Agile Transformation: Pilot or Big Bang?

Every leader in charge of a transformation process runs into this question. Even those who’ve already started one keep asking themselves whether they made the right call on the scale of the effort needed to guarantee the greatest positive impact.

In this article, I lay out what I see as the advantages and disadvantages of both approaches, along with the challenges a successful agile evolution involves.

Agile Pilot

The word pilot carries a particular connotation of “experimentation.” The truth is, every company that decides to run a “pilot” has a low risk profile.

Advantages

• Pilots can start quickly - you don’t need a major redefinition of roles, responsibilities, or the organizational structure to get going.
• The scale is smaller, so training and coaching costs are lower - training and coaching 50+ or 100+ people isn’t the same as training and coaching 7 to 10.
• A clear, well-defined context (a broken-down, prioritized system, product, or service) helps the team stay focused.
• If individual capabilities are complementary and sufficient to deliver results, it’s undeniable that it brings big benefits - which get perceived as a good speed of action and reaction.

Disadvantages

• Having a healthy, beautiful plant at home doesn’t make you a farmer. Many of the concessions made for a pilot aren’t sustainable at scale. The reality is that a lot of pilots get direct support from senior leadership, and as a result, a lot of internal processes, controls, or policies get waived “in favor” of the pilot. Unfortunately, the right or lasting actions to get the pilot out of that exception mode rarely get taken.
• Once the pilot succeeds, expectations rise, and a bigger “post-pilot” impact gets expected. There’d be nothing wrong with that, except that most of the time, scale or governance was never actually considered. That’s exactly why agility-at-scale frameworks like SAFe, Nexus, Scrum @Scale, DA, and others exist.
• Benefits at the team level aren’t the same as benefits at the program or organizational level. Agility is a cultural transformation, not a set of processes. A pilot rarely addresses the challenges that come with scale.

Big Bang

A big-bang transformation doesn’t necessarily mean changing the entire organization. You could choose to transform a single department - technology, innovation, or human talent. Still, transforming at scale means grappling with the problems and challenges companies with a very large workforce face - and we’re talking about hundreds or thousands of people.

Advantages

• Big-bang transformations account for governance challenges from the start. Far from just promoting change at the agile-team level (small groups of people, also known as cells or squads, to name a couple of popular terms), agility at scale promotes thinking, from day one, about how to organize, align, and work with many people and many teams.
• It promotes strategic, systemic thinking about the transformation, which makes it more durable. A lot of pilots never properly graduate past the “pilot” stage, precisely because they were designed to be pilots in the first place.
• It builds a medium- and long-term plan. Agility at scale gives the transformation process a clear direction. Building the teams is just the beginning of a continuous process of improvement and construction.

Disadvantages

• The first and most obvious one: cost. Scale means more people, more training, and more coaching.
• Resistance to change. Scale also implies a “definitive” change. Once you drop the word “pilot,” the temporary framing disappears, and people who saw the pilot as an “experiment” can feel affected or targeted, becoming detractors of the large-scale process.
• Senior leadership’s commitment has to be absolute. Given the size and duration of the change (12 to 18 months), the transformation process isn’t a group of 5 to 10 people doing “Scrum” (or Scrumbut) - it’s a much bigger commitment at scale.

Personally, my experience tells me pilots tend to fail, which is why I ended up favoring evaluating the large-scale process instead. That doesn’t mean a pilot can’t be the seed of a transformation - I’m just saying that, most of the time, it’s a limited effort with little organizational impact.

Pilots need to be thought of within the context of a complete transformation, and to do that, you need to take them out of the “simulation exercise” framing. That framing doesn’t foster real commitment from the different departments. Pilots, in reality, turn into “favors” or “exceptions” that aren’t sustainable long-term. Conversations come up along the lines of: “keep in mind I helped you before because it was temporary, for the pilot - now that we’re rolling this out for every [project, product, value stream], I need you to meet A, B, and C.”

Pilots should be seen as the first step toward something bigger.

On the other hand, I like large-scale transformation because, given its size, it almost inevitably requires deep commitment to the transformation. Beyond the boardroom clichés like “we need to be agile,” going big actively involves leadership in the process, and the Go/No-Go decision becomes real support for those of us who, from the outside, as consultants, try to transmit that passion, excitement, and practice of an agile mindset.