This learning track covers how to design organizations and strategies that are able to respond and adapt quickly to changing economic, technological, and market conditions. It focuses on how to optimize the entire organization through increased alignment to the flow of work and the decentralization of decision-making. Since there is no one right approach, framework, technique or method to create a perfect adaptable organization, these should be chosen, blended and tweaked to encourage agility in sense-making, learning, and experimentation. As organizations find themselves requiring a higher frequency and level of adaptability in strategic planning than what has traditionally been the case, continuous improvement mechanisms and methods to measure what matters should be established early. This learning track explores all the options available.
Target Audience
Primary Audience: Anyone in a position to make or influence decisions around organizational design, particularly in organizations embarking on a journey to become more adaptive.
Relevant Roles: Senior Leadership, Senior HR Professionals, Department Heads, Directors, or Organizational Design Consultants.
Continuous Improvement
An ongoing effort to improve products, services, or processes. These efforts can seek "incremental" improvement over time or "breakthrough" improvement all at once. Delivery (customer valued) processes are constantly evaluated and improved in the light of their efficiency, effectiveness and flexibility.
Related Resources
Show Summaries
A talk with Esther Derby about what a retrospective really is and the role of the facilitator.
Have you ever wondered what a retrospective really is? What’s the role of the facilitator? Is it just to pick an activity… time box discussions, move on to the next item… write down the action items and assign it to someone? Well if only retrospective facilitation was that simple… what are things to watch out for? What are things to strive for? In this initial episode we invited Esther Derby to answer some of these questions.
The commitments required as foundation for proper team adaptation.
“Responding to change”, is often more difficult than expected. Teams need to adapt, or otherwise be continuously confronted with their ineptitude. The inability to uphold improvement commitments often lead to disappointment and demotivation, but Sjoerd Nijland shares that the Wizard of Oz gives us hope. It tells a tale of individuals, each lacking key elements, can come together and work it out - as long as there is support and trust.
Explaining why retrospectives are the engine for team improvement, and a flexible framework to improve them.
How often does your team meet to brainstorm after a software rollout or an iteration? Too often or rarely? Agile retrospectives are braced to help company teams improve when conducted well. However, they could also fail to deliver expected results when done too often or when the team members do not follow through with the meeting. This article explains what are Agile retrospectives and proposes a flexible framework to improve them.
Understand the pivotal role the Sprint Retrospective plays in Scrum, how to hold a basic session, and what is the importance of a Kaizen.
The Sprint Retrospective, the last ceremony in the Sprint, takes place after the Sprint Review and before the next Sprint Planning. The meeting should be time-boxed to no more than an hour per week of Sprint length. The Scrum Master facilitates the meeting to keep it on track, focused, and within the time-box.
The sprint retrospective should always remain a consistent event at the end of each sprint.
The Sprint Retrospective is often the first item to get skipped when a team is under pressure, often with the intention of getting to it when life is a bit more relaxed and under control. The irony is that this session is most valuable when the pressure is on, and things aren't running as expected. In this article, Cecil Goldstein explains the elements of retrospectives to assist you in never again skipping it.
Illustrating how the act of deliberately capturing and evolving "learning streams" (in addition to the more conventional value streams) can lead to surprising consequences.
Claudio Perrone explains some of the factors hindering effective Agile transformations in most organizations. He points to the fact that traditional Agile approaches haven't been effective and that Agility must affect the entire value stream, not just the development teams. He illustrates his experience by sharing a story of how a company became fully Agile by evolving experimentally. The organization first tested SCRUM and realized it was not a viable option then decided to introduce Lean Techniques pragmatically leveraging the Lean Change Cycle.
Analyzing the elements that sprint retrospectives successful and how to implement them properly.
The most important aspect of agile software development is the continuous improvement, and a great way to bake that into your process is by having regular retrospective meetings that engage and challenge the team to solve their own problems and make things better. However, these meetings can be difficult to run well and drive improvement. In fact, many teams sleepwalk through sessions, treating them as a box-ticking exercise that signals the end of the iteration. In this talk, Chris explains how to put together an awesome sprint retrospective. He discusses the following:
* Why retrospectives can be unpopular
* Structuring the meeting to succeed
* Setting the right tone
* Activities to gather data
* Activities to generate insights
* How to decide what to do
* How to manage retrospective actions
It can be an effective agile adoption pattern & model for continuous improvement.
Used to describe the progression of training or learning, Shu Ha Ri is a Japanese martial art concept that is used to describe the stages of learning to mastery. In this article, Jason Novack shows that its distinct levels are useful guides (not black and white rules) providing a frame of reference to help influence how to approach learning any new skill, including agile adoption.
