Establishing an agile transformation office (ATO) can improve the odds of success. Whether your transformation aims at only part of the enterprise or across the whole of it, a successful journey should have a structured approach that can deliver value.
An ATO shapes and manages the transformation, brings the full organization along, and—perhaps most important—helps it achieve lasting cultural change. The ATO is not meant to be an oversight board or another layer of bureaucracy. Instead, it is embedded within the existing structure, pulling in the right business expertise to realize tangible outcomes.
Becoming a truly agile organization is a long-term proposition that takes place in phases. A centralized ATO can not only propel the transformation but also ensure the “stickiness” of cultural change across an organization. It helps identify and resolve issues that can slow the pace of the transformation and keeps the focus on creating value.
In essence, agility at an enterprise level means moving strategy, structure, processes, people, and technology toward a new operating model. It achieves all this by rebuilding an organization around hundreds of self-steering, high-performing teams (supported by a stable backbone) and by changing the organizational culture.
An agile transformation is both comprehensive and iterative. It is comprehensive because it clearly defines what the organization is trying to achieve and creates the processes and structures needed to reach these goals. It is iterative because it requires the organization to test, learn, and correct course as each part of the new operating model is implemented