There are two ways to approach doing Agile in an organization. You either seek to live it or you try to apply it.
To live Agile is to change your culture from the inside out. A transmutation.
To apply Agile is to introduce practices or frameworks on top of your culture. A transformation.
In my company, we chose to move from inside out. To live it.
That means that Agile is integrated into everything we do and it looks different depending on the department. We think a lot about creating iterative Learning Cycles where we quickly define, do and decipher.
For the sales team that means a daily morning standup where we look at the day ahead and explore new opportunities and challenges. For the construction crew, we do a nightly check-in where we look at the day in a quick retrospective before mapping out the next day.
Each time we are listening to each other and learning. New ideas get added to our Kaizen improvement boards and we work these ideas in weekly sprints.
Our strategic initiatives are done with quarterly release cycles, broken into four three-week sprints. The management holds itself accountable by sharing out the progress of these initiatives in quarterly all-hands meetings.
We completely re-imagined how we train, developing Agile Training for new hires and the cross-training of existing staff.
We restructured our company as a Value Network.
To live Agile is to _do_ Agile in a way that empowers the team to work as a committed community that continually delivers more value to our customers. There is no simple formula.