Building on the power of habits, Toyota Kata will help you build a daily continuous learning and improvement culture - a kaizen culture.
Lean coach Hakan Forss makes an interesting presentation on Restrospective on steroids basing Toyota Kata citing that continuous learning leads to real-time improvements. We see that Kata is the process of synthesizing thoughts and behavior in skillful actions for continuous learning and improvements and the strategy entails identifying the current condition, setting the target condition, facing the challenge, and achieving the vision. view the slides to learn more about Kata.
Why and how the team should reflect on how to become more effective, then tune and adjust its behaviour accordingly.
A Brief Guide to Success with Agile
Agile methods are now mainstream, but many organizational leaders point out that they are not reaping the benefits they expected. This article presents a set of four growth phases that agile teams pass through as they learn. By understanding the challenges afflicting the teams, the authors hope to bring light into where investments should be made and where to look for help when teams don't deliver the desired benefits.
Like all learning processes, transformation means letting go of the image we had of ourselves and embracing an uncertain future of a "new" self.
An agile transformation is a journey, it takes time to change from one framework to another in an organization. Whether it's a leap from a planned approach system to an agile framework or a shift from leveraging SMART Goals to OKRs, the transition requires patience. This is as a result of the period it might take to adopt agile values and principles, or setbacks such as resistance to change by the people. But, ever wondered why such setbacks arise? This article explains where most organizations go wrong when making an agile transformation and coach why it's fundamental to build your relationship with people amid agile transformations.
How to frequently deliver value to customers, measure the results, and adapt accordingly with the smallest investment.
"We all know what “agility” is about, right? It’s about delivering faster, eliminating waste, and becoming more efficient." Kurt Bittner notes, arguing that what if that's not the fact? As many organizations that she speaks with aren't aware if they're heading in the right direction. They work incredibly hard to increase their delivery speed, but once they’ve shipped something they turn their attention to the next release. So what if most of what they just delivered turned out to be waste, or lacking in any real value to their customers? She explores this dilemma on speed, efficiency, and value through the article using empiricism to achieve business agility.
Producing a politically motivated, insignificant success story backed by people who do not exhibit an agile mindset.
The reality is that many organizations that want to "become Agile" start by browsing through the catalog of common frameworks. They pick their favorite, and run a Transformation Program. While they may be communicated as success stories, Michael Küsters casts a bit of light on what is actually going on. He offers his view on the reality of transformations through frameworks, and how they impact expectations, overcome problems, and actually change the culture.
Get your team discussing the burning issues
Eleven formats are shared that can be introduced into the retrospective to challenge the team and get them to discuss issues outside the normal range. Try these ideas when your retrospectives are resulting in the identification of only small improvements.
Agility is the state of being (not just doing) Agile, which means going beyond its “well-known” practices.
Differentiating between "continuous improvement" and "discontinuous improvement" as seen through the lens of systems thinking.
The most exciting part was to meet Alistair Cockburn. My mistake was not raising a hand.
Clickbait-y title or not - I’ve got some stern truths for you.
Benefits of the quality management system implemented at Wolox, in their path to flexible continuous improvement.
Organizational Change Management
Change management (sometimes abbreviated as CM) is a collective term for all approaches to prepare, support, and help individuals, teams, and organizations in making organizational change. Drivers of change may include the ongoing evolution of technology, internal reviews of processes, crisis response, customer demand changes, competitive pressure, acquisitions and mergers, and organizational restructuring. It includes methods that redirect or redefine the use of resources, business process, budget allocations, or other modes of operation that significantly change a company or organization. Organizational change management (OCM) considers the full organization and what needs to change, while change management may be used solely to refer to how people and teams are affected by such organizational transition. It deals with many different disciplines, from behavioral and social sciences to information technology and business solutions.
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Lessons for managing change learned from applying agile mindset in large organizations.
Agile coach Yuri Maalishenko gives an Agile transformation talk focused at the organizational level in this video. Packed with well-detailed visuals, it notes that executives are the principal influencers of change and are often biased by the fact that change is seen as a one-off action. However, he clarifies that this is not the case as the company is usually bombarded by dynamic external events that cause many static Agile transformation efforts to fail. He urges that change should be implemented in steps with a dynamic strategy through the interactive delivery process to achieve customer and organizational value. Check the video webinar to hear more of his insights on the change as a product.
A look at how agile has gotten adopted throughout industry, where it is situated now and where we can expect it to go from here.
