Summary: Is your company going through an agile transformation. In January 2016, the product/development team and I where sent to a 6 month full-time training engagement to bring agile transformation to our product team and enterprise. I think it is time that I write about it. Here are some things you should consider while starting or going through your agile transformation.

Stage of transformation
I have observed 4 stages of transformation.

Training
Team integration
Plateau
Enterprise integration

Training:
Choose a product and IT team that works on a product that can quickly show business and customer experience (CX) results. Pick a vendor to send your entire team off site to learn the agile and lean UX process. The vendor should be an industry leader in training organizations to transform from waterfall to agile and at integrating lean UX research and design into that process. You should work on your actually product while off site. Lastly, look for small wins and ways you can quickly demonstrate how the agile process will accomplish business goals and improve customer experience at a faster rate.

Team integration:
Your team will come back after 4-6 months to your organization. The team will have push through. This will cause conflict while working with other waterfall teams but embrace it. Figure our a process of working with waterfall teams and still with it. Pick and choose your battles. Use your political capitol wisely and little by little. Don't be surprised if some of your team members use all their political, get burned out and leave the company for new opportunities elsewhere. Transformation is a tiring tasks but rewarding work.

Plateau:
Around 2 years in, your single product team that you chose to start the transformation will be full agile. The problem now is they have to work with waterfall teams. The good news is that business leaders across the company will see your teams success and push other IT and product teams to go agile.

Enterprise integration:
At the 3 year mark, other IT and product teams within the enterprise should start making real process changes to transform from waterfall to agile. This will be hard for them and will take each team 3-5 years to transform to a full agile process. If you are an executive at a company, here is what you can do to move your enterprise forward. 1.) Pair up waterfall team members with agile team members. 2.) Guide each team to start with projects that are low risk and have high business and CX impact. 3.) When agile seems to fail the company, don't give up, back up your team and the process with senior leaders/executives in your enterprise and help your team learn and grow with each failure.

Here are some patterns I have seen in my current role that have been effective in building our UX team.

1. Make sure visual designers, UX/interaction designers and UX researchers collaborate together

Collaboration usually happens with a UX team when 2 people work together on a specific product, part of a product or project. The best collaboration happens when the 2 working together have different areas of focus. For example, one of your visual designers would work with one of your UX/interaction designers to help make user flows visual appealing, brand compliant and visually consistent with the rest of the brand. There should be little differences of opinion between them because each person should be seeing the product through a different perceptive. The visual designer is focused on the look and feel and the UX/interaction designer is focussed on the user flows, user interactions and how the user is consuming content.

2. Establish design principles, a style guide and UI kit

If your UX team knows what each element on the page should look like, what UI elements are used for what interactions and how the brand essence should feel to the end users, your team can focus more of their time on high value activities. High value activities might include conduction usability sessions, creating scenario maps, conducting design thinking activities and other activities that help create solutions for UX issues on the product.

Also, working with developers and vendors will take less time. Vendors and developers will really appreciate you for supplying them with documents that will help them give you the product you desire.

Host your design principles, style guide and UI kit in a shared space and make them easy to share with others.

How much of your team’s time is spent on figuring out how a drop down menu should look? Or on other similar, low value tasks?

3. Create a UX process and UX research process and share it with everyone you can at your company

Creating and sharing documents like these can help build your reputation within an organization. Other teams will feel more comfortable working with you and your team. They will get a taste of what to expect before you work with them for the first time.

You don’t have to use every part of your process on every project. However, giving everyone a process that contains all the tools in your tool box will make your team look experienced and well versed in the field of UX.

Thanks for reading. Be blessed, be thankful and enjoy today!