Agile transformations often start with big ambitions: cross-functional teams, happier employees, faster feedback loops, and more value delivered. But years later after the initial energy fades, many organizations find themselves right back where they started — slow, siloed, and stuck in legacy way of working. Major investments made in time, effort and money but with little to no visible effect on the business.
Why?
Because governance didn’t change.
The Hidden Constraint
You can coach teams, adopt frameworks like SAFe, and run Lean training for months. But if your governance model — how decisions are made, how funding flows, how progress is reviewed — still reflects a traditional, project-based mindset, your transformation will always hit a ceiling.
This is especially true if your organization is tasked with building complex products that consist of both hardware and software. You can’t unlock agility on the ground if the top is still wired for control and predictability.
Symptoms of Governance Misalignment
Here’s what it looks like when governance is out of sync with development and delivery:
- Teams are forced to commit to detailed plans years in advance
- Progress is reported in terms of milestones, not outcomes or insight from solution integration
- Funding is tied to projects, not value streams — leading to stop-start-stop work
- Decisions pile up at steering groups instead of being made closer to teams
- Risk is managed by review gates, not through fast learning and iteration
These aren’t just growing pains. They’re signs that your system is protecting itself from real change.
What Needs to Change
Transforming governance doesn’t mean removing oversight. It means rethinking how oversight works.
Transforming governance doesn’t mean removing oversight. It means rethinking how oversight works. For that to happen, mindset needs to change. It needs to shift from focusing mainly on execution of a largely outdated plan to making sure the organizational capabilities are focused on achieving desirable outcomes.
Here are three key shifts I’ve seen succeed in large, legacy-heavy organizations:
1. Fund Value Streams, Not Projects
Move from temporary project budgets to long-lived funding for persistent teams. This enables flow, long-term ownership, and better alignment with customer value.
2. Empower Decentralized Decision-Making
Push decisions down to the level of greatest insight and accountability. People organized in long-lived cross-functional Value Streams is a huge enabler for this. Governance should enable clarity, not create bottlenecks.
3. Measure Progress in Outcomes, Not Milestones
Shift focus from “Did we do what we said?” to “Are we solving the right problem?”
Use OKRs, lean metrics, or customer impact to steer.
Start With One Conversation
You don’t need to overhaul everything at once. But someone — usually at the executive leadership level — needs to name the gap between an ambition to increase organizational responsiveness and traditional governance.
Start by asking:
- What are we funding — projects, or capabilities?
- How do we make the connection between our Strategy and ongoing initiatives?
- How fast can a team respond to validated insight?
- Where are decisions getting stuck, and why?
Changing governance is hard. But without it, even the best teams will be constrained by a system that wasn’t built for agility.
Final Thought
If you want to meaningfully improve agility at scale, you have to change funding and steering — not just roles and events, but governance itself.
I help leaders and organizations make this shift in a practical, grounded way.
Want to explore how? Get in touch — or start by sharing this with someone asking why agile isn’t working.