The power of the First 90 Days

Moving from a consulting job to a permanent role in a new organization is never easy. From a consulting role with an airline industry client to an Agile delivery role with a major health insurance company - comparable size (160K+ employees), corporate culture, multimillion dollar projects, agile at significant scale and yet, everything was different and new for me there.

Multiple challenges, ultimate uncertainty, lack of buy in, significant resistance, lack of trust, strong waterfall mentality - everything that we are so well familiar with as change agents coming to an organization as agile coaches and leaving as part of the transformed and high performing work environment leaving high performing and self organizing teams behind. I did not come to my new job to leave though, the scope was unlimited and the amount of work would last long enough for a long professional life span and well beyond. I came to enlighten, transform, and execute.

I was excited. I had great conversations at multiple job interviews that resonated with me. Agile at significant scale, like minded agilists excited about building products that transform healthcare and delight customers. I did my research, asked a lot of questions, and felt that I was well prepared. I spent my two days before joining putting my 90-day plan together. It was a no brainer. Build relationships, create the team, hire as needed, put together a transformation roadmap, socialize, get buy in, come up with a training and coaching approach, position the team externally, empower them, get them the tools, identify continuous improvement opportunities, decide on metrics, start execution, compare the baseline with the first few sprints' data, and celebrate successes.

Pretty simple for a 90-day plan. I wanted to assess the environment and start whatever would take me to change the delivery culture and mindsets at scale. I was excited about my 90-day roadmap! It was following the SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, result-oriented, time-bound) format, so each milestone had specific acceptance criteria and the timelines. For example, I was committing to building relationships by introducing myself to 5 people per day within the first 10 days, 2 people for the following 20 days, and 1 person the remainder of the 90 days. There was a breakdown which areas of the organizations these relationships should come from because I wanted to cover software delivery, project management, product management, business side of things and other dedicated teams. All thought through in minor detail.

I started with a lot of enthusiasm of an Agile coach who came to an organization to stay, to transform it from waterfall to the collaborative culture of ongoing delivery. I was thinking hackathons, product workshops, innovation weeks, collaborative spaces, agile at scale, multi-day PI planning sessions, changing the way healthcare is administered and perceived. My 90-day plan was translated into color-coded stickies and attached to the wall in my office. I was all set and ready to sprint.

The following 90 days were a torture. My 90-day release planning for a new job was forgotten. It was an ongoing never ending set of challenges ranging from archaic engineering practices to the process challenges multiplied by the high distribution rate for team members, lack of trust with the business, and ton of inefficiencies. But the people were amazing and teams were willing, and the product team was a fountain of ideas and suggestions!

So I did my version of Agile maturity assessment, spent a lot of time with teams and stakeholders and while doing that, met like-minded people and created multiple task force teams to address prioritized action items for continuous improvement. We made it a rule that every day we want to accomplish something, even though it may feel small and insignificant. And each time a user story was completed, I moved a user story on our kanban board to the right column tagged as "Completed". I worked around the clock, worked directly with multiple teams, and somehow things started moving. The teams moved into a cadence, became higher-performing, were moving ahead fast, implemented ATDD, and were plowing ahead overall.

So one day I came to work, checked stickies on my 90-day board and was stunned to notice that all the stickies are gone from the left and the right column has them all as completed. All my tiredness was gone and I was more excited about my Agile delivery role than ever. The teams within my portfolio are not highly performing yet, but they are developing quality software at cadence, they are collaborative, innovative, empowered. Their technical maturity is growing. Team members work at sustainable pace. I looked at a calendar, and - surprise - it was exactly 90 days since I started my new employment. All of a sudden I realized that I've completed all my user stories - my 90-day sprint was not wasted. Just like Michael Watkins says in his book, "The First 90 Days", it is all about building momentum during a challenging transition.

So the momentum is built now. The transition roadmap is in place. This is where the power of the first 90 days is!