Basing on Agile adoption data across different industries collected around the globe, the article proves that agile is not dead as some people perceive. It is actually in its early stages and people are still learning how to do it better - some have even moved forward into more advanced methodologies. This article explores the reasons attributing to the perception that Agile is dead and the preferred way to run your Agile or non-Agile project through the chasm curve.
In 1985 the Ford Motor Company was in deep financial trouble, and bet 3 Billion dollars (not adjusted for inflation) in a new revolutionary way of working to create its last resort.
Ford's futuristic car, the Taurus was the most revolutionary-looking car on the market in the 1980s. It was something new in the American Automotive industry. However, when Ford was rolling out the Taurus, it was on the brink of collapse and the fate of the company was in the hands of the Taurus. The company was on the verge of going bankrupt as some described it was facing a ''financial disaster of epic proportions'' due to the influx of poorly designed and high energy-consuming cars it had in the market. The Ford Taurus was the last throw of the dice for the company. The automobile actually hit the market late but when it was put on sale, it was a blockbuster and netted a million in sales per year saving the company and entire American automotive industry.
Steps to build and sustain change in a systemic fashion using the A.D.K.A.R Model on top of the Scrum Framework.
Many organizations face a challenge identifying a real purpose for change, outside the desire to gain productivity without much effort. Umar Farook shares things the organization can do to achieve balance in the act of sustained improvement. With a focus on the Scrum Master as an agent for change, the author elaborates on how to co-create a safe workplace that instills growth behavior and where people can grow empirically.
A holistic and human-centric approach that enables organizations to succeed today and thrive tomorrow.
Transformation has become a continuous state for most organizations. Leaders must move beyond short-term fixes to envision a compelling future, exchanging the expedient and prescribed set of change actions to an approach that enables execution and innovation to occur simultaneously. This article by BCG shows how to ensure that you: 1) Envision the future and focus on the big rocks; 2) Inspire and empower your people; and 3) Execute and innovate with agility.
How to generate collective responsibility and accountability for service delivery and customer satisfaction.
Changing the culture isn’t a pre-requisite of Kanban, it should be part of the emergent outcome from practicing Kanban. The value gained, depth and maturity of your Kanban implementation will be constrained by your ability to embrace tolerance of failure, through thoughtful, patient, scientific inquiry and the ability of your workforce regardless of pay grade to feel safe making acts of leadership. Ultimately, there needs to be collective responsibility and accountability for service delivery and customer satisfaction, if you are to reach the highest levels of Kanban and reap its benefits.
A look at how to think about organizational change, how to start the process, and how to involve those impacted.
How do we go about producing organizational change? Esther Derby shares her experience in how to get the conversations started, how to prepare the individuals for the change process, how to measure the change effort, how to keep the momentum going, and how to deal with the possible sense of loss. Agile retrospectives are specially important, since changes at the team level will reflect impact on the organization.
Research indicating long-term change is most effective when it occurs over a series of smaller microchanges.
Executives from the digital research company Infosys, explain three micro-change techniques that helped the company make a large scale adoption framework during their multi-year transformation and in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. Based on this experience, they also did a survey on 1000 global cooperate leaders to figure out how the top companies got their people to transition and adapt to the new change induced by the pandemic. They found out that micro-changes were also pivoting these companies to drive their large and lasting transformations amid the pandemic leveraging the three key techniques. Learn more about these techniques in this text to drive successful changes in your organization.
The case study of Penta Technologies, a construction software company that witnessed a six-month cultural transformation from a siloed environment to one with greater agility.
After years of operation under a siloed environment, Penta Technologies, a construction software company realized that the frequency of delivery was slow and inconsistent and there was a complete disconnect between creating value and doing work. They needed a cultural transformation to enhance agility as a profitable software business. The case study outlines the company's agile transformation journey co-led by the President, the CEO, and COO Laura Handerson. Their vision was to stabilize and scale the business through a move to the Scrum framework.
Comparing the EFQM excellence model to the OKR goal management framework.
Rob Davies delivers the first part of his OKR and other frameworks series exploring how the Objective Key Results framework is akin to and differs from the EFQM framework. We learn how the European Foundation for Quality Management model was founded, the history behind it, and its benefits and relationship with OKRs. Dive into the article to learn more about these two frameworks.
If a transformation is really agile, does it fail due to culture or due to lack of understanding about this change process?
One of the key elements of any agile transformation is adaptation of the plan when new insights are gained or when new circumstances present themselves. Sjors Meekels challenges that when things are not going according to plan, you should ask yourself whether it is really the transformation that is failing or something else. Is there enough understanding about this change process, the required organizational capabilities, or the skills needed in shaping this process? Perhaps all that is needed is to adjust the plan.
Four strategies for leaders to apply into their organizations to thrive amid constant change.
