PD SPOTLIGHT CHERYL TANSEY
HR in an agile world How can HR respond quickly and flexibly to our organisations’ ever-changing needs? Cheryl Tansey, international agility coach, seeks to find the answers.
both the private and public sectors, experienced these challenges. So we know first hand how expensive and frustrating it can be to wait three years to discover that what we asked for is not what we are getting.
How flexible is your planning?
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Planning, predicting and setting goals continue to be an incredibly important part of delivering value in Agile. Provided our plans can flex.
Originally designed to help teams deal with the fast pace of digital innovation, Agile grew in the IT department during the early ‘90s, based on a need to respond faster to change.
With change happening faster than ever before, and as we enter the fourth industrial revolution, artificial intelligence and robotics are creating change for humans at every corner. So flexibility in our planning is fast becoming our competitive advantage.
ands up if you’ve heard the Agile word mentioned recently. Keep those hands up if you still have no idea what it really means! It’s okay; you’re not alone.
How quickly can you respond to change?
During the early ‘90s, the average life cycle of IT projects was about three years. In some industries, many more. This meant it took three years from when a business need was validated to when the IT team could hand over something that would (hopefully) work and would (hopefully) meet that business need. History shows us that things change a lot over three years, especially in IT. As a result, major software projects became delayed, abandoned or, if they did go live, the customer often didn’t want or need it anymore. Some of our largest organisations in New Zealand during that time, in 38
HUMAN RESOURCES
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No longer can we predict three years in the future what our businesses will need, nor can we predict what our customers may want. We need to be able to respond to a changing market.
What role does culture play in Agile?
Agile is more than just a new process, team structure or way to work. Agile is a cultural shift in the way we think about people.
Agile is a cultural shift in the way we think about people. When the Agile Manifesto was created in 2001, the primary goal
was to uncover better ways of developing software by discovering better ways to work. To change the way we work, we must first change the way we think. The entire Agile movement is based on just four simple values: 1. individuals and interactions over processes and tools 2. working software over comprehensive documentation 3. customer collaboration over contract negotiation 4. responding to change over following a plan. That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more. These four values form the foundation of the many Agile frameworks, methods and artefacts that teams around the world now use. In fact, the five largest organisations on the planet, in terms of market capitalisation, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft, all value responding to change over following a plan.
How does Agile move beyond IT?
Throughout New Zealand, organisations are adopting this new way of working in all areas of their business. This includes finance, policy, legal, marketing, operations, communications and, most importantly, our HR teams.
