Jutta Eckstein's Blog, page 2
June 21, 2018
Why Do Engineers Like BOSSA Nova?
This article is the second in a series looking ING, Ericsson, Spotify, Statoil, Titansoft (of Singapore), Walmart, and BOSSA nova. “BOSSA,” a synthesis of Beyond Budgeting, Open Space, Sociocracy, and Agile, provides an overall framework that can guide probes and experiments for implementing company-wide nimbleness and agility.
Hendrik Esser of Ericsson contributed to the new book about BOSSA nova called Company-wide Agility with Beyond Budgeting, Open Space, & Sociocracy. He reports about Ericsson’s ongoing program of experimentation that drives their product development. The 140-year old Swedish electronic systems engineering company holds more than 40,000 patents and employs about 100,000 people operating in 180 countries.
Hendrik worked in the leadership team of a 2000 person international division that started early agile adoption in 2006 and went full-bore in 2010. Using a mixture of Scrum-of-Scrum and a homemade portfolio management process to manage our complete product development, their core strategy was to decentralize decision making and truly embrace change. While Scrum and Scrum-of-Scrum were relatively easy to adopt, the Portfolio Management process was a challenge.
“It started with a workshop into which I called all stakeholders of Product Development: Product Management, Product Development, Test, System Design, Deployment. In that workshop we went straight to the main issue we had at that time: all our releases were significantly delayed. Through an intensive debate we found two core problems: Product Management could not predict what customers would need in the future, and Product Development could not predict precisely how much effort would be required to develop a feature before feature development started. Based on this insight, we created a process that uses ranges for estimates of cost and time. These ranges are an expression of our uncertainty at a certain point in time. We agreed that using ranges is a good way to communicate the current best knowledge.”
This pattern of group reflection followed by tryouts is core to their development process.
“When implementing this approach, we of course faced some adoption issues as several people who had not been part of the workshop did not understand the idea behind the ranges. But as a communication tool the ranges idea is meant to stir up discussions (“What do you mean: the delivery is between August and November? The customer needs it in July!”). The new approach gently directed us into the mindset shift we wanted. That shift took us in total about a year and a half.”
They then conducted a retrospective on why their transformation was successful “…because in retrospectives, it is good to not only focus on why something didn’t work out, but also why something worked!” Their reflections led them to further investigation into experimentation methods and they found Human System Dynamics (HSD), VUCA and Complexity Management including the Cynefin Framework and the related experimentation approach – all of which are included in the BOSSA nova framework.
They also realized in their retrospective that focusing on communication and continuous retrospectives at the leadership/organizational level are key ingredients for driving change. Formulate change experiments (knowing that there will be always side-effects) and monitor whether they lead to the desired outcome via retrospectives. They have since then started many more such initiatives.
Their recent experimentation has made them realize that to unleash the full potential of the people in Ericsson, they need autonomy to take own decisions and drive things forward. But how to avoid chaos if there is not sufficient alignment? They carefully avoided developing policies meant to drive alignment! Instead they have developed a Community of Practice structure. These communities are cross-organizational and fully empowered to take decisions within their area and manage alignment in a dynamic way.
The post Why Do Engineers Like BOSSA Nova? appeared first on Agile BOSSA nova – Jutta Eckstein & John Buck.
May 28, 2018
The ING Bank Experience and BOSSA Nova
This article is the first in a series that will also look at what ING, Ericsson, Spotify, Statoil, Titansoft (of Singapore), Walmart, and others say about BOSSA nova. “BOSSA” symbolizes the synthesis of Beyond Budgeting, Open Space, Sociocracy, and Agile.)
Eric Abelen of ING, a worldwide bank headquartered in the Netherlands, contributed to the new book about BOSSA nova called Company-wide Agility with Beyond Budgeting, Open Space, & Sociocracy. He reports about ING’s ambition to become “…a digital bank, an IT company delivering banking services”.
Eric describes ING Bank’s agile enterprise transformation that began in the summer of 2015 with its headquarters, “a spectacular big bang event in Amsterdam’s Ajax soccer stadium (in which) the organisation morphed into Spotify-inspired agile Tribes and Squads, and adopted a related agile way of working.” It is one of the few examples of a transformation to company-wide agility attempted at such big scale. Lots has been published about it. See for example McKinsey and Mary Poppendieck.
The transformation illustrates several elements of the BOSSA nova approach. For example, the change was driven by “a ‘home-grown’ set of enterprise-wide values and behaviours that function as the code of conduct in the company worldwide. ING’s key values are: being honest, prudent, and responsible. Behaviours associated with these values are: “you take it on and make it happen”, “you help others to be successful”, and “you are always a step ahead”. BOSSA nova recognizes “guidance by values” as a kind of hierarchy separate from the hierarchy that begins with shareholders’ interests, and notice ING’s no mention of shareholders’ interests.
