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February 20 - February 21, 2020
Cross-functionality has nothing to do with team setup
Cross-functional teams are in no way the Holy Grail of agility
When it's about focusing on the customer, integrated value generation is only a small drop in a very large bucket. Cross-functionality is a company mentality and not an organizational setup for teams. It means creating an environment where it is ok, or even desired, to perform poorly locally (whilst learning) if it helps the overall performance of the organization. It isn't enough having everyone is pulling on the same rope—they must all pull in the same direction, too.
Business agility doesn't work if an organization is comprised of agile islands while the logic of the surrounding processes remains the same and certain groups exempt themselves from practicing agility.
Business agility starts at the top because executive management is still responsible for the strategic direction in most organizations.
Getting executive management on board is not always easy, however. The expensive MBA knowledge is deeply anchored in their minds. But an agile company doesn't need a business administrator at the top, it needs a business leader.
they must be the pilots on the agile journey to avoid just sinking money into the local sub-optimization hole.
Out of this grows the illusion of being able to react quickly to the market—and yet, annual budget cycles are still followed.
Ultimately, you unleash an enormous amount of money, creating a project wave that should distribute itself into calm rivers continually rolling out new ideas and products.
Real business agility integrates the upstream and the downstream into a single value stream to create a fast and steady workflow. Put another way: Strategy, operations, development and delivery closely work together and, most importantly, towards the same goal. For this to function properly, executive management must be on board.
You must limit the work where the effects, the benefits and the advantages of WIP limits want to be seen.
In an organizational system, the ratio between initiatives that have been started to those that have been completed has a direct effect on the time-to-market.
organization to the strategy, upper management must be willing to unequivocally and explicitly communicate the strategy and all the current initiatives within the organization to the employees. Just like with the
Initiatives were the organization's money makers; essentially, the products and solutions for the customers.
Investments denoted necessary, but not urgent, projects that didn't have a direct benefit for the customer, but had a background affect. As a Netflix customer, for example, you purchase problem-free video streaming and not automated software testing. But to deliver this product, Netflix needs to setup the appropriate infrastructure for it.
The primary difference between operative and strategic portfolio management is the timeframe.
On most of the boards in this world, you will usually find after a column that is labelled "In Development" a column tersely labelled as "Finished" or "Done". In this company, though, they saw it a bit differently. A project or initiative would only be considered "Finished" if it had achieved what it was supposed to achieve.
That's why this company had three additional columns after development on the strategy board: "Measure & Improve Success", "Adjust & Improve" and "Result (not) Achieved".
Where did the ideas for projects and initiatives, the "money makers", come from in this company?
The business case also had to consider market response so a decision could be made within 90 days whether or not the desired result was going to be achievable. The idea didn't need to completely implemented within 90 days, but it should be possible to see the trend towards success after 90 days.
There were more projects started than the organization could handle. The greater the time period between Strategy Standups, the greater the risk of falling back into old habits. Even if you would meet on a monthly basis, there is a high probability that a week later an urgent decision is needed for something else—and then the temptation arises to not wait for the next Standup. And if you would wait, that would be anything but agile.
No management of team interactions We built product boards to manage the dependencies within products We establish an operative portfolio management to manage the dependencies between products No end-to-end management of the value creation chain We scaled the operative product portfolio to include the upstream, simplifies the upstream and with it improved the collaboration between the departments and development No strategic portfolio management
We developed strategy boards with upper management to get an overview of all current and planned projects in the organization, enabling collective rather than isolated decision making in short cycles.
Business agility is not a team sport—it is a company sport!
Before, the company was a conglomeration of silos.
Focus on Outcome rather than Output If you want an agile business, you should focus on the result and its effect, i.e. the outcome, rather than on the quantity, i.e. the output.
Ultimately, the goal of business agility is to positively impact the business metrics. It´s great if you deliver eight percent more features – but if nobody needs them, you have eight percent more garbage.
Start at the top
The job of upper management is to really consider what business agility means, which problems need to be dealt with and above all what their role is in this process.
Agility begins with the change process You cannot implement new ways of working and thinking on schedule. All of
Focus on the goal, not on the method
In some companies, "Agile" is turned into a type of cargo cult. The methods are worshipped, but not the goal.
Agility is not a team affair
If you want an agile business, your focus should be on generating value (organizational processes) and not on organizational structure. Clearly, you need teams for the processes to work. But it makes little sense to optimize teams come hell or high water because optimal teams encompassed by broader bad processes contributes very little to business agility. From a systemic point of view, it is much more effective to have great processes with bad teams.
Manage and eliminate dependencies (exactly in this order)
Incorporate the drivers for lean business agility at every Flight Level
