As Agile coaches engage in enterprise transformations, there is a common theme among the organizational barriers and impediments seen across most clients. Oftentimes going into new account, organization, or team, it seems like a bit of déjà vu with the type of issues seen, despite how unique each company describes themselves. Usually through some sort of an assessment or an inspect and adapt, the clients all seem to have similar cultural, organizational, environmental, or personnel issues impacting their transformation. While every account does have a unique piece to it and our approach to these common issues can be somewhat standardized, coaches really show value by providing the best solution to their situation.

Some common areas encountered include:

• Annual project and funding approval process
• Lack of visibility into work going on at the enterprise level
• A disconnect between strategy and the actual work being executed
• Culture of fear causing lack of transparency

This lightning talk will review a couple of these impediments, define them, and show how a coach can address and move through them. It’s incumbent upon coaches to help the client understand that these impediments aren’t insurmountable, they just need to be tackled piece by piece. Value can be added in both small and big chunks, but coaches need to ensure they're doing that continuously and pragmatically.

In the scheme of an Agile transformation, one way to improve productivity is to form dedicated or persistent teams (or as close to it as possible). In many transformation roadmaps or plans, this is usually a first step to enable a myriad of the benefits that arise from dedicated teams (such as delivering better value more quickly, better team dynamics and morale, empowerment and autonomy, increased productivity, alignment to scaled models), but there always seems to be an underlying assumption that this transition is simply able to happen. Information is scant on "the how" to accomplish such a feat if leadership or neighboring organizations have not agreed to it or ready to let go of resource allocations of old. Case studies generally cite companies like Spotify and ING in achieving organizational agility, the overall transformation they made (or built up from), but details on one of the pivotal changes is left out. How do you take an organization from scattered, resource dependent, project funded teams to one that has dedicated and persistent teams? This lightning talk will discuss the approaches one can take to help enable and transition to dedicated teams to further an Agile transformation.