A second critical element is that the mega event at Amsterdam’s Ajax stadium was preceded by years of experiments. According to Mary Poppendieck, “After initial experiments in 2010, the IT organization put aside waterfall development in favor of agile teams. As successful as this change was, it did not make much difference to the bank, so Continuous Delivery and DevOps teams were added to increase feedback and stability. But still, there was not enough impact on business results.”
Next, according to CIO Ron van Kemenade, “The business took it upon itself to reorganize in ways that broke down silos and fostered the necessary end-to-end ownership and accountability. Making this transition … proved highly challenging for our business colleagues, especially culturally. But I tip my hat to them. They had the guts to do it.” After carefully looking at what other technology companies were doing, they stopped the practice of having technology improvements “… worked out by people in the commercial business who would then tell the engineers what to develop.” The engineers were able to develop the really innovative solutions.
Finally, ING moved beyond the IT department to run the whole company like a software company by assigning everyone to semi-autonomous cross-functional teams (another BOSSA nova) recommendation. The change has not been without problems. Poppendieck remarks that, “The biggest issue is one that anyone with a background in organizational development would expect – creating alignment across the many autonomous teams has been a formidable challenge. The bank needs to make major changes and develop breakthrough innovations; but these require coordinated action across multiple, supposedly autonomous, teams.”
According to Eric Abelen, a key adjustment needed to support the team system was “…defining a ‘performance management’ system that systemically encourages, instead of hurting agile culture, is a big and crucial hurdle to overcome on our journey towards ING’s enterprise agility worldwide.” He notes that the performance management system, “..will get adjusted in the coming years to better encourage a ‘growth mindset’ and related value of reiterative ‘learning by doing’”.
BOSSA nova has some suggestions regarding the performance management and alignment challenges. The first suggestion is to to look at the value of self-organization and the strategy of trust for ideas for probes regarding performance management. The second suggestion is to conduct probes into creating structures that create hard-wired feedback to align the various cross functional teams. A third suggestion is to look at the value of continuous learning and ING’s processes of feedback regarding individual and team development for ideas about probing how to help large groups employees quickly find their common sources of passion and inspiration – a key ingredient for deep alignment.
For more suggestions, grab yourself a copy of Company-wide Agility with Beyond Budgeting, Open Space, & Sociocracy.
The post The ING Bank Experience and BOSSA Nova appeared first on Agile BOSSA nova – Jutta Eckstein & John Buck.
May 14, 2018
BOSSA Nova: A Synthesis of Management Concepts
This article is the fifth and final article in a planned series prepared from our new book: Company-Wide Agility with Beyond Budgeting, Open Space, and Sociocracy. The first four articles summarized each of the BOSSA nova core values: Self Organization, Transparency, Constant Customer Focus, and Continuous Learning. This article summarizes the four values. We would like to turn it into a poster for hanging on an office wall:
Self-organization: Use accountable cross-functional teams that select themselves and follow their passion with responsibility.
Use accountable cross-functional teams
At different levels of abstraction
With a common aim (meaning clear purpose, measures, and targets) that
Govern through shared values and ideals not through rules.
They
Select themselves (for a meaningful duration),
Follow their passion with responsibility for whole and meaningful pieces of work, and
Hold retrospectives and align them across the enterprise to optimize the whole.
Transparency: Create transparency for all involved in two directions by providing information and lowering the barriers to those seeking information:
Provide information
On progress and delivery related to common aim;
Lower barriers
To information needed for
Making informed decisions
Self-regulation, innovation, and learning.
Constant Customer Focus: “Focus wide” on every aspect of the company: product & process, structure and strategy, and individual contributions and people.
Product & Process
Common aim as, for example, summarized in a minimum viable product;
Narratives capturing the ideas of personas in user stories;
Feedback on each production step as, for example, made transparent by a value stream analysis.
Structure & Strategy
Includes owners (shareholders),
Value centers & support service teams,
Rolling forecasting.
Individual contributions / people
Passion bounded by responsibility guides contribution,
Relative individual objectives not fixed ones.
Continuous Learning: Always learn and contribute to others’ learning, get feedback and adapt.
Always
Learning / contributing to others learning guides all work.
Get Feedback,
Retrospectives,
Role improvement reviews with peer feedback,
Individual objectives separated from bonuses.
And Adapt
Your plans as you develop (where development equals learning / training, teaching, researching in interaction with your aim.
