Like any other big change or initiative, if going agile is just a grassroot movement in your organization without the buy-in, support and sponsorship from Upper Management, it’ll eventually hit the glass ceiling and stop growing—i.e., when changes to ways of working need to be made outside of your own silo. Even though agile might’ve started out as a grassroot movement for software developers back, it’s for the whole organization today.

Therefore, an agile transformation should be driven both bottom-up and top-down; without the passion and drive of the teams (the grassroots), it’ll never happen, and without Upper Management (the glass ceiling) in on it , it’ll never make a real difference. And when you do get the needed support from above, remember to take an agile approach to going agile, and slice your agile pilot so it can deliver end-to-end value making the lessons learned relevant for the rest of your organization.