Rethinking Agile: What You Need to Know About Business Agility

Introduction

In this blog, we dive into the journey of rethinking agile and its impact on business agility. From challenges faced to identifying organizational problems and strategies for establishing agility, this article provides valuable insights.

Rethinking Agile: A Story of Business Agility Transformation

• The speaker introduces the topic of rethinking agile and emphasizes that agile teams have nothing to do with business agility. The story revolves around an organization facing challenges with project delivery time, proactive market response, and preparation for continuous change.

• The organization’s response to these challenges was to embark on an agile transformation. They formed cross-functional product teams, allowed teams to choose their preferred agile methods, and implemented visualization, stand-up meetings, retrospectives, and measurements as requirements for each team.

• The organization initiated a one and a half year agile transformation project, focusing on training 600 employees, restructuring into cross-functional product teams, and implementing agile practices team by team. External and internal coaches were brought in to support the transformation.

• After a year, 80% of the teams were reported to be fully transformed, but when metrics were examined, concerns arose. The trend charts showed a decline in sprint velocity and lead time, contradicting the expected improvements from the agile transformation.

• The organization’s primary motivation for the agile journey was to reduce time to market, but the actual result showed an increase in project lead time, leading to disappointment and questioning of the effectiveness of the agile transformation.

Identifying Organizational Problems

• The speaker was contacted by an organization to address issues they were facing, and it was related to local optimization and global sub-optimization.

• Upon visiting the organization, the speaker noticed that despite efforts to improve, the situation was actually worsening, leading to longer shipping times to the market.

• The initial exploration involved identifying potential problems in the organization, and the audience actively participated by suggesting various issues such as lack of Wi-Fi, unpreparedness for agile methodologies, and a focus on wrong metrics.

• The speaker conducted in-depth discussions with teams and found that the organization exhibited significant dependencies among teams, leading to a complex web of inter-team connections.

• The analogy of an organization’s structure to a keyboard was used to illustrate how dependencies can hinder overall performance, emphasizing the importance of optimizing team interactions rather than just individual team efficiencies.

Challenges in Visualizing the Development Process

• The speaker encountered challenges in visualizing the development process of their team, as they initially assumed that development completion meant customer satisfaction and project success.

• However, they discovered that after development, there was integration work, followed by acceptance testing and waiting for release windows, which were not initially visible on the board.

• The speaker emphasized the importance of visualizing the entire process to understand the workflow and identify potential areas for improvement.

• They also inquired about the time spent in each stage, learning that integration work was done monthly, acceptance testing quarterly, and waiting for a release four times a year, all contributing to the overall time to market.

Establishing Agile Strategy and Portfolio Solutions

• The speaker reflects on the challenges faced in a project, emphasizing the importance of strategy in determining what to work on.

• To address the lack of actual interactions and end-to-end flow, the speaker implemented changes at both the team and product levels, including establishing product boards for coordination and conducting product stand-up meetings and retrospectives.

• In addition to addressing dependencies between teams, the speaker also focused on dependencies between products by creating an operational portfolio, enabling representatives to discuss and manage inter-product dependencies.

• The speaker simplified the upstream processes, involving the business to streamline operations and move away from an annual budgeting cycle to a more continuous project initiation approach, creating focus and establishing agile strategy through a forward-loop approach.

• The implementation of agile strategy and portfolio solutions highlighted the broader need for business agility at all levels of the organization, emphasizing the significance of company-wide agile transformation.

• The Flight Levels concept was introduced to illustrate the different organizational levels at which agility can be achieved, emphasizing the need for agile transformation beyond just the team level.

Understanding Flight Levels in Organizational Agility

• Flight Level 2 system is essential for ensuring that the right team is working on the right stuff at the right time, acting as a keyboard for the keys (teams) in an organization.

• When there are dependencies among multiple products and services in an organization, the operational portfolio can be built at Flight Level 2, connecting the different systems.

• Flight Level 3, or the strategy level, aims to align the work in the organization with the overarching strategy, enabling strategy implementation by connecting it with the lower flight levels.

• Establishing agility in an organization is not only confined to the team level, but also involves zooming out to understand the needs at different flight levels, solving different but equally important problems.

• It’s important for organizations to consider the benefits of implementing flight levels and how it can help them become more agile in the market.

• An online course, ‘Understanding Flight Levels,’ is available for those interested, providing insight into how to incorporate flight levels into their organization effectively.

• Getting new initiatives to Flight Level 3 involves breaking down long-term goals into yearly, quarterly, and 90-day outcomes, then translating these into specific initiatives for implementation.

• Convincing managers about the need for a strategy portfolio involves showcasing the tangible benefits and addressing the question of ‘What’s in it for me?‘

• Managing silos and dependencies across flight levels, such as with product or capability-based management, is critical to optimize organizational operations and effectiveness.

• Addressing non-believers and skeptics within the organization involves framing the benefits and value of agility in a way that aligns with their concerns and problems, showcasing the multiple facets of agility from economic to social benefits.

• The comparison between flight levels and Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) will be explored in an upcoming live show, discussing the differences and potential integration approaches.

Conclusion

Rethinking agile goes beyond team-level transformations. It delves into the core of business agility, tackling challenges, dependencies, and strategies for optimization. Understanding flight levels in organizational agility is crucial for a holistic approach to agility. Learn more about incorporating agility into your organization effectively.

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