The future is nothing but a mystery. We don't know how it will be until it unfolds. The outcome could be in your favor or sometimes the odds could shift against you. So what does this mean for organizations? Should you prepare them for these future outcomes? YES! April Rinne in this article notes that the future is engulfed by constant changes that organizations should always be prepared for to thrive. She gives four steps leaders should adopt to position their organizations ready to survive constant changes and adds that reacting when the change hits, is not viable.
Taking a look at the dark and sad aspects of agile transformations, as they experience downsides and negatively affect business along the journey.
Agile coach and worldwide consultant Anton Zotin makes an informative video conference on "Why you should not start an agile transformation" noting that when making an Agile transformation you're at times in limbo if it will deliver value and people might not want to leave their status quo thus the change might not be effective.
Learn 4 Gamification techniques leveraged by organizations for ultimate performance and successful transformations.
Playing games is exciting, gamers are always motivated and eager to proceed to the next step. They gain psychological gratification and interest to improve their performance to pass even more difficult levels. Organizations have found ways to mirror the gaming world techniques in their environment to trigger motivation and boost personal performance, teamwork, and attain successful transformations.
A successful transformation entails understanding the players' desires, mindset, and involving them in the process.
It's important to consider the desires (heart), the mindset (brain), and the contribution (hands) of stakeholders during a transformation. These elements precede each other and are key to attaining a successful transformation. The heart powers emotions that people cannot intellectually control, while the brain commands people to actively do something. Whereas hands make people do things against their will. Transformations that turn a blind eye to these elements end up failing.
An in-depth explanation of the 3 major Objectives and Key Results (OKRs), that leaders can leverage to achieve successful Agile transformations.
Transforming an organization's traditional culture is a hard task as people are resistant to change. But what can you leverage as the leader to help the organization become Agile? Erik Cottrell in this text shares his knowledge of OKRs to leaders explaining how they can use 3 major OKRs to mitigate Agile transformation failures.
Five key insights into the true nature of change, in order to create profound and transformational change.
Organizations stumble to implement change picturing it as a controllable process that takes a series of phases to transform from the status quo to the desired state. This interpretation sums up what we call "Planned change" and is undermined by factors such as "Resistance" - a force deemed to affect managers and employees equally. However, Niels Pflaeging reiterates change in this text as a "Profound transformation" that involves constant flipping of the current system to a new state, backed by 5 key insights about the true nature of change.
A detailed explanation of the key thing that creates resistance during an organizational agile transformation, how resistance hinders the organization's agile change, and the best way to eliminate it.
Organizations face resistance during an agile transformation from managers, employees, and stakeholders. But what creates the resistance and what is the best strategy to eliminate it? This article explains some of the wrong patterns used by leaders during an agile transformation that promote resistance, and the perfect way to overcome it by involving everyone in the change. It details that agile is not about pushing change onto people, but inviting them in using pull success patterns.
What constitutes to most agile transformation failures in an organization? A dive into behavior change to understand why.
The habits practiced by an organization determine its effectiveness to implement change. Organizations under agile-like approaches "doing agile'', are easier to transcend to agile while it's harder for those that live by the name agile only. Anthony Murphy in this text, uses analogies like the "onion agile" concept to explain how behavioral change hinders most agile transformations in organizations, and why the Fogg behavior model is key to eliminating this barrier.
Accelerating agile transformation by leveraging polarities and converging on the business agility third wave of agile.
SAFe sells the illusion you can radically change without leaving your comfort zone.
Some important ways organizations should consider in the hard side of change project management to make a successful transition.
Often as organizations strive to make a successful change, they face a handful of drawbacks such as resistance to change by the workers, lack of patience by the executives, and not putting in enough effort. As a result, making the transition becomes a steep slope to climb. In this article, we learn what is change project management and how to mitigate difficulties that exist in the hard side of it, using ways proposed in a classic Harvard Business Review article. Sian Dodd adds a checklist of 4 ways organizations can leverage to ensure change success.
Organizational Structure
Organizational structure affects organizational action and provides the foundation on which standard operating procedures and routines rest. It determines which individuals get to participate in which decision-making processes, and thus to what extent their views shape the organization's actions. Organizational structure can also be considered as the viewing glass or perspective through which individuals see their organization and its environment.
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Driving results through social cohesion instead of individual contribution.
Organizations (and individuals) often place value on star employees who outperform others. On this insightful TED Talk, Margaret Heffernan illustrates that grouping high-performing individuals does not lead to greater productivity, and in fact goes against it. She reasons that it is social cohesion - built every coffee break, every time one team member asks another for help - that leads over time to great results.
