According to the Business Agility Institute, business agility

It is the ability and willingness of an organization to adapt, create and take advantage of change for the benefit of its customers.”

This simple statement exposes the dramatic mindset shift necessary for agile organizations.

Where the way you respond to the market is more reliably predictable than the way the market responds to you. So far, we have developed the following 3 main themes:

1. Enterprise scaling and its similarities to agile scaling.
2. 10 minimum skills required to transform a business.
3. Exponential Agility Model of a Company.

Today we will reaffirm how agile can help us overcome the current crisis and deliberately prepare to face any type of future crisis, such as through digital transformation or any other strategy depending on the priorities to be addressed.

10. Cultural and business transformation.

The internalization of the cultural and business transformation in a complete organization is a challenge especially when it is a large corporate with more than 100 years of existence, since, in a digital transformation strategy, it is necessary that we observe the advantages of its physical model and the opportunities of your digital model, the former will be intrinsic strengths that allow you to compete like no other, the latter will keep you at the forefront in this transformation.

Figure 1: Crisis care model.

Source: Gartner (2020).

It is very important that the organization or large corporate requires different versions of itself according to the turbulence of the environment that occurs, which, if it is a fact that organizations that are already working agile, have moved quickly in this curve recession accentuated by the pandemic, this has even allowed them to climb to higher levels, due to the advance of their digital transformation, like others that started, are obtaining a performance above the average and those that have not done agile and are tending to disappear, below average.

Figure 2: Post-pandemic framework for responding to a crisis.

Source: Gartner (2020).

I believe that some agile initiatives should evolve deliberately, such as intra-startups when they are successful, make a vertical scaling, which allows them to compete directly with the market and generate a different version of the business that incubates them in such a way that the latter prepare their new version, satisfying the market with new products and / or services. Some companies in the market do it as an innovation strategy that requires real investment, to generate and serve new markets, thus generating an exponential business, which, although it will not be a unicorn, will perform above the market average in the that you are, which will lead you to be the leader of it.

An agile organization is conceived as one in which its strategies represent the ability to create value and respond to constant change, constantly planning and adapting its initial plans through timely and continuous continuous learning, to focus on identifying what is meaningful, fundamental, thus satisfying customer needs as quickly as possible.

Figure 3: Possible Roadmap to navigate a crisis.

Source: Gartner (2020).

To create an agile organization from end to end, it will be necessary to take into account the size, the transformation process, the life span it has, the business domain. We achieve an agile business by executing agile with agile, thus our center is in the transformation of the transformation processes and value delivery, while at the same time we create a work system based on a way of thinking and doing different from the agile business.

Thus, the leader of the organization should assume an explicit role, not only as a strategist, but as a designer and administrator of the complex reality of the environment, allowing the creation of sustainable, self-organizing, learning, agile and exponential organizations.

Organizational redesign implies the internalization of new values ​​and of a unique new generation operating model prepared for turbulent environments, which crosses the entire organization, an operating model of an exponential and disruptive organization in the market, like the following one, which will be our topic of conversation in a following article.

Today we will move on to here, if you have any questions or comments about it, feel free to contact us directly and ask us.

Many greetings.

Miguel A. G. Martínez H., September 2020.

Bibliography:

• AG, D. (2020, March 10). Respond and Recover | Crisis management in unprecedented times. Retrieved August 20, 2020, from https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en.html
• Allas, T., Sjatil, P. E., Stern, S., & Windhage, E. (2020, April). How European businesses can position themselves for recovery. Retrieved September 10, 2020, from https://www.mckinsey.com/
• C, B., 2020. Domains Of Business Agility – Business Agility Institute. [online] Business Agility Institute. Available at: <https://businessagility.institute/learn/domains-of-business-agility/> [Accessed 28 September 2020].
• Dreyfus model of skill acquisition. (2020, June 18). Retrieved September 18, 2020, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreyfus_model_of_skill_acquisition
• Howard, C., 2020. Reset Your Business Strategy In COVID-19 Recovery. [online] Gartner.com. Available at: <https://www.gartner.com/smarterwithgartner/reset-your-business-strategy-in-covid-19-recovery/> [Accessed 28 September 2020].
• Mahadevan, D. (2018, February 20). ING’s agile transformation. Retrieved September 19, 2020, from https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/financial-services/our-insights/ings-agile-transformation
• Mitchell, C. (n.d.). The Conference Board – TCB C Suite Challenge 2020 Covid19 Recovery. Retrieved September 10, 2020, from https://conference-board.org/us/
• LEANTALK, 2020. The Ultimate Lean Talk Forum And Blog- About Us. [online] Leantalk.org. Available at: <https://leantalk.org/about-leantalk-org> [Accessed 14 September 2020].
• One, V. (n.d.). 14th Annual State of Agile Report. Retrieved September 10, 2020, from https://stateofagile.com/
• O’rreally, B. (2020, May 11). Scaling Innovation Means Descaling Work. Retrieved September 10, 2020, from https://barryoreilly.com/resources/
• Saenz, H., Supko, M., &amp; O’Keefe, D. (n.d.). Why Return to “Normal” When You Can Recover to a Winning Position? Retrieved September 10, 2020, from https://www.bain.com/

Read more

Collaboration is like a populated ocean, a giant and immaterial extension of complex communication systems, which enable the effective interaction of its habitants.” Exponential Agility (2020).

In this phase, if we have followed the previous steps, increasing the capabilities of the business, what we will obtain is a business, mature and sustained in agile to be able to scale, remember that what we scale is collaboration, and the other capabilities, maturity is an objective. What we want is to keep productivity and investments as uniform as possible throughout our initial agile environment (more than 3 scrum teams), to achieve this, we need to scale a set of mature initiatives and their interaction between them.

As we have seen, there are different types of scaling, vertical scaling, focused on maximizing the value of a specific initiative until it becomes an exponential initiative or organization.

8.Agile at Scale

Horizontal scaling, which aims to achieve a goal with a very large scope at the extended enterprise level, to coordinate the integration of the value generated by hundreds of participating teams in synthesized value streams. Scaling up is an adaptive change challenge, full of “wicked problems,” as design thinking describes, that are unique to each organization. Remember that we must work deliberately and intentionally on creation, maturity, and stabilization. of collaboration, since it is what we are going to scale, through sustained development and growth.

Every organization is different, although scaling is related to collaboration, we scale it, if we have problems in our collaboration approaches, both vertical and horizontal, we will scale them to their maximum potential for dysfunctionality and that is not what we want. What we want is to keep productivity and investments as uniform as possible throughout our initial agile environment (more than 3 scrum teams), to achieve this, we need to scale a set of mature initiatives and their interaction between them.

Therefore, we can outline a scaling meta-backlog (Similar to what is described in this series of articles), so that each cycle (that is, each month) we can validate our main hypothesis together with escalation experts to guide our initiative ” Escalation MVP”. We may not even need to scale if we can achieve higher productivity with the equipment we already have. Do agile with agile, not climb agile with waterfall, does it exist?

Figure 1: Agile Scaling Roadmap MVP.

Source: Miguel Martínez (2020). Own Elaboration.

A scaling challenge is similar to a business escalation, for us it will be an “intra-business escalation”, where we have peaks and valleys, which we must identify, to overcome the obstacles and achieve the future state, remember that we should execute agile with agile, with the objective that the capacities built are the base of the following ones, thus creating an environment of sustained collaboration.

Figure 2: The Nexus Scaling Framework.

Source: Scrum.org.

The center of scaling resides in identifying, minimizing and removing dependencies, only with a firm foundation can we scale successfully. In reality, we can produce less and be less efficient for a time, as teams face the additional complexities that scaling brings, so maturity of the agile environment is important before scaling, because there will be fewer obstacles and we will also have strong teams to overcome them.

Figure 3: The LeSS Scaling Framework.

Source: less.works

As such, it’s important to get the most out of the teams we currently have and help them become more efficient and effective before looking to scale their efforts. Before we start climbing, we must seek to achieve more, with what we already have.

Figure 4: The SAFE Scaling Framework.

Source: scaledagileframework.com

At this point, it is very important that investment management is connected to the strategic themes of the organization, which will be our northern stars to follow, to contribute or directly achieve the business objectives. We will develop this topic extensively in future articles.

9.Extension of Blueprints or strategic themes.

Lean portfolio management provides us with a higher-level planning perspective in an agile framework, and refers to the definition, refinement, prioritization and financing of business initiatives for implementation by delivery teams and programs. These initiatives are regularly referred to as epic and once approved at the portfolio level, they translate into implementable features, which must be realized by delivery program teams. A program is a collection of linked products, involving multiple teams of collaborators.

Each business unit within a company will have a portfolio of income generating products and / or services. Each portfolio is guided by a strategy, or set of Strategic Themes, and supported by the people and processes necessary to carry out that strategy. Portfolio-level artifacts include:

Strategic themes, epics (business epics and enablers), a Portfolio Kanban and a Portfolio Backlog. Defines the total set of actions required to take a product / service from its characterization to its commissioning.

Figure 5: Portfolio based on strategic themes.

Source: productplan.com/theme-based-roadmap/

Institutional alignment includes organizational leadership, knowledge of the vision, strategy and tactics of the business, and the alignment of each program, vision, strategy and product tactics as a value stream, the commitment of the various stakeholders is very important. in the process in order to maintain flexibility and stability of the strategy at the same time, a practice that helps us to keep an environment aligned and prepare it to scale is the practice of agile product management, since the artifacts that it generates will allow us to integrate the value of each of the initiatives at the time of executing the corresponding value flows.

When we work on the creation of an agile work environment, it is very important that business leaders, at the management level, know the value of agility and know how to leverage it to obtain strong results, culture should not eat strategy at breakfast , the leaders are the ones in charge of this not happening and they are the ones who will set the example in the co-creation of these capacities.

As a practical experience in a transformation, when interacting at this level: “It was the first of several meetings we held in this regard, our agenda consisted of socializing the vision, strategy and tactics of about 15 products / services in a digital business unit banking, we had to share the vision and strategy, aligned with the bank’s transformation strategy, it was our first early step towards imminent scaling, we had been using Nexus as a work base and we sought to complement it with a Lean Portfolio Management practice. In the first three presentations, the executives present in the session were not used to the level of transparency shown, they did not understand why there should be strategy at that level, because it had to be repeated, the strategy at that time only corresponded to the CEO and his staff , to no one else, the culture was siloficated, with about 10 bastions, who served as the CEOs of their business units, which were managed by results and each one separately, there were projects that overlapped and one of the CEO’s tasks was to identify them, but ultimately the culture is planned because the strategy was divided and not transparent, I remember that the first session lasted until the executives present requested the signing of the commitments that were established in the agile roadmaps of each product, these they should not change and the perspective should be at least 1 year ”, those were the indications. Carrying out an inspection and adaptation of this session, we proceeded to identify the elements for improvement, it took approximately 3 to 6 months, in each case, to change this perspective through awareness, training at these levels, training in agile strategy and product management. The next session, in the following 3 months, was much better for us, we had an attendance of at least 10 interested parties at the executive level, with a previous syncretic preparation, in which we previously reviewed the relevant points to show, the problems and the decisions to be made In a synthetic and executive way, only one case had to rework the information of an initiative. That was a key planning of how we began to modify the culture and win the required commitments at the management level.

Figure 6: Strategic Issues in SAFE.

Source: www.scaledagileframework.com/strategic-themes/

One of the next steps implied that just as we had created teams at the operational level, at the tactical level, it was important to create prioritization teams at the strategic level, self-organized teams, with roles similar to scrum or Kanban, but where decisions about the products and experiments were collegiate, as well as the funding of various projects, finally they applied Scrum or Kanban, but at another level, it was necessary to talk with these teams at the level of investments, benefits, customer impact, financial business, cost reduction, savings, recovery of investments, risks, scrum or Kanban being the same base but personalized to the context where we were located, this allowed us to create portfolio prioritization teams at a strategic level, which allowed great progress in the transformation with respect to the flattening of hierarchical structures, obviously there were always antagonistic figures that gave us greater impetus in the better pray continue.

Today we will move on to here, if you have any questions or comments about it, feel free to contact us directly and ask us.

Many greetings.

Miguel A. G. Martínez H., September 2020,

Bibliography:

• AG, D. (2020, March 10). Respond and Recover | Crisis management in unprecedented times. Retrieved August 20, 2020, from https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en.html
• Allas, T., Sjatil, P. E., Stern, S., &amp; Windhage, E. (2020, April). How European businesses can position themselves for recovery. Retrieved September 10, 2020, from https://www.mckinsey.com/
• Dreyfus model of skill acquisition. (2020, June 18). Retrieved September 18, 2020, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreyfus_model_of_skill_acquisition
• Mahadevan, D. (2018, February 20). ING’s agile transformation. Retrieved September 19, 2020, from https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/financial-services/our-insights/ings-agile-transformation
• Mitchell, C. (n.d.). The Conference Board – TCB C Suite Challenge 2020 Covid19 Recovery. Retrieved September 10, 2020, from https://conference-board.org/us/
• LEANTALK, 2020. The Ultimate Lean Talk Forum And Blog- About Us. [online] Leantalk.org. Available at: <https://leantalk.org/about-leantalk-org> [Accessed 14 September 2020].
• One, V. (n.d.). 14th Annual State of Agile Report. Retrieved September 10, 2020, from https://stateofagile.com/
• O’rreally, B. (2020, May 11). Scaling Innovation Means Descaling Work. Retrieved September 10, 2020, from https://barryoreilly.com/resources/
• Saenz, H., Supko, M., &amp; O’Keefe, D. (n.d.). Why Return to “Normal” When You Can Recover to a Winning Position? Retrieved September 10, 2020, from https://www.bain.com/

Read more

Replicating the essence of the practice is a concrete gift, obtained from a previous experiment to reduce something to the relevant and significant, without losing the original value.” Exponential Agility (2020).

In this delivery we will review 2 fundamental points to extend an agile transformation, points that are specific to the business or company in which we are working, these are: extension to other business units and creation of value centers, they are specific since they depend to a great extent measure of the culture in question and of the set of lessons previously learned in the transformation in question.

6. Extension to other business units.

When we talk about extensibility to other business units, we must think about all those capabilities that we have built internally and how we can replicate them, based on the reflection of the context, is it the same? and if they work on it. Our experience here is related to an extensive dictionary of practices that teams master and that have built internally in the organization, in one of the places where we implement a complete transformation, we took on the task of managing these learning domains, both as organizational assets and team competencies, in such a way that at the end of 6 months we had about 50 unique practices that the teams had created, different from the initial ones of the chosen frameworks, initially based on a maturity approach and mastery (Deyfrus or shu-ha-ri) in the implementation to solve problems: Initiates, frequency and mastery of written practice, Intermediate, is a state where the team has generated a high mastery, the frequency and mastery is daily, the team has begun to relate these practices with a way of acting and thinking, which allows them to start new paths to do things differently, the advanced level, is where the mastery is very high, the frequency and the domain also, the team has generated mastery to create their own artifacts and tools aligning this use to the agile values ​​and principles, the expert level, is the one in which teams create their own frameworks, adjusted to their profiles and the environment where they are, aligning the values ​​and principles of these frameworks to traditional agility frameworks, no matter the type, whether it is scrum or kanban, the important thing is the creation and the consummation and evolution of internal practice (apply agile with agile).

Figure 1: Maturity model of practices and principles.

Source: Miguel Martínez (2020). Based on the Deyfrus model.

To extend this agility to other business units, it is important that we carry out a strategic alignment similar to that carried out in the first step, in order to define the value of this extension and transformation, trying to implement everything we have learned, from which we can obtain a initial implementation log, which consists of this transformation log extended to other business units, taking our “quick wins” as a reference.

7. Creation of value centers.

The mapping of value flows with other business units has to do with all those areas with which we interact to enable the delivery of value, at the beginning in some cases they will see it as an exception in the treatment of their traditional processes (if it is that there are processes), in my experience I listened several times to the representatives of other business units: “Let’s do it quickly, they are agile teams that are sponsored by the CEO, we quickly respond to their request and continue with our times and traditional procedure”, Later, we had to experiment that these teams became a ring of impediments and obstacles to enable the release of the product, better analyzing the environment we found, that they went to that state when they realized that the agile work model of the central teams was exposing the deficiency of the peripheral but highly relevant areas to enable the delivery of products and services, with higher speed and lower cost. One of the basic premises that we obtained as a reflection is that a traditional team will never better serve an agile team doing it in a traditional way, we already know the answer, that environment will grow poorly to a level as great as the capacity of the owner of the unit business to get a budget, but it will do so without achieving sustained capacity, which will eventually cause a financial sustainability crisis (scope corruption and bottlenecks are examples), which will imply seeing the work approach differently, in an agile way (either Kanban or Scrum).

Figure 2: Structure of teams and Communities of Practice of an Agile Business.

Source: Miguel Martínez (2020). Based on the Spotify model.

Once it has been decided that the support teams will work in an agile way, then the business unit is converted from a functional area to one of practice and of delivery facilitation teams (almost always with Kanban), which implies seeing the processes and their redesign towards agile, to eliminate waiting times and reduce the times of placing products and services, where the objective is to achieve a balance between demand and the capacity of this flow, to mention an experience, in a place a support process To carry out this delivery it took about 1 month initially, when we intervened in the area, extending the membership and the value of the central team and we automated this process as a whole, the time it took was 5 minutes.

What we did was a mapping of the processes of the area, through a Kanban STATIK, to find their purpose and utility, we selected all those that had a greater impact on delivery and we proceeded to redesign them with Kanban, assign roles, train the people, establishing prioritization cycles and assigning these capabilities to teams, in such a way that optimizing the demand for teams and proper management of capabilities, in addition to transparency, enabled the delivery in an agile and expeditious manner. .

Something similar happens when adding technical areas, but also business areas, in such a way that the delivery is transparent and a single flow of value to the customer is visualized.

When we establish the value of operational excellence, it is when all our collaborators have seen the difference between working in a traditional way to working in an agile way, they have seen it based on product increases, improved user satisfaction, they have Once the value of agility in the business and the taste of it with respect to each of the work frameworks has been understood, operational excellence is related to at least 3 elements, the first is personal excellence, the second is excellence in teamwork and is the creation of an environment that really fosters the first and second, there are various frameworks that help us to work and integrate each of these areas, the impact that we must observe is the positive impact that we generate in the experience of our clients, which must be followed by financial impact. In many places we have observed that business owners and product owners are more focused on the financial impact on the business, if we think about it, the coverage and the positive impact on the client will be proportional to the business prosperity we generate.

Today we will move on to here, if you have any questions or comments about it, feel free to contact us directly and ask us: contact@exponentialagility.org

Many greetings.

Miguel A. G. Martínez H., September 2020,

Bibliography:

• AG, D. (2020, March 10). Respond and Recover | Crisis management in unprecedented times. Retrieved August 20, 2020, from https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en.html
• Allas, T., Sjatil, P. E., Stern, S., &amp; Windhage, E. (2020, April). How European businesses can position themselves for recovery. Retrieved September 10, 2020, from https://www.mckinsey.com/
• Dreyfus model of skill acquisition. (2020, June 18). Retrieved September 18, 2020, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreyfus_model_of_skill_acquisition
• Mahadevan, D. (2018, February 20). ING’s agile transformation. Retrieved September 19, 2020, from https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/financial-services/our-insights/ings-agile-transformation
• Mitchell, C. (n.d.). The Conference Board – TCB C Suite Challenge 2020 Covid19 Recovery. Retrieved September 10, 2020, from https://conference-board.org/us/
• LEANTALK, 2020. The Ultimate Lean Talk Forum And Blog- About Us. [online] Leantalk.org. Available at: <https://leantalk.org/about-leantalk-org> [Accessed 14 September 2020].
• One, V. (n.d.). 14th Annual State of Agile Report. Retrieved September 10, 2020, from https://stateofagile.com/
• O’rreally, B. (2020, May 11). Scaling Innovation Means Descaling Work. Retrieved September 10, 2020, from https://barryoreilly.com/resources/
• Saenz, H., Supko, M., &amp; O’Keefe, D. (n.d.). Why Return to “Normal” When You Can Recover to a Winning Position? Retrieved September 10, 2020, from https://www.bain.com/

Read more

In this article about we will fly another three capabilities of the 10 that we have discussed part of the actions wich are part of creating our agile business MVP.

 3. Execution and maturity of initiatives.

From this moment on, one of the objectives is to achieve the maturity of high performance teams, highly motivated teams that create products that are superior to the objectives set, thus we will have the standing up, stabilization and optimization of them, it is very important have experienced agile coaches in these tasks and focused on accelerating maturity. For specific advice on this point, as Exponential Agility we can help you extensively, remember that these approaches cover a descriptive point of view. We are experts in “agile practice”, agile team coaching and agile transformations, with the frameworks mentioned above.

The product demonstration is critical for proper management of product expectations, as well as the visible determination of the return on investment, remember that the customer on site requires seeing the value of the delivery, which are the visible product increases, with in order to raise the confidence of the sponsors and those involved, this point is where responsibility regains importance.

The retrospective of the cycle is extremely important, in order to measure the result and know the reason for it, identifying the improvement actions, which in a following cycle will provide us with an increase in vision and efficiency in the release of an increase in product.

Figure 1: Agile Initiative in Scrum.

Source: Miguel Martínez (2020). Own elaboration.

A priority is to create sustained peace of the team in a transparent environment, I remember that, in one of my initial practical experience, several years ago, I had the responsibility of playing the role of Scrum Master while we located a person, what I discovered is that there was a total lack of transparency, the concept of “technical debt” or “cultural debt” is prohibited, “the client should not know that we have debt!”, in the words of the global practice leader and head of agile, who lived in another country. Technical debt and transparency is one of the relevant factors, which enables improvement of agile teams, of course also of people.

4. Demand and capacity management.

An agile team that is focused on managing the demand for agile and internalizing capacities in a sustained way is essential, to ensure cohesion, choreography and dissemination of the meta-rules to follow. An agile office can act as an integration team, make agile with agile, create a quality and integrity assurance mechanism, with the objective of serving as a center of value, to enable, offer alignment and acceleration through a mechanism PULL, at the process level, support and accompaniment to initiatives and programs, as well as the creation and internalization of internal agile capacities.

This center of excellence may be responsible for measuring the progress of the transformation at the level of: Maturity of teams, Product, Government and Business, managing continuous improvement of the environment (kaizen) and measuring the progress of the agile maturity of the environment and the teams. This is an exciting and extensive topic, which will be the subject of another conversation.

Figure 2: Kanban: Demand and Capacity Management.

Source: Miguel Martínez (2020). Own elaboration.

5.Inspection and adaptation of the environment.

The inspection and adaptation of the environment is a relevant process for continuous improvement, the more frequent we have it and we carry out the reflections in a disciplined way, the more learning we will achieve, remember that the objective of learning is adaptability, adapting the media to the environments. The experts who inspect the real products do not come from outside, but are the people who are in the same environment and team, one of the objectives is to enable early return on investment, which in this case is the progress of the transformation seen from the perspective of the increases in value or capabilities that are built as we move forward.

A basic way of asking ourselves to improve is: What did we do well? What are the areas of opportunity that we face? and of course the improvement actions to be carried out, all this triggers decision-making that enables effectiveness, efficiency, in addition to continuing or deliberately pivoting with a product. I particularly dedicated myself from my beginnings with agile to team coaching, with scrum and Kanban, how to establish them, how to mature them and stabilize them, this also applies to integration teams that can be centers of excellence and prioritization teams that are born in the strategic level, if they are also agile teams, but with a different type of value delivery that must be synchronized with the transformation cycles.

Figure 3: Kaizen boards.

Source: LEANTALK, 2020. The Ultimate Lean Talk Forum And Blog- About Us. [online] Leantalk.org. Available at: <https://leantalk.org/about-leantalk-org> [Accessed 14 September 2020].

The organizational redesign and / or Internalization of roles is part of the creation of internal business capacities to face turbulent environments where changing priorities are in turn a priority, it must be remembered that culture does not only reside in the network of people who tends around what we call organization to give it life, all those organizational assets are part, both implicit and explicit, policies, structures, what we must ensure is that these rules produce a choreography instead of a central coordination, that is related to the empowerment of people, trust above all is a crucial factor to enable it, remember that we must always take into account 2 factors for this empowerment: commitment and performance, commitment is related to the values ​​of the person in coincidence with the values ​​of the company, we must ensure that they will have a disciplined and ethical response to circumvent the re What we have in front of us is probably the most important thing that is related to talent management that in the end our collaborators will take care of our most important assets which are: our clients and our business, performance can be developed is related to mastery and purpose, because we do what we do, let us hire by attitude and develop an environment that is an example of the necessary level of aptitude that we require, advice: let’s take time to hire or internalize a role, based on the values ​​of the person and the business, develop the internal potential of these people, let’s think about the average length of stay in the business and support people in their promotion and growth internally, as well as external, since we will never know who our future clients or loyal suppliers may be.

Today we will advance here, if you have questions or comments about it, feel free to contact us directly and ask us.

Many greetings.

Miguel A. G. Martínez H., September 2020,

Bibliography:

• AG, D. (2020, March 10). Respond and Recover | Crisis management in unprecedented times. Retrieved August 20, 2020, from https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en.html
• Allas, T., Sjatil, P. E., Stern, S., &amp; Windhage, E. (2020, April). How European businesses can position themselves for recovery. Retrieved September 10, 2020, from https://www.mckinsey.com/
• Mitchell, C. (n.d.). The Conference Board – TCB C Suite Challenge 2020 Covid19 Recovery. Retrieved September 10, 2020, from https://conference-board.org/us/
• LEANTALK, 2020. The Ultimate Lean Talk Forum And Blog- About Us. [online] Leantalk.org. Available at: <https://leantalk.org/about-leantalk-org> [Accessed 14 September 2020].
• One, V. (n.d.). 14th Annual State of Agile Report. Retrieved September 10, 2020, from https://stateofagile.com/
• O’rreally, B. (2020, May 11). Scaling Innovation Means Descaling Work. Retrieved September 10, 2020, from https://barryoreilly.com/resources/
• Saenz, H., Supko, M., &amp; O’Keefe, D. (n.d.). Why Return to “Normal” When You Can Recover to a Winning Position? Retrieved September 10, 2020, from https://www.bain.com/

Read more

En el artículo anterior desarrollamos el tema de crecimiento y desarrollo de un ecosistema de trabajo ágil, las implicaciones de la colaboración, su alcance y madurez para crear una transformación del negocio hacia ágil de forma sostenida. También revisamos la importancia de un marco de trabajo, que tiene como objetivo la simplificación de una realidad compleja con objetivo de identificar las necesidades críticas, co-crear soluciones significativas y entregarlas de forma iterativa, incremental y emergente, aprendiendo y ajustándonos continuamente al entorno para servir mejor a nuestro cliente.

La transformación digital es energía social en movimiento, una fuente de empoderamiento y propiedad, que reside en la interacción entre todos nuestros colaboradores, para servir mejor a nuestros clientes”. MAGMH (2020)

El día de hoy sobrevolaremos, 10 puntos importantes que forman parte de un viaje de transformación, usando una metáfora de crecimiento, es como una travesía y cada uno de estos puntos representan las crestas que debemos alcanzar.

Figura 1: Transformación del negocio implica crecimiento de sus capacidades.

Fuente: Miguel Martínez (2020). Elaboración propia.

Es muy importante que cuando queremos construir un negocio ágil lo hagamos mediante ágil, lo que significa crecer y desarrollar el entorno de trabajo de forma sostenida, definir los ciclos de la transformación, liberar valor en cada ciclo, realizar una inspección y adaptación del entorno en cada ciclo, con el objetivo de incrementar las capacidades de la organización de acuerdo al progreso, de tal forma que en cada ciclo emerja una organización con capacidades mayores y distintas que cree un impacto positivo a sus colaboradores y clientes.

Escucharlo contado, no es lo mismo que la experiencia”. Proverbio chino

Figura 1: Transformación del negocio basada en una transformación de la persona.

Fuente: Miguel Martínez (2020). Elaboración propia.

Recordemos que las organizaciones no se transforman, quienes lo hacen son las personas que pertenecen a las organizaciones, lo hacen transformando su dialogo interior, las organizaciones están basadas en el intercambio de significados de quienes las integran.

Figura 1: Áreas y capacidades para construir la agilidad en el negocio.

Fuente: Miguel Martínez (2020). Elaboración propia.

A continuación, describiremos las 10 capacidades que nos permiten lograr un MVP de negocio ágil:

1. Alineación táctica y estratégica.

Crear un propósito compartido y visión para inspirar la acción, una alineación requiere crear cohesión a la organización desde la perspectiva interna y externa, de forma que está se socialice a través de la co-creación de una estrategia y una táctica de la transformación que esperamos (modelo futuro). Es muy importante que los líderes conozcan de forma previa el valor de la agilidad y que nosotros como catalizadores los acompañemos en este proceso.

Una línea base, de las distintas áreas objetivo, es muy valiosa, con respecto al estado actual del negocio, con el propósito de obtener y ofrecer claridad del impacto del progreso, en el incremento de las capacidades, pongamos un ejemplo: “Al cuarto mes de implementada la transformación, en una unidad de negocio, logramos un impacto positivo: el decremento de los costos operación, si no tenemos una línea base, será muy difícil sostener con datos el origen de este resultado”. Recordemos que lo que hagamos, lo debemos convertir en una capacidad instalada de negocio, para crear sostenibilidad de un modelo operativo futuro, siendo el principio de la agilidad estratégica en el alcance de la transformación que se defina.

En esta fase encontramos también, la priorización de las iniciativas que consta de definir el impacto de las iniciativas con respecto a su tipo: ahorro, inversión, utilidades, esta definición se trabaja en conjunto con el equipo de transformación, patrocinadores y representante de nivel estratégico de la organización (comité directivo “comprometido”). Una vez realizada esta priorización, nos toca entender el modelo de negocio desde la perspectiva agile para cada una de las iniciativas seleccionadas, desarrollar el marco de producto preliminar y delinear el mapa preliminar de la creación del producto/servicio y los involucrados en el proceso.

2. Creación y lanzamiento de iniciativas.

El objetivo de este incremento, es que para todas las iniciativas/equipos creados, será necesario por equipo enfocar a todos sus participantes hacia un mismo objetivo, delimitar y priorizar el alcance inicial del producto, obtener mayor claridad acerca de lo que se quiere crear, las prioridades y los riesgos implicados. Es muy importante, en esta fase, gestionar expectativas, la visión del negocio, el entendimiento en conjunto, las dependencias e involucrados, los riesgos y su mitigación, así como el mapa de construcción, los criterios iniciales de éxito y la calidad de lo que visualizan los participantes, quienes están directamente implicados en las actividades de ejecución de los proyectos actuales, relacionados con el dominio de negocio en cuestión.

Hace poco me preguntaban una persona, ¿quién decide quien integra un equipo ágil?, en primer principio un equipo ágil está compuesto de 3 a 9 personas, con objeto de habilitar la comunicación cara a cara, segundo, debe ser un equipo funcionalmente cruzado, es decir que integre todas las capacidades requeridas para construir el producto en cuestión, tercero, los miembros del equipo debieran ser personas que estén directamente involucrados en el proceso de creación de valor, no sus jefes, no sus gerentes, buscamos equipos que sean autoorganizados y tengan la capacidad de responder ellos mismos, debemos responder al cambio constante y al contexto que se vive en el negocio actual, para progresar.  Obviamente lo que toca aquí también, es realizar un awareness a los dueños de producto y a los que en ese momento aún son los gerentes o directores de las áreas funcionales, que abran de convertirse en líderes agile, este es un proceso que retoma la misma importancia que la creación misma de los equipos ágiles y que será un tema de conversación más adelante.

Entonces, será relevante confirmar roles y proporcionar un entrenamiento básico, en los marcos de trabajo a utilizar, una vez realizado esto para todas las iniciativas a lanzar procederemos formalmente a confirmar las asignaciones de estos roles a nivel organizacional y realizaremos el lanzamiento de los equipos, que consiste en el establecimiento de las fechas de inicio de la planeación formal de las liberaciones, de los ciclos de entrega de resultados, la creación de la bitácora de producto, el inicio de la planeación y de todos los eventos relacionados con el marco de trabajo seleccionado (Scrum/ Kanban/ XP/ Nexus/ LeSS/ SAFE).

Cultivar la autonomía, basada en el propósito, significado y la maestría en las tareas que cada uno de los miembros realiza es uno de los puntos centrales en esta etapa. Si requiere acompañamiento al respecto puede contactarnos 😊.

Esta es la primera de 5 entregas, en los siguientes artículos desarrollaremos los puntos restantes, si tienes duda o comentarios al respecto, siéntete con total libertad de contactarnos directamente y preguntarnos.

Miguel A. G. Martínez H., septiembre 2020,

Saludos a todos,

Bibliografía:

• AG, D. (2020, March 10). Respond and Recover | Crisis management in unprecedented times. Retrieved August 20, 2020, from https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en.html
• Allas, T., Sjatil, P. E., Stern, S., & Windhage, E. (2020, April). How European businesses can position themselves for recovery. Retrieved September 10, 2020, from https://www.mckinsey.com/
• Howard, C. (2020, June 03). Reset Your Business Strategy in COVID-19 Recovery. Retrieved September 10, 2020, from https://www.gartner.com/smarterwithgartner/reset-your-business-strategy-in-covid-19-recovery/
• Mitchell, C. (n.d.). The Conference Board – TCB C Suite Challenge 2020 Covid19 Recovery. Retrieved September 10, 2020, from https://conference-board.org/us/
• Version One (n.d.). 14th Annual State of Agile Report. Retrieved September 10, 2020, from https://stateofagile.com/
• O’rreally, B. (2020, May 11). Scaling Innovation Means Descaling Work. Retrieved September 10, 2020, from https://barryoreilly.com/resources/
• Saenz, H., Supko, M., & O’Keefe, D. (n.d.). Why Return to “Normal” When You Can Recover to a Winning Position? Retrieved September 10, 2020, from https://www.bain.com/

Read more

Collaboration is an important element for creative construction, it is the exoskeleton of intelligence in action, where we build in a flow, making ourselves fully present to create something non-existent, facilitation helps us to leverage this creative process.

Our purpose is to build together, in a self-organized and improved way, for this we must accept and see in a natural way in others and in ourselves levels of achievement below the expected objective, so that we can recover quickly from it, reflecting individually and together (cognitive and affective domain) about the process that allowed us to reach that result, for this we must make ourselves 100% present, observe our inner dialogue, through our thoughts and our actions, in such a way that in our thoughts positivity and progress are found in doing, action verbs instead of procrastination verbs.

A warm-up exercise that can help us to do this is to put all the members of a team, in a parallel starting line, define a goal to be built among the whole team, each of the members must think of an action and express it out loud, action that will allow us to advance towards the objective, if this action is positive and builds, then the member or collaborator advances towards the objective and the team gains points, when the action is not positive and does not build, the member does not advance , passing the turn to the next collaborator and so on until the objective is achieved, the action verbs are those that are in the psychomotor domain, in order to build iteratively, a member of a team should then accept and confirm what their collaborator proposes, quickly think of an action that complements that proposal, with another verb in the psychomotor domain and express it out loud.

Teamwork, acceptance and rapid recovery from errors, through individual and joint reflection, disciplined, commitment to increase mastery, creation of safe spaces, impacting on the decrease in time learning skills, responsible assumption risk management and expanding resilience.

So, collaboration is a co-creative process to achieve a goal, it is based on communication and interaction with the people around me. The level of collaboration required is related to the scope of the objective we want to achieve, depending on the magnitude of this, we can find different levels of collaboration that range from: individual, team, program, company and extended company.

What we want to achieve through collaboration is to create a culture of high performance, where the level of achievement of the objective in each execution is higher than the initially proposed. To achieve this, we require a work environment, where agile values, psychological safety, alignment, autonomy and responsibility are lived. We must first be sure to answer these questions: 1. Why are we here? 2. Who are we? 3. What do we do? 4. How do we do it?

Atlassian all rigths reserved.

The level of collaboration that we seek in agile, is the business level, which implies a transversal collaboration, it is to create a flow of delivery of unique value to the client, flattening hierarchies and organizing teams around this delivery, these teams can be of various rates, synchronize their rate of delivery and value, to the established value stream. When we deliberately co-create a collaborative environment, it is necessary to think about maturity. Maturity is the state of a thing that has reached its full development, a mature collaborative environment is one that allows us to ensure a very high level of achievement, through constant inspection and adaptation of the execution, with a scope of the objective at the program or company level.

A framework is a collaborative tool, allowing us to answer the questions that create high performance in a practical way. It is made up of:

1. The values, which represent the qualities of being to focus on the achievement of a habit or behavior, which will allow me to achieve a set of objectives. Respond to: Why are we here and who are we?
2. The principles, which are the rules aligned with the values. Respond to: what do we do?
3. The practices, which are the systematic execution of actions that allow me to create habits and behaviors in the long run to achieve a goal. Answer: how do we do it?

A framework represents a quality and integrity assurance mechanism, in the chain I am, think, feel, say and do.

Values ​​are the most relevant element of a framework, they are related to the way of thinking or mindset, which is composed of the set held by one or more people.

Prosperity is the product of a belief system, a way of thinking or mindset.

Prosperity implies growth, development and sustainability, it is based on the ability to be and do what we have, in balance with the environment (time / space).

Let’s put all this into practice, when we need to grow and develop a company, we must do it at least twice the average of the sector in which we find ourselves, we require a prosperity mindset, which is achieved with the creation of capacities, to go from a state to another effectively.

If we represent it as a wave, where we have, peaks, plateaus and valleys. A ridge or plateau is defined as the objective state where we want to reach, between crest and crest are the valleys, which represent the series of obstacles to growth and development, which are solved with the appropriate mindset and previously built capacities.

As Einstein said: “No problem can be solved on the same level of consciousness in which it was created.” What helped us to achieve a goal, will not help us to achieve another of a higher level, we need to increase mastery, greater competencies (maturity) and level of thought to achieve each objective level, a higher level of consciousness and new learning will help us to achieve it.

The growth of an agile initiative in a company has parallels with business ventures, only that it has internal financing, it is an intrapreneurship.

We define scaling as the growth and development in a sustainable way that we do to an agile initiative to achieve a goal with a broad scope at the business level, thus we have at least 3 types of scaling, according to the goal to be achieved within the companies:

1. Vertical scaling, it is an agile intra-enterprise, focused on converting an internal initiative the closest thing to a business unit or an independent external company.
2. Horizontal scaling, focused on achieving an objective with a very large magnitude and / or scope, a collaboration at the level of several programs or companies of the same group, is based on the elimination of dependencies and continuous integration of the value of the participants.
3. Organic growth and development, creation of teams of teams in a self-organized and emergent way.

To be able to effectively scale Agile, we must ensure the achievement of the objective by building a mature and solid collaborative work ecosystem, prepared to solve the obstacles that will arise in this growth. This requires that from the beginning of the creation of the environment to be scaled, we focus on the creation and maturity of the minimum capacities required that will make it competent as a high-performance work ecosystem and the type of scaling required.

A useful practical tool is the quarterly realization of continuous and iterative diagnoses and reinforcement so that the level of maturity that we require emerges and we scale without debt, technical or cultural. Let us remember that failing to mature the collaborative agile environment creates an imbalance in the environment, which becomes a cultural or technical debt in the business domain that we are working on.

In our next article we will talk about how to manage an escalation environment.

Miguel A. Martínez H., August 2020.

Bibliography:

1. Ackoff, R. L. (2012). Rediseñando el futuro. Mexico: Limusa.
2. Ackoff, R. L., &amp; Rovin, S. (2005). Beating the system: Using creativity to outsmart bureaucracies. San Francisco, CA: Berrett-Koehler.
3. Krippendorff, K. (2012). Outthink the competition how a new generation strategist sees options others ignore. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley.
4. Madson, P. R. (2005). Improv wisdom don’t prepare, just show up. New York: Bell Tower.
5. Schumacher, E. F. (1999). Small is beautiful: Economics as if people mattered: 25 years later … with commentaries. Point Roberts, WA: Hartley &amp; Marks.
6. Simon, H. A. (2008). The sciences of the artificial. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Read more