Stop scaling... start growing an agile organization (IIBA)

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Stop scaling… Start growing
an agile organization

Andrea Tomasini
Agile Coach & Trainer
andrea.tomasini@agile42.com
@tumma72
@agile42/coaches

What to scale?

Delivery
Model?
Organizational
Structure?
Teams and
Processes?

agile42 | the agile coaching company www.agile42.com | All rights reserved. Copyright © 2007 - 2015.agile42 | the agile coaching company www.agile42.com | All rights reserved. Copyright © 2007 - 2015.
We’llhave
largerProjects,we
needtoscale…
Ithinkscaling
culturewillbethereal
challenge…

Why scale?

CorporateHierarchy
Compliance
Individual

Agile Pilot Success!
Teams demonstrated
that Agile can deliver
value faster, with
higher quality, and is
motivating…
Organizations are
pressed into Agile, and
react using traditional
approach...

The heartbeat of an agile
organization…

Client &
Value focus
Self-Organization
&Autonomy
Iterative &
Incremental
change to
reduce the
risk
Continuous
Improvement

Adhocracy
MarketHierarchy
Flexibility & Discretion
Stability & Control
Internalfocus&Integration
Externalfocus&Differentiation
Clan
Organizational Culture Profile (CVF)
Agile Values & Principles

New
Organization 
(up to 60 people)
Grown
Organization
(from 60 to 500 people)
Corporation
(from 500 to many thousands people)
“One size fits all?”… Not in practice… but in Principles!

Basic principles and recurring
patterns for growing agile…

1st Principle: focus on small
incremental changes
Whenever changing from one way of working to another, we
will go through a hybrid situation where the coexistence of
two different ways generates attrition, duplications and other
forms of waste. The awareness of this fact should push us
in delivering changes fast and in small increments…

The traditional approach to change management…
…focused on standardization, before stabilization…
t
Design
Documentation
Rollout
Fix Issues
> 3-4 months…

The agile approach to change management…
…focused on stabilization with emergent standardization…
Design
Rollout
Doc
Rollout
Doc
Rollout
Doc
Coach
≤ 12 weeks t
Design Coach
Rollout
Doc
Rollout
Doc

Goal PSF
NC
Agile Strategy Map™
Define the Goal we
want to achieve
Possible Success Factor (PSF)
represents a hypothesis about a
key factor that would enable us
to achieve the Goal
Necessary Condition (NC):
what is needed in order to fulfill
the Success Factor

Strategy Map from
March 2014
• The Goal for 2015
has been
established
• The Transition
Team identiﬁed at
least 7 PSFs that
would provide a
powerful leverage
to achieve the
ﬁnal Goal

Strategy Map
June 2014
• Break out
groups worked
on detailing the
various PSFs
into actionable
experiments to
validate the
hypothesis for
organizational
improvement

2nd Principle: focus on value
and organize accordingly
Focusing on value means to make sure that there are as
few obstacles as possible in the direction of the value
streams…

The matrix organization…
SubSystem1
SubSystem2
SubSystem3
Infrastructure
Operations
PMO
Project 1
Project 2
Project 3
… optimized for utilization, not value delivery…
Handovers and coordination
Value
Client
Push in the lines

Stream 1
Stream 2
Stream 3
The agile organization…
SubSystem1
SubSystem2
SubSystem3
Infrastructure
Operations
… optimized for value delivery and time to market
Value
Client
Pull on the streams

Ideas Potential ROIF Ready to Pull
Success: we can compare the value of
projects easily (using defined KPIs) and
make consistent business decisions.
Failure: we still have endless discussions
about priority and it’s costly to prepare
project info for the portfolio process
High
Mid
HighHigh HighHigh
Dev Team
Unified Portfolio & Program System to focus on Customer Value…

Lean Canvases to create context and focus on Customer Value…
Lean Portfolio Canvas™ have been created by agile42 and are licensed using Creative Common 3.0 with attribution (BY), non commercial usage (NC) and
share alike (SA) options. You can reuse and modify the template, but you will always have to leave the logo on it.
OpportunityName (title)
1. Opportunity 2. Customer Segments
What is the problem to be solved? What type of customers & users will
benefit from this solution?
How is the customer solving the
problem right now?
3. Possible Solution
What are the key points of a possible
solution to the presented problem?
4. Benefits
What are the benefits for the
customers?
6. Measuring Success
What metrics will be best measure the
success of the feature?
5. Business Readiness
What steps are required from the
business side to be able to use this
capability?
7. Cost of Delay
Which profile better represent the cost
of delay (CoD)?
8. Costs Structure
How does the cost structure look like for such a feature? One time, ongoing
costs, contractors expenses, development costs?
9. Value to Customer and Business
What are the expected incremental revenue for selling this feature, and what are
the strategic and tactical benefit? What are the intangible values (usability,
performance, customer knowledge obtained...)
Opportunity Owner (name)

agile42 | the agile coaching company www.agile42.com | All rights reserved. Copyright © 2007 - 2015.agile42 | We advise, train and coach companies building software www.agile42.com | All rights reserved. Copyright © 2007 - 2015.
• Uniﬁed Portfolio and Program
System to increase transparency,
to visualize Customer Value and
dependencies

3rd Principle: decentralize
control whenever possible
Decentralization of control and decision making, reduces
the feedback loops, and enables faster reaction times. It
requires deﬁning goals and constraints to allow for
autonomous decision making.

