organizing for business agility - atlanta nov 2016
TRANSCRIPT
If you follow the advice in this book, your organisation will be the better for it
— Dave Farley, author of Continuous Delivery
@sriramnarayanwww.agileorgdesign.com
Organizing for Business Agility
A curious case of too many late-
stage defects
2
Desk-checks
3
“You mean they simply interrupt us
during the course of work?”
—Test Lead
4
Barrier 1: Scripted collaboration
5
“We have to log all defects into the
defect-tracking system”
— Test Lead
6
Barrier 2: Doing Agile
7
“We won’t get credit for it”
8
Barrier 3: Narrow KPIs
9
When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a
good measure.—Charles Goodhart, former advisor to the Bank of England and
Emeritus Professor at the London School of Economics
Targets turn informational metrics
into motivational metrics. Use with
caution.
Why do we encounter activity-
oriented KPIs?
12
Barrier 4: Functional Org Structure
Some structures encourage process
and tools over individuals and
interactions
13
Wait! Are we overdoing it? Motivated
people with a can-do attitude can
get past these non-issues.
14
In general, systems influence
behavior more than individual
attitude. Therefore, the operating
model matters.
Non-conformance!
Tailorings and Deviations
16
Barrier 5: Governance by excessive
process standardization
17
“Could we at least go through the
end-to-end test scripts beforehand?”
18
Barrier 6: Vendor KPI
19
Why are vendor KPIs so narrowly
defined?
20
Barrier 7: Activity-oriented
outsourcing
21
22
23
These barriers represent the
organization’s “ways of working”. In
a big organization, they cannot
usually be overcome by team
members or even managers.
Courageous executives need to step
in and sponsor change.
24
25
So much for barriers within IT
But there are other barriers on account of how
various upstream divisions are set up to work
with IT
26
Business IT
WHY I.T. SHOULD NOT BE SET-UP AS A “DELIVERY” ORG
27
More Work is Funded
Lots of Output
Not much business benefit
Business comes up with other
hopeful ideas
A POTENTIAL PROBLEM
ITBusiness
More Work is Funded
Lots of Output
Not much business benefit
Business comes up with other
hopeful ideas
Pressure to be
more efficient
Delivery-only
transformation
attempt
BEWARE OF DELIVERY-ONLY TRANSFORMATION
ITBusiness
30
Engg.
IT
Product
Digital
Business
Platform
BUSINESS-IT MORPHS INTO COMMERCIAL-PLATFORM
31
Business
Product
Digital
IT
CommercialBusiness
IT
Tech
Older generation business Digital Business
A REVISION OF THE OPERATING MODEL
The operating
model serves
as a bridge
between
strategy and
execution. It
has several
dimensions.
COMMON QUESTIONS
• Align teams along products or channels?
• Product-centric or customer-centric?
• What is the alternative to funding projects?
• How do we handle BAU work?
• How do we help our people take on new roles?
• Do developers/testers report to product owners, delivery
managers or people managers?
• How does business need to play along?
33
ORGANIZING FOR BUSINESS AGILITY
Move away from projects (and programs)
Funding for pods and outcomes rather than for projects
More product people than delivery people
Durable org aligned with products/brands/LOBs and capabilities
Long-lived, outcome-oriented, cross-functional, think-build-run, cross-
channel teams (pods)
Accountable owner owners. Hierarchy of outcome-ownership. Decision
rights and input rights. (Cleararchy)
Revised metrics, targets, incentives
Revised tooling regime
34
DESIGN
PRINCIPLES
Govern for value over predictability.
(Aim for soft predictability.)
Govern For Value Over Predictability
Value
Soft Hard
Pre
dic
tab
ility S
oft
Ha
rd
Usual Aim
Usual Result Better Aim
Not going to happen
For best results, let purpose inform structure.
When the purpose is responsiveness:
Organize for responsiveness over cost-
efficiency
Design for intrinsic motivation and unscripted
collaboration rather than extrinsic motivation and
scripted collaboration
Autonomy | Mastery | Purpose
WHO IS DOING THIS?
WHO IS DOING THIS?
Digital natives
Sections of enterprise IT, Digital at companies
facing disruption e.g. finserv, media, retail
41
DON’T ASK FOR A BIG TRANSFORMATION BUDGET
A big transformation budget will need to be backed up
a big upfront transformation plan. That’s a waterfall
approach to Agile transformation
Think of an MVP for transformation
Committing to “feedback-based-planning” is a change
of mindset from committing to an upfront plan.
“IT-only” attempts lead to transformation fatigue
42
43
Initial Design
First batch of
Pods
Second batch of
Pods
Third batch of Pods
The operating model evolves
as transformation unfolds
Initial Funding
INITIAL DESIGN
A. Business capability mapping to delineate products, channels and capabilities.
B. Outcome mapping to translate strategy to high-level outcomes and suboutcomes
C. Systems mapping to map the existing systems landscape onto the identified products,
channels and capabilities.
D. Review existing portfolio of work to assess alignment with new organization
E. Review metrics, targets, incentives for alignment with new setup
F. Review changes to reporting lines in order to ensure appropriate balance of authority
along dimensions of product, horizontal-concerns and people management.
G. Initial cut of long-lived, cross-functional pods with shared specialists where unavoidable
H. Identify communities of practice and community leads
I. Identify ready and potential candidates for product owners, capability owners and
channel leads
J. Work on internal messaging.
K. Identify pilot pods for rollout.44
THE TIME TO ACT IS NOW
Cannot wait for “proven case-studies in my
industry segment”
Needs courageous executives.
45
THANK YOU
www.agileorgdesign.com