Experiences in implementing the squad-based model when growing from 100 to 250 employees.
Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at Leboncoin Julien Jouhault shares his company's own experience implementing Spotify's framework and how they finally got it to work for them. He confirms that they implemented the model all the while growing from 100 to over 250 engineers, 35 squads, and 4 tribes. Their approach was under a matrix-based management model that they later coupled with their own Travail d'Organization Ouvert model (TOO) and services architecture, and DevOps principles creating an organization that identifies problems on its own and solves them with the support of management.
Scrum doesn’t know a role called “Project Manager”.
Scrum is a framework, consisting of 3 roles, 3 artifacts and 5 events. It is meant to be used in many different environments, some with Project Manager functions and others without. Willem-Jan Ageling explains that due to Scums' focus on products instead of projects, the PM function is vanishing. But by understanding its value, there are still specific situations where a Project Manager may and should be required.
ITIL is a framework of best practices for delivering IT services.
ITIL’s systematic approach to IT service management can help businesses manage risk, strengthen customer relations, establish cost-effective practices, and build a stable IT environment that allows for growth, scale and change. In this article the authors explain what it is, what it entails, and how to put it into practice. It is a very high-level overview, but it will get you started by setting general expectations.
Two senior executives from the global bank describe their recent journey.
In 2015, the Dutch banking group ING shifted from the traditional organizational structure to an Agile model intrigued by major conglomerates such as Google and Netflix. Two senior executives from the financial entity explain the transformation journey in an interview answering questions like, why the bank needed to change, how it manages without the old reporting lines, and how it measures the impact of its efforts.
Spotify doesn’t use “the Spotify model” and neither should you.
Jeremiah Lee briefly tells his story of how he was excited to join the Spotify HQ in Stockholm in 2017 and see the Spotify squad model in action as a product manager - only later to learn that the famed squad model was only ever aspirational and never fully implemented, as it failed to work for the company. He witnessed the company leaders incrementally transition to more traditional management structures. So what is really the Spotify squad model and why didn't it work? let's find out in the article.
All organisations, from the largest enterprise to the newest startup, face the same challenge: how to solve their users’ problems by bringing a superior product (or service) to market faster than their competitors.
Naresh Jain takes us through a journey of how an organization leveraged its millions of diverse users to propel a cultural enterprise transformation. Struggling to build novel products, find the right user needs to focus on, and how to rapidly innovate, he shares the five key elements of their approach. With clarity and transparency, we are taken step-by-step through years of learnings.
Defining the role of the Project Management Office in an agile organization
What exactly is the "PMO Office", and what value does it provide? Ian Mitchell argues the need for critical oversight and governance as organizations grow, as well as the reduction of risk in a portfolio of corporate projects. He also acknowledges that often PMO Offices turn into the process police, identifies how to measure the health of the system and the path towards true business agility.
Risk Management
Risk management is a discipline for dealing with uncertainty. At its most basic level, that may involve simply imagining what events could unfold in our organizations and making the slightest change in behavior to prepare for that possibility.
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OKRs help us build prudent, evidence-based decision making into the way we plan our work - but won't give you predictability or consistency.
Jeff Gothelf talks about the best approach to leveraging Objective Key Results (OKRs) while planning work and their limitation when not used probably citing that, teams may face unpredictability if they measure outcomes with OKRs rather than outputs. He suggests that OKRs come in handy when the product backlog is reduced and executed in short cycles. He defines this as "Agility" and notes that it is the organizational ability to change course based on newly discovered backlog items thus ensuring it deploys people and resources in the most viable direction.
Business Intelligence
BI technologies provide historical, current, and predictive views of business operations. Common functions of business intelligence technologies include reporting, online analytical processing, analytics, dashboard development, data mining, process mining, complex event processing, business performance management, benchmarking, text mining, predictive analytics, and prescriptive analytics. BI technologies can handle large amounts of structured and sometimes unstructured data to help identify, develop, and otherwise create new strategic business opportunities. They aim to allow for the easy interpretation of these big data. Identifying new opportunities and implementing an effective strategy based on insights can provide businesses with a competitive market advantage and long-term stability.
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Designing great customer experiences is getting easier with the rise of predictive analytics.
Portfolio Management
Project Portfolio Management (PPM) is the centralized management of the processes, methods, and technologies used by project managers and project management offices (PMOs) to analyze and collectively manage current or proposed projects based on numerous key characteristics. The objectives of PPM are to determine the optimal resource mix for delivery and to schedule activities to best achieve an organization’s operational and financial goals, while honoring constraints imposed by customers, strategic objectives, or external real-world factors.