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,
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