Impact Makers' SVP Jim Blizzard presented two breakout sessions at the Project Management Institute of Central Virginia's 2019 symposium. The interactive two-part discussion focuses on what to look for as you help drive your company into an age of Enterprise Agility and move from “doing Agile” into “being Agile.”
2. Part I
Part I – Planning is key to agility
• Brand and strategy alignment
• Impeding forces
• Aligning to business capabilities
• Agile governance
Part II – Agility in operations
• Architecture
• Infrastructure
• Intelligence and Automation
• Attitudes
Planning is key to agility
3. Starts with your company’s promise to their
customers
Job #1 – everything else should align to
those promises
Must anticipate internal and external forces
that will constrain or impact your ability as
a company to fulfill on these promises
More than a delivery methodology
WhatisEnterpriseAgility?
3
4. 4
National and Regional Examples:
• Nike - "To bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete in the world.”
• Nationwide Insurance – “Nationwide Is On Your Side”
• Coors Light – “The World’s Most Refreshing Beer”
• Tesla: "To accelerate the advent of sustainable transport by bringing compelling
mass market electric cars to market"
• Geico – “15 Minutes Or Less Can Save You 15% Or More On Car Insurance”
• Allstate - "You're in good hands"
• Lego - "Endless Play"
• Southwest Airlines - “Low fares”
• McDonald’s - “Inexpensive, familiar & consistent meal delivered in a clean
environment”
• BMW - “The ultimate driving machine”
• WellStar Health System – providing innovative care models that are focused on
improving quality and access to healthcare
And…How do your current features/stories align to those promises?
Whatare yourcompany’s promisestoyourcustomers?
ACTION ITEM
If you had a
difficult time
answering these
questions…make
that your
homework when
you return to work!
#agilecustomerpromises
6. 6
• Compliance needs/audit findings
• Technology changes and need for
innovation
• Competition
• Fear of change
• Unengaged business partