Mike Burrows's Blog, page 44

Announcing the Agendashift Unbenchmarking Service

First the hint (in What next after part I?):

I am already able to demonstrate the automatic identification of survey scores that don’t fit the model – areas in which the organisation in question has unusually strong areas to celebrate or weak areas for further investigation – all driven by the data, not the biases of the person facilitating the debrief

Now the announcement: the Agendashift unbenchmarking service is now available.

In a nutshell: we run your survey results against our dataset and identify areas of opportunity for you automatically.

When and why to unbenchmark

You’re embarking on a journey of Lean-Agile transformation and you want a better understanding of the landscape you’ll be navigating
Your improvement efforts are stalling and it’s time to agree priorities afresh
As input to your corporate culture exercise, team retrospective, departmental meeting, or offsite
Anytime you need to reorient, re-baseline, take stock, and re-energise
When it’s time to take a regular checkpoint
As a low-commitment step before taking an Agendashift workshop or engaging an Agendashift partner

How it works

We set up for you an online survey with the full 43-prompt Agendashift values-based delivery assessment
You distribute it internally for your staff to complete by the agreed deadline
We report back to you:

The overall distribution of your scores
Stronger and weaker categories and prompts, as measured in absolute terms (without reference to other data)
Categories and prompts whose aggregate scores are above or below the expected profile given the correlations we have observed
Areas of agreement and disagreement, reinforcing the more obvious findings and creating opportunities for story-gathering where the picture is more mixed
The complete set of aggregate results for all categories and prompts (twice over in fact – one set for prioritisation purposes, another for planning)

If you’re a veteran of one of our workshops or you have read the Agendashift book (chapters 2 and 3 in particular), you’ll recognise this reporting structure. It reflects how we typically organise a survey debrief and the mapping exercises that follow.

Unbenchmarking

The new and exciting bit is the identification of data points above or below the expected profile, ie scores that differ from what might be expected given your survey’s overall shape and the correlations we observe elsewhere. We’ve used machine learning techniques on our growing dataset to create a model of survey results to which yours can be fitted; the deviations above and below the best-fit model identify what’s particular to you. Instead of a crude index or vanity metric that’s meaningless in the context of an open-ended journey of transformation, we give you detailed insights you can actually work with.

Additionally, we can control the granularity of the model so that you see deviations not just from the total population but from organisations that show traits similar to yours. This helps you put your findings into proper context, and makes the insights even more actionable.

Should you decide to repeat the exercise at some later date, any significant changes to your profile will cause new areas of interest to be highlighted. Just as you’d expect!

In this real example, the three prompts whose scores lie furthest below the expected profile clearly have something in common:

As illustrated here, the biggest opportunities can hide in unexpected places, away from where absolute scores are obviously weak. Unbenchmarking highlights these potential action items for you automatically.

What happens next is of course up to you. However, the process of turning prioritised prompts into an agreed plan of actionable outcomes appropriate to your unique context is something we are well practised at facilitating; no matter wherever you are located, we should be able to find you some valuable support.

Pricing

The Agendashift unbenchmarking service is priced at £125 (about €145 or $160) per survey plus £1 per person over 10 people surveyed, with survey sizes specified in advance.

Several discounts are available:

We make generous allowances for charitable, non-profit, educational, and government organisations
If you’re based outside the major economies we can make PPP adjustments
For large exercises involving multiple teams or departments, you may find it helpful to receive both separate and combined results; pricing will depend on complexity but multiple surveys will in general attract discounts.
Similarly, repeat exercises (eg quarterly) will be discounted

The Agendashift values-based delivery assessment is already included as prework for our transformation mapping and practitioner’s workshops. Where workshops follow unbenchmarking we’ll adjust workshop pricing appropriately. You won’t pay twice!

Finally, you should consider engaging one of our partners, professionals well qualified to support you in your journey of transformation.

Get in touch now to arrange your unbenchmarking exercise:

Arrange an unbenchmarking exercise

Related

Which assessment template?
Which workshop?
The Agendashift partner directory
The Agendashift partner programme
The book: Agendashift: clean conversations, coherent collaborations, continuous transformation , chapters 2 and 3 especially

Meet us online

Read our blog: blog.agendashift.com
Join our Slack community: agendashift
Join our LinkedIn group: Agendashift
Follow us on Twitter: @agendashift

Video: Exercises in Lean-Agile transformation

Two weeks ago I led a big Agendashift-style Discovery session (chapter 1 of the book) for 80+ people as guest of Adventures With Agile’s London meetup. Here’s the video:

Last week I was at Agile Yorkshire. Tomorrow (Wednesday June 20th) I’ll be doing my third meetup in three weeks, when I’m at Agile Peterborough. 75 people signed up so far!

Related

The book:  Agendashift: clean conversations, coherent collaboration, continuous transformation
Events calendar

What next after part I?

What’s next after part I of the new Agendashift book (published last month), that is.

The obvious answer would be part II, which I intend to consist mainly of case studies and smaller real-world examples of Lean-Agile change in action. Before that though, I’ve been experimenting with some machine learning tools, in particular in the area of dimension reduction. Broadly, this allows the 43-dimensional data of the Agendashift survey results to be boiled down to just a few key features (factors, traits, tendencies, etc).

This has considerable potential:

I am already able to demonstrate the automatic identification of survey scores that don’t fit the model – areas in which the organisation in question has unusually strong areas to celebrate or weak areas for further investigation – all driven by the data, not the biases of the person facilitating the debrief
Cluster analysis could allow representatives of organisations exhibiting similar traits to be introduced and their experiences compared
A combination of 1 & 2 could lead to some kind of recommendation system – machine-assistance for the coach, perhaps

Expect an announcement very soon on point 1, a new commercial offering and new functionality available soon to paid users (ie Agendashift partners).

Point 2 is in fact my plan for part II. Technicalities aside: bring people together, get them talking, write it up

Which workshop?

Check out these two workshop descriptions and you’ll see the same structure:

The Agendashift™ transformation mapping workshop
The Agendashift™ practitioner workshop

Not just the same structure, but the same materials too. What’s the difference?

The difference is context and objectives:

In the transformation mapping workshop, the participants share a context – their organisation – and the workshop’s objective is to formulate a response to that organisation’s needs
In the practitioner workshop there may be little or no shared context; participants are there to experience and practice, often building on what they may have already read (not that reading is a prerequisite)

They aren’t mutually exclusive:

A recent private workshop made significant progress on organisational issues in the workshop and in the period following, but many of the attendees could be described as practitioners (subsequently, one participant become an Agendashift partner and has now at his disposal all the tools and materials needed to run workshops himself)
A participant at a recent public practitioner workshop later invited me back to his company, shifting the focus from practice back to context

Why make the distinction? A discussion about objectives beforehand is always valuable. Expectations should clear on both sides, it’s important to get the right set of people in the room, and if it’s left to the day of the workshop to think about what happens afterwards, it may be too late.

Related

Agendashift partner programme
Book:  Agendashift: clean conversations, coherent collaborations, continuous transformation (part 1) – out on Leanpub since May 11th. The chapters follow the same structure as the workshops.
Agendashift on LinkedIn and Slack

Which assessment template?

[Update: I’ve summarised the options in a table near the bottom of this post]

A small enhancement got released today, causing assessment templates to be listed in a sensible order when you’re creating or editing a survey:

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They’re organised by family, edition, and language.

Family

Currently, there are two families:

Agendashift values-based delivery assessment – this is the main one, the template we’ve been iterating on since 2014
Agendashift values-based adaptability assessment – this is new, developed in parallel with chapter 5 of the new book

Unless you specifically want to assess your organisation’s ability to make change happen, you almost certainly want the first one.

Edition

This specifies both the structure and the size of the assessment:

Original edition – the full-sized template (43 prompts at the latest count), structured by value (transparency, balance, collaboration, etc)
Mini edition – like the original edition, but only 18 prompts (3 per value)
Pathway edition – with minor variations the same prompts of the original edition, structured not by value but by the steps of Reverse STATIK
Mini pathway edition – an 18-prompt version of the above
Featureban edition – the mini edition, re-purposed (see the Featureban home page)

Partners (and their clients) have the full range of templates available to them. The free trial gives access to the mini and mini pathway editions only.

Surveys are generally conducted using the original or mini editions. The pathway or mini pathway editions come into play later when creating a transformation map (chapter 3).

Language

As shown in the screenshot, all of these combinations are available in English (EN), and most of them in French (FR) and German (DE) also. The original and mini editions are also available in Spanish (ES), Hebrew (HE), Italian (IT), Dutch (NL), and Russian (RU).

Summary

Here are all the options summarised in a table:

 

Family
 


Edition
Agendashift

values-based delivery assessment
Agendashift

values-based change assessment

Languages

Original

Partners

n/a

EN, DE, ES, FR, HE, IT, NL, RU

Pathway

Partners

n/a

EN, DE, FR

Mini

Trial, Partners

Trial, Partners

EN, DE, ES, FR, HE, IT, NL, RU

Mini pathway

Trial, Partners

Trial, Partners

EN, DE, FR

Featureban

Trial, Partners

n/a

EN



Related

Agendashift: clean conversations, coherent collaborations, continuous transformation (part 1) – out on Leanpub since May 11th
Agendashift on LinkedIn and Slack
Agendashift partner programme

Agendashift roundup, May 2017

In this edition: The book is out; Lean-Agile Strategy Days, London; A True North for Lean-Agile; Looking ahead; Top posts; Upcoming events

The book is out!

Part I at least – thoughts on part II later. You won’t blame me for blogging about it more than once:

It’s here! Agendashift (part I) is published!
If you’ve read Kanban from the Inside…
The Agendashift book (part I) goes to press on the 11th

Get your copy here: Agendashift: clean conversations, coherent collaboration, continuous transformation [leanpub.com].

Lean-Agile Strategy Days, London (June 7th & 8th)

I mentioned this exciting event in last month’s roundup and it is fast approaching. Karl Scotland (my co-facilitator) wrote about it here, and I gave my take here. Tickets here [eventbrite.com].

A True North for Lean-Agile?

Imagine… everyone able to work consistently at their best:

 • Individuals, teams, between teams, across the organisation

 • Right conversations, right people, best possible moment

 • Needs anticipated, met at just the right time

If you’ve read the book or seen the blurb for our workshops, those words will seem familiar. As described here, I’d love to seem them used more widely. What do you think?

Looking ahead

In preparation for part II of the book I’ve been performing a new analysis on Agendashift survey data, using Principal Component Analysis (PCA) – a technique popular in machine learning circles – to identify traits common to different sub-populations. I’ll release some early findings soon. There’s some great potential here:

Identifying potential case studies for the book
Automatically highlighting prompts that have unexpected values
Connecting people/organisations based on similarity or complementarity

To keep tabs on this work, on new enhancements to the online tools, and on anything else part II-related, join us in #next-steps on Slack.

Top posts

It’s here! Agendashift (part I) is published!
A True North for Lean-Agile?
If you’ve read Kanban from the Inside…
Lean-Agile transformation as Lean-Agile process  (January)
Lean-Agile Strategy Days, London

Upcoming events

07 June, London, UK:

Adventures with Agile meetup: Exercises in Lean-Agile transformation




7-8 June, London, UK:

Lean-Agile Strategy Days, London (2-day workshop incorporating an Agendashift practitioner’s workshop)




21 June, Peterborough, UK:

Agile Peterborough meetup: Managing change in the 21st century: what we know & where we must do better


[Previous roundup: April 2017 ][Next roundup: coming soon!]

[Join us on Slack, LinkedIn , and Twitter ]

New feature: tagging assessments

Now that part I of the book is out, I’ve been using the #next-steps channel in the Agendashift Slack both to share plans for part II and to discuss enhancements to the online tools. I’ll blog about part II soon; this post is about a new feature that addresses a quite frequently-expressed need.

The basic need is the ability to analyse survey results in finer detail, reporting on different sub-populations – managers and staff, different teams, different roles, different projects, and so on.