The post BOSSA Nova: A Synthesis of Management Concepts appeared first on Agile BOSSA nova – Jutta Eckstein & John Buck.
May 12, 2018
Constant Customer Focus
Beyond Budgeting, Open Space, Sociocracy, and Agile (BOSSA nova) have lots to say about constant customer focus. When combined, they make a powerful statement!
Here is what BOSSA nova has to say about constant customer focus:
1) “Organize to serve your customer. Organize each facet of the company around coordinating services offered to any one customer. The kind of work and the customer’s convenience should drive the review and reallocation of resources, not the calendar.”
Value stream analysis, Sociocracy workflow, and Design Thinking are each valuable tools for depicting the fundamental organization of production for serving the customer. They offer three different vocabularies. It is important to be aware of the underlying patterns and not identify them with a particular vocabulary.
Customer focus should be everyone’s aim, the reason they are working together as a team. It helps to use cross-functional teams so that the customer focus is understood from all angles (different perspectives). Furthermore, enable the staff to follow their passion for doing work that matters and delights their customers, passion bounded by responsibility.
2) “Establish a bidirectional relationship with your customer. Ensure that the customer can learn from the deliveries and that the company can learn from the customer – both throughout the production process.”
One way to understand the end users’ needs is to use the concept of personas to build scenarios, or rather user stories, to comprehend how the product or service will help solve the end users’ problems. Consider establishing a Product Owner function to maintain and develop a bidirectional relationship.
Create a minimum viable product, for testing the waters, and be sure to get early and frequent feedback from your customer. Building the right thing means iterate, iterate, and iterate again.
3) “Ensure your budgeting approach is flexible toward customer and market needs. Do not fix the budget long-term upfront; make budgeting fit the customer focus.”
Eliminate time wasted by deleting (or at least reducing) the activities and processes that are not focusing on the customer as uncovered by a value stream analysis. Thus, don’t make the customer wait.
Also, have performance reviews, individual goals, and incentives aligned with the customer focus, including board members and the board team. The process is to hold performance reviews where the goals and incentives focus on the customer.
4) “Enable your board of directors to be open to feedback from and measurement by the customer”
One step toward building customer focus on the board is to include representatives elected from the staff as full members on the Board. Another step is to include outside representatives who have different perspectives on the customer. Include customer feedback on the agenda of each board meeting. In general, establish multi-stakeholder control of the company. Address this fundamental issue by providing a specific legal structure to establish the multi-stakeholder environment.
This article is the third in a planned series prepared from our new book: Company-Wide Agility with Beyond Budgeting, Open Space, and Sociocracy, Chapter 5, Constant Customer Focus. The first two articles were on Self Organization and Transparency. Look for the next article will be on Continuous Learning!
The post Constant Customer Focus appeared first on Agile BOSSA nova – Jutta Eckstein & John Buck.
Continuous Learning
The synthesis of Beyond Budgeting, Open Space, Sociocracy, and Agile (BOSSA nova) has lots to say about continuous learning. BOSSA nova creates the spirit and structure needed to make continuous learning a reality!
This article is the fourth in a planned series prepared from our new book: Company-Wide Agility with Beyond Budgeting, Open Space, and Sociocracy, Chapter 6, Continuous Learning. The first three articles were on the other three BOSSA nova core values: Self Organization, Transparency, and Constant Customer Focus. Look for the next article about a revolutionary new way of drawing the structure of an organization.
Continuous learning recommends:
Learning through interaction with your environment. BOSSA nova asserts that constant customer focus provides the richest learning environment for the whole company-wide venue.
Using a structure across different teams, roles, and hierarchies that follows a regular rhythm and creates space for feedback.
A disciplined process that defines an hypothesis first (usually grounded in reflection), then experiments around this hypothesis and learns from the results – which then feed into the next hypothesis.
Having a focus on the aim of the company encourages not just training but also teaching and organized research. Organized research includes sharing or publishing what you are learning with peers so that they can attempt to replicate and validate your conclusions. Key components are:
Viewing failure as a learning opportunity and making the learning transparent and independent of the function in the organizational structure.
Reflecting and learning both from outcomes and from interactions.
Openness to dramatically new learning paths that may emerge spontaneously by interrupting daily routines (e.g., moments of silence in a meeting, retrospectives especially when you are under stress, hold an ad hoc Open Space for new ideas).
Finally, performance evaluations should relate their measurements to customer focus and organize learning and development for the individual that supports organizational growth. The most effective evaluations separate individual objectives from bonuses.
The post Continuous Learning appeared first on Agile BOSSA nova – Jutta Eckstein & John Buck.