Control !
Worker 1
Sub 1
Worker 2
Sub 2 Sub 3
The hierarchical organization… Centralized Control,
ends up overloaded,
introducing delays
Requests
Authorization
the design is based on mistrust…
Information&power

Container for empowerment
Worker 3Worker 2
The agile organization… Decentralized
Control reduces
overhead, and
encourage
collaboration
the design is based on trust…
Worker 1
Collaboration
Information&power

• Both on the “budget”
level, as well as on the
expected delivery and
preparation levels
• This level of
transparency allows to
build trust between
Portfolio Management
and self-organizing
teams
• Clear Policies
describing the
range of autonomy
the teams have

4th
Principle: avoid
synchronization of ﬂows unless
necessary
De-synchronization is unintuitive, but allows for parallel
distributed work, without having to carry the excessive
burden of coordination and handovers.

t
Project 2
Project 3
Project 1
The plan driven organization… Synchronization of all Projects
for a release, decreases
efficiency and increases
coordination costs
Release
Pm 3
Pm 1
Pm 2
…fixed scope and fixed date…

t
The agile organization… De-synchronization of
development teams to
reduce cost of release
…variable scope and variable date…
Feature A
Release
Team 1
Team 2
Team 3
Team 4
Feature B
Release Release
Feature C
Release
Feature D
Release
Feature E

agile42 | We make your Agile transition succeed! www.agile42.com | All rights reserved. Copyright © 2007 - 2014.
Release incrementally,
with higher quality
Automated testing
in short cycles
Delivered
serviceable Product
in just 2 months

Continuos Integration & Delivery…
Switch from big product
releases to incremental
change, every feature is
released on all platforms
“Focusing on one Feature at a
time allowed for faster
feedback also involving
stakeholders was easier…
deliver fast to learn fast”

Overall lessons learned
Changes in behaviour happened thanks to focus on
principles and values, the resulting emergent systems
showed recurring and reusable patterns to produce similar
behaviours.

EDD Hendrik Esser | Commercial in confidence | © Ericsson AB 2015 | 2015-02-11 | Page 2
Commitment
– We have moved from the question “are you committed?” to “how can we
deliver?”
Distribution instead of hierarchy
– Planning/forecasting is distributed: many people do this from different
angles (Strategy, Product Roadmap, Product Release, Feature, Sprint)
– Each party trusts the other that they do their part of the whole.
– Continuous flow of planning, follow-up and adaptation
Collaboration instead of co-existence
– No “contracts” between parts of Ericsson
– Collaboration with a lot of interaction to drive alignment and by this enable
autonomy.
Most significant Changes
after 7 years through transition

Page 14 MC Conference | May 2014 Gunther Birk / I DT MC R&D 11 Restricted © Siemens AG 2014. All rights reserved
Fast Lane PLC319F
Lean transformation in practice
Learnings
•  Direct communication is the enabler
for doing the necessary things at the
right time
•  Timeboxed development is
mandatory to establish learning
methods
•  Ranked backlog / visualization
creates unknown transparency on
where we stand - over 7 teams, with
more than 40 people
•  Giving responsibility into the teams
leads to outstanding engagement
and results
•  Thinking in customer value within
each iteration gives us control on the
functionality of our deliverables

Page 12 MC Conference | May 2014 Gunther Birk / I DT MC R&D 11 Restricted © Siemens AG 2014. All rights reserved
Fast Lane PLC319F
Adopting lean thinking to hardware development
The Question
How can we be sure,
that our redesign will
be o.k.?!
Parallel Sourcing
- Serial material
- Testing Equipment
- Rapid Prototypes
Parallel Qualification
- Typetest
- Loadtest
Risk Exclusion
-  Execute Complete DVT
-  Evaluate Production process
-  Build up production samples
•  Speed-up by
40%
•  Enhanced
Quality
•  Enhanced
Design for
Production
Blog: LEAN@MC - english Blog

Assessment
Strategy
Pilot Projects
Rollout
Enterprise Transition Framework (ETF)

1. There is no blueprint for an
Agile Organization, as from
the moment you’ll try to
deﬁne one, it won’t be Agile
anymore!
agile42 | We advise, train and coach companies building software www.agile42.com | All rights reserved. Copyright © 2007 - 2015.

2. Scaling is not about the
delivery or a model it’s about
culture change, and
continuous improvement

3. Becoming an Agile
organization it is not a goal, it
is a conscious decision to
embrace a journey towards
continuous improvement

4. Experience shows that
there are recurring patterns
emerging by embracing
speciﬁc principles. Using this
experience can be extremely
valuable on your own journey

Thank
You!

More food for thought...
http://slideshare.net/tumma72

Copyrights notice
All material produced in this presentation is protected by the
Creative Common License 4.0 (by-nc-sa).
The brands and logos of agile42, Enterprise Transition Framework ETF, Team Coaching Framework TCF
and Agile Strategy Map are Copy Rights and Trademarks of agile42 GmbH, and agile42 International GmbH
and can’t be reused without written authorization

Stop scaling... start growing an agile organization (IIBA)

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Stop scaling... start growing an agile organization (IIBA)