The document discusses the cultural challenges enterprises face during agile transitions, particularly in the context of traditional Chinese culture. It explores various case studies that highlight barriers such as hierarchical structures, command-control mindsets, and departmental silos, along with strategies for fostering a more agile-oriented culture. Recommendations include promoting servant leadership, clarifying roles, and encouraging collaboration across teams to successfully implement agile practices.

1. 企业敏捷转型所面临的文化挑战
Enterprise Cultural Challenges
To Agile Transition
王明兰

2. Enterprise Cultural Challenges
To Agile Transition
Wang Minglan
2012.06.07
2

3. Agenda
 Culture and Agile
 Agile Challenges In Chinese Traditional Culture
 Cases In Given Enterprise Culture
 Ramp up – Do’s and Don’ts

4. Culture And Agile

5. Reflect A Bit - What Is Culture About
 People
 Language
 Food
 Beliefs
 Values
 World views
 Behaviours
 Preferences
 Communication
styles
 Relationship patterns
 …… 5

6. “A way of life of a group of people.
Culture is learned, not innate. Culture includes a group's shared
values, beliefs, behaviors, preferences, verbal and nonverbal
communication styles, relationship patterns..”
----- (Chen, Chan, Brekken, Lynch, Valverde 1998)
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7. Culture And Agile

8. Do Dancers Understand Dance’s Essence?
“My organization’s agile implementation
is pretty much mature. Every single team
is running with sprint cadence and daily
scrum smoothly. “ – A manager of a big
R&D department.
What you saw is people’s dancing and
singing, however do you know if dancers get
the essence of dance?
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9. Introspect - Is the Value of Dance Achieved?
“We have been dancing for years, why
performance indicators didn’t show the
improvement of time to market, quality, or
even no clear sign of higher team moral?”
• Did silver bullet achieve your
target?
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10. Cargo Cult – Can They Summon
God-like Aircraft?
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11. Agile Deployment: Way of Working or Way of
Thinking?
11

12. Agile Deployment: Way Of Working Or Way Of
Thinking?
If we don’t change people’s thinking,
we will find transitioning activities are
stuck to the corner easily.
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13. Behind Thinking : Culture
Result
Behavior Way of Working
Thinking Way of Thinking
Culture Way of Being
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14. Agile Culture VS. Chinese Traditional Culture
14

15. Traditional Chinese Culture
 Higher power distance  Lower power distance
 Command and control  Self management
 Clearer boundary between each  Cross functional team
other’s responsible areas
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16. Traditional Chinese Culture
 Manager/Officer position as better  Build project around motivated
career path than engineers individuals. Management as
 Saving face supporting role.
 Grant responsibility  Openness
 Over time work is somehow natural  Taking responsibility
 Sustainable development
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17. Common Elements
Both promote being
adaptable and flexible.
However disciplines are
often forgotten in Chinese
companies.
Agile is not taking short cut!
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18. Common Elements
Both promote result
oriented and near goal
driven.
 However long term
view of successful
products and portfolio
are often neglected in
Chinese companies.
 Agile is not short-
sighted way of perusing
success!
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19. Cases In Given Enterprise Culture

20. Case #1 – Hierarchical Towards Self-organizing
Team
Scrum Team In Definition Scrum Team from
People’s Perception
Product Scrum Product
Product Owner
Owner Master
Owner
Scrum
Scrum
Master
Master
Developers
and Testers Developers
and Testers
Developers
and Testers
Is it strange, or familiar to you ?
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21. Case #1 – Why
 Strong hierarchy culture in
the organization.
New roles of scrum
masters/PO are introduced when
the enterprise is transitioning to
agile; Meanwhile team
leaders/project managers step into
new roles.
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22. Case #1 – How To Deal With It?
Correct roles and
responsibility definitions
and misunderstandings.
Remove hierarchy. Make
PO/Scrum masters use
right leadership style.
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23. Case #2– Command Control Towards Empowered Team
 Is this something familiar to you :
Managers demand schedule to teams and
request detailed reports; Scrum Master
assign tasks to teams; Team members
report to scrum masters/PO.

24. Case #2– Why
 Strong command control and
micromanagement culture in the
company.
 Due to case #1, PO/Scrum Master
take this command control style
naturally, meanwhile teams accept
this style by default.

25. Case #2– How To Deal With It
Promote servant leadership.
“Serve first, lead second”.
Promote coach type of leadership.

26. Case #3 – Machinery Towards Interactions
 Is this something familiar to you:
“robot army” organization. “robot A”
finishes his step then handovers to
“robot B”. If process instructions are
not available to operate, then robots
wait.

27. Case #3 – Why
Manufacturing culture.
Every human is a functioning
cogwheel being controlled and
adjusted.
Heavy processes and tools kill
people’s innovation and
interaction, passion, and
efficiency.

28. Case #3 – How To Deal With It
Adjust the balance among
people, process and tools.
Relieve people from heavy
processes and tools.
Promote individuals’
professionalism, e.g. software
craftsmanship

29. Case #3 – How To Deal With It
Discourage interactions through
processes and tools. Promote just-
in-time, and face to face
collaborations.
One word: Make
people truly become
human!!

30. Case #4 – Silos Towards Collaboration
 Is this something familiar to you:
There is little interactions across
teams. When one team seeks for help
from others, it goes through from both
teams’ management escalation
channel.
 Why
 Overall strong “department silo”
bureaucracy culture.

31. Case #4 – How To Deal With It
 Make common goal visible and
consistent across teams
 Make the common goal the
foundation of achieving team goals
and individual goals.
 Change to feature based teams if
teams are component based setup.
End-to-end responsibility enables
collaboration across teams.

32. Ramp Up

33. Do’s
 ...Why...
 ...Way of Being...
 ...Consistant Vision...
 ...Explictly...
 …Leadership
 …upstream and downstream…
 ...Seeds
 Evolve …

34. Do’s
 Communicate clearly and repeatively on why to transit to agile.
 Incorpate Way Of Thinking into Way Of Working Transition Program towards Way of
Being.
 Provide consistant vision and direction across the organization
 Repeat the voice of promoted culture explictly on daily basis, again and over
again.
 Change managers first! Managers become road blockers if not shifting from
commanding and controlling to servant leading and coaching leadership.
 change of the people in upstream and downstream of scrum teams
 Open eyes, eudcate potential seeds to change themselves. Let the ”seeds”
influence others to embrace agile culture.
 Help teams evolve in stead of predefining everything in PowerPoint then implement

35. Don’ts
 Go all in...
 ...one size...
 ...wrong people...
 ...titles...
 Reorganize…
 …regression…
 …superficial…
 …lose belief…
 …Ignore disciplines…

36. Don’ts
 Go all in overnight without piloting
 Try one size fits all.
 Nominate wrong people playing key roles in scrum teams.
 Make key roles in scrum teams permantly with titles.
Reorganize teams frequently.
 Let teams transitioning progress regress to old way of working and thinking.
 Make scrum ceremonies become superficial as a result making agile essence
not exposed.
 Make teams lose belief in agile
 Let teams ignore disciplines when being flexible.