Exclusive Trusted Magazine Q&A with Jason Schreuder, Leadership & Agility Coach.
How could you describe your career path in a few words
I have been working in the space of organizational transformation, team agility, and leadership coaching for the last 15 years. I leverage my leadership experiences from the military, consulting and fintech to develop high-performing leaders and teams. I served over 7 years as a military officer after graduating from West Point, and then went on to earn an MBA and an MA in Higher Education Administration before transitioning to corporate roles and starting my coaching and consulting businesses. I leverage my expertise in Organizational Agility to support leaders, and teams to achieve greater agility and become better with every iteration.
How do you think agile practices have transformed companies over the past two years?
To answer that, I want to go back a bit and look at this decade by decade. Agile has had a long and fascinating history since the early days of XP and Scrum in the 90's. In the early 2000s, we saw the early adopters give way to the early majority, as essential frameworks like Scrum and Kanban became mainstream in the market. In the 2010s, agile practices extended beyond IT and many companies were on their 2nd, 3rd, or 4th iteration of a transformation. They hired small armies of agile coaches and adopted scaling frameworks in an attempt to bring the goodness of single team agile delivery to all parts of the organization. Fast forward to now, and only a small set of laggards have yet to reap some benefit of a concerted effort at agile transformation. We have seen a shift in the past two years of taking embedded full-time agile coaches and consultants with long-term engagements and building out other enablement functions with the organization. Examples of this include Offices of Agile (a euphemism for Agile PMO) with a specific focus on leveraging scaled agile delivery across an organization and installing discipline of strategic prioritization and release and program increment planning. As these centralized agile offices replace the decentralized approach of assigning agile experts to just a few areas, entire organizations can benefit from iterative delivery and continuous planning.
What successful cases of agile transformations have you had the opportunity to observe that have particularly stood out to you?
I have seen and led transformations on everything from a small software shop trying to bring more predictability and stability to their Scrum practices, to full-scale organizational transformation, where business and technology reorganized into cross-functional delivery teams and programs (or product areas) and the name of the game was organizational agility, adaptive planning, and as much transparency as possible. The organizations that succeeded the most, particularly at scale, were the ones that had full leadership buy-in from the top, a clear and present call to action with a significant up-front investment in training, establishing roles and getting an operating model in place (one that applies to everyone, not just product development teams). These successful transformations then developed a delivery and enablement function (sure, call it an Agile Office) whose mission was to bring transparency and adaptive planning to ways of working and delivery, driving continuous improvement, not simply to maintain the status quo.
Will agile practices continue to generate interest? What challenges do you see in the context of deploying these practices?
Absolutely. I know there is still a market out there for agile practice enablement. While many organizations have had several reps now with "installing" agile practices, the ones that have any staying power treat organizational agility as a way of working, not a destination to declare agile victory on. Agile may have become mainstream, in one sense or another, but we are a far cry from realizing the full benefits of rapid iterations, radical transparency, decentralized authority, and stable happy teams across the industry.
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