start off well with an external company taking the heat without any business knowledge just talking from the narrative in the McKinsey slides and without business context. The feedback was tough on them. Later it should be better when experienced company people took over the education.

Still I question the value from the Bootcamps and PO-prepps and other workshops online as many people do not interact. My guess is that approx. 20% of the information during education is processed by the students due to the virtual format and the psychological unsafety bias. Also, after education people need to practice asap, if not we are down to 10%.

No education is planned after the transition. The education strategy is local education on demand for each product area.

Advice:

Make all education with a test so people need to also understand what has been trained and make sure training and practice are tightly integrated.
Train the trainers in facilitation.
Make the team commit to OKRs that embrace the wanted WOW and are educated upon.
Create a learning path for everyone with a mandatory part and an optional part.

HR and culture

In every agile transformation HR must be on top, as it is all about people. And perhaps also be the driver. Here HR is in the backseat in a “supporting function” with no agile or lean skills, trying primarily to recruit and fill the huge gaps of ACs and software engineers now needed. Quantity before quality. I will in a separate document tell my story about my employee experience that has been not of the caliber you can expect from a company with core values as “we believe in people”. When I started I heard of people leaving the same thing but I thought it was disappointment only for not being one of the chosen few. Now i am there but at least trying to give constructive feedback so next recruitment will be aligned with the mutual expectations.

The culture HR is supposed to drive should be enforcing the core values of the company but instead I often hear about “the sect” and I can sense this when people introduce themselves with the years they have worked for the company, before their names. It is not easy to come new to this company.

Advice:

Create an employee journey process, live by your values and make sure you are within the team of WOW and drive the HR aspects as they are the core of an agile transformation.
Educate HR in Agile. How can they hire people when not knowing what it is?
Put HR in the transformation team and make them on top.
Consider the agile onion and start with the mindset instead of as now the proceses and tools.

Tools

The confusion or should we say, war between Atlassian, and Microsoft fans is substantial. I think there is a great Jira/Confluence setup and using MS for other stuff in combination is great. Also, the resistance of configuration of Jira is a great habit to avoid Jira havoc.

It was hard to find information about anything. The fluffy movies and monthly broadcasts excepted that was great but when wanting information you need to know where to goto and then do a search.

No communication strategy was in place. All information was spread over the intranet, sharepoint, confluence and MS Teams. How to find what was for a newbie not so easy. The usage of MS Teams was also unmature. We need to be more specific on what tools are mandatory and for what purpose. Do not give the teams freedom if not having a great reason. Here the balance between alignment and self direction was very unclear and a firm hand had been better than the weak “depend on” answers.

Pre-delivery (discovery)

Looking into Jira I can see no proper discovery activities. Also nowhere inte the office or the intranet. How can we then make sure we are doing the right thing with transparency? All focus is on the delivery part of the machine and what comes from above is not transparent other than a Jira board.

To be honest – the discovery skills are low and a look into features and portfolio epics verifies this. Did we get rid of all business people?

Advice:

Make discovery a fundamental part of the knowledge and add to PO-prepp and Bootcamp.
Get support from skilled business analysts and agile coaches and set up a process around the “double diamond”.
Make the role of the “business analyst” a core skill in every team as a person that supports the Product owner.

Summary

“It takes as long as the company is old” someone said about an agile transformation.

If I should put my money anywhere, I should put it on the management. A management that is on a journey for their first time as all others but for some reason excepted from the transition. Create personal transparent OKRs for management such as “trained in Agile” etc.

I am available on a consultant basis after my time at the company for 2300 SEK/h if needed. I would love to do a review as a temperature check on my report and on the transformation as such in one year?

Ove Holmberg

Senior Agile Coach 2020-06-01 – 2020-11-30

Thanks to four other senior agile coaches for the SWOT