Abstract: Over the course of the last two and one-half years, Fannie Mae has worked aggressively to transform itself from a heavily silo’d and firmly entrenched command and control culture, following a gated workflow, with long release cycles, to an Agile organization. Today, Fannie Mae is a more dynamic value oriented organization that is responsive to stakeholders, focused on achieving greater efficiency by enabling fast-feedback loops, as well as using empirical data to optimize mature and persistent agile values and practices.
Within the larger context of the transformation to enterprise agility, this Experience Report will focus on the case for change, Fannie Mae’s journey and the corresponding challenges, benefits and key learnings realized. Our conclusion, while it is important to build bridges with business stakeholders, mature agile teams, leverage automation and embrace the values and principles of the agile manifesto… a successful and longstanding transformation is dependent upon the unrelenting focus on changing the ecosystem supporting the organization’s change at the outset.
Lessons Learned from Your Experience: - - An agile transformation at the team level optimizes locally and is fragile
- - An agile transformation at the program level optimizes locally and is also fragile
- - Rather, the momentum supporting an agile transformation comes from the ecosystem supporting the organization and should be leadership’s focus for change at the outset… focus to late on changing the ecosystem and the transformation will collapse.
- - Leadership and Management are pivotal change agents required at the outset to change traditional ways of thinking, embedded legacy culture as well as organizational challenges to sustainable transformation.
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