Partnering with organizations on their agile journey
Guiding an organization through change is a complex and complicated journey. Partnering with experienced practitioners who have been through it before can provide invaluable insights and shorten your organization’s learning curve. Our areas of focus are as follows:
Agile portfolio management
Portfolio agility focuses on the next level up and looking at the work of multiple teams within a connected portfolio. It can be easy to get bogged down in terminology and processes, particularly with so many ‘scaling models’, so we always stay focused on pragmatic practices that create meaningful results:
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- Align your teams around the value you want to deliver and ensure your teams use end-to-end Agile processes.
- Break down the work in your portfolio into several smaller pieces, where each piece is “a unit of value impactful enough to be meaningful to customers and small enough to be quickly delivered and deployed”. These pieces are called ‘minimum meaningful product’ or ‘minimum marketable product’ (MMP), depending on your context.
- Facilitate system-wide planning activities that ensure priorities are made by the right group of individuals and that regular feedback loops are built to assess progress against a roadmap.
Working across multiple teams and putting in place a Value Management Office to facilitate and lead the conversation around what digital products and services need to be built, for whom and why. Making difficult but intentional prioritization decisions across a Portfolio Backlog is key to maximizing value delivery.
Product and program governance
For enterprise digital service development, decision-making structures and approaches can hamper progress by being too slow, cumbersome or lacking clear accountabilities. Conversely, a sustainable and effective governance model can enable product teams and related groups to act quickly, take responsibility and drive value to their customers.
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Additionally, when key decisions are required around funding, timelines or priorities, robust governance will ensure it can handle the scale of decisions required.
Our governance practice begins with a set of lightweight discovery to understand how funding, relationships, accountabilities and decision flows are currently happening. From there, insights are generated and flowed into collaborative governance design with representation from all key groups. Finally, an implementation roadmap is put into place with a new meeting architecture, roles, responsibilities and cadence for all governance-related activities.
Guiding agile change
Working with leaders and agents of change through a mix of consulting, facilitation and training, organizations can develop their own persistent and sustainable Agile change platform. By collaborative crafting meaningful outcomes, mapping out a holistic change backlog and then prioritizing it into release plans, organizations can then incrementally and iteratively guide their Agile change.
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This proven methodology is capable of welcoming new ideas, concepts or challenges as they come up and responding in an empathetic fashion that helps build culture and engagement. Crucially, leaders will learn to recursively apply many key Agile values and practices in their approach to change, allowing them to learn and model aligned behavior with the core purpose of their change.
In an age of constant change, leaders need to be equipped with a mindset, model and pragmatic set of tools to guide Agile change within their teams and organizations.
Agile organizational development
Building organizational agility is a multi-faceted challenge that touches on a wide range of concerns within any organization. Before embarking on this journey, it’s crucial to understand ‘why’ any changes are required and how any changes would have a meaningful impact on business outcomes.
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Agile Organizational Development always begins from a posture of listening and discovery, as we endeavour to understand what the needs within an organization are and which outcomes are most impactful. From there, through a series of discovery activities (interviews, observations, product and artifact reviews), insights are made about which areas have the most opportunity for impacts. These could touch learning and development plans, strengthening culture, defining jobs and roles, organizational design and collaboration tools.