There is already a crude way to achieve this, conducte multiple surveys and aggregate the results afterwards. It has two drawbacks however:

The UI is very crude (it involves URL hacking)
It works only if the populations are surveyed separately. That’s not always possible, it requires forethought, and it adds significant administrative overhead

Point 1 is of course fixable, but point 2 may not be. A different kind of solution is required.

Now, survey administrators and participants may ‘tag’ their assessments, as many tags as they like:

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And in the charts view, assessments may be included or excluded by tag:

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You could, for example, include all assessments tagged for a given department, but exclude assessments tagged for certain roles.

Finally, if you’re curious about the context name ‘Free trial’, it’s one way to experiment with the mini version of the Agendashift values-based delivery assessment for free. You can sign up here.

A True North for Lean-Agile?

You may have noticed that the blurb for our workshops and for the new book always starts with this:

Imagine… everyone able to work consistently at their best:

 • Individuals, teams, between teams, across the organisation

 • Right conversations, right people, best possible moment

 • Needs anticipated, met at just the right time

It’s taken from one of our Discovery exercises (chapter 1), an early opportunity for participants to explore different ways of working not from the perspective of prescribed practices, but in terms of what it is like – how it feels, what’s different, and so on.

Some of the groups I’ve facilitated have found the exercise so cathartic that they ask repeatedly for more time. It’s not hard to see why:

If you feel that you’re rarely given the opportunity to work at your best, your team doesn’t work well, or you’re painfully aware that teams aren’t working work well together, it can come as a relief to be given the chance to imagine a different reality
Whether you’re a front line worker or a manager, conversations happening at the wrong time (or not at all) can be very frustrating
For most of us, knowing that we’re meeting needs is crucial to finding meaning in our work

The current text of the book doesn’t identify these words as a True North statement (a compass direction rather than a destination), but it probably should. A True North for Agendashift certainly, and I’d like to put it forward as a True North for Lean-Agile also. It’s consistent with the Lean pillars of respect for people and just in time. Consistent with the Agile manifesto, it elevates individuals and interactions, combining those with a sense of timeliness (I joke that Agile seems to imply lots of meetings, the beginning – one hopes– of true collaboration).

In its favour as a worthy True North:

It is easy to understand, worth striving for, and will remain always just out of reach. Transformation must be continuous, not a one-off project
It works at every scale – from individual to organisation, and at scales in between
In its last bullet, it conveys much-needed senses of proactive discovery (needs don’t get consistently anticipated by accident) and purpose (needs being met)

Also, it’s not specifically about software, or even about product development. That’s a departure from the Agile manifesto, but I have no doubt that this is in its favour too.

So… Does it work for you?

Related:

Agendashift: clean conversations, coherent collaborations, continuous transformation (part 1) – out on Leanpub since May 11th
Lean-Agile Strategy Days, London  – June 7th & 8th, see day 2
Caitlin Walker’s From Contempt to Curiosity , whose explorations of “working at your best” inspired the Agendashift exercise.

[image error]

Confirmed venue for Lean-Agile Strategy Days, London

Quick one…

The 2-day workshop Lean-Agile Strategy Days, London (June 7th & 8th) has a confirmed venue:

Monticello House

45 Russell Square

London

WC1B 4JP

That’s fairly central, a 20ish-minute walk from St Pancras International, and close to Russell Square (Piccadilly Line), Goodge Street (Northern Line), and Holborn (Central Line and Piccadilly Line) tube stations.

In case you missed it, here’s a previous post describing this exciting collaboration with my co-facilitator Karl Scotland: Lean-Agile Strategy Days, London. And here’s Karl’s: Lean-Agile Strategy Days: An X-Matrix and Agendashift Fusion.

And read the book! Part I of Agendashift: clean conversations, coherent collaboration, continuous transformation came out exactly a week ago.

[Join us on Slack, LinkedIn, and Twitter]

If you’ve read Kanban from the Inside…

…what should you expect from my second book?

TLDR: Agendashift wouldn’t have happened without Kanban from the Inside. It is however very much its own book. I think you will enjoy it