Boostrapping off of @andybacon’s comment in the SAFe thread… Andy made the remark that “scaling frameworks can be replaced by good leadership, excellent facilitation, etc.” The emphasis in this thread is “good leadership”. I attended a Webinar by Temenos where they talked about the iceberg of agile adoption, and one of their ideas is the idea of three types of enterprise change agents: the Executive , the Internal, and the External. I liked the concept and batted it around in my head, and I arrived at the conclusion that in order for an agile transformation to be successful you need all 3.
The Executive leads from the top down; they sell the idea/story to the other executives, are the face of the transformation to the enterprise, and are deeply committed to the success of the change.
The Internal is the internal change champion; someone who already is part of the organization looking to change, and is fully “bought in.” They may or may not have previous experience in running a transformation but they can help serve as the face of the change to the lower echelons undergoing the transformation.
The External should be someone an organization brings in to help guide their change; they are the “expert” who’s done it before and can offer tips and tricks to making it work and/or stick. As for why should you pay an expert who has answers when you can figure it out yourself…there’s an old Chinese proverb that states “He who asks a question is a fool for five minutes; he who does not ask a question remains a fool forever”.
I was curious to see what others thoughts are; does this make sense? Have you had a transformation succeed where in hindsight these roles were filled? Did you have a transformation fail and in looking back you realize it’s because one of these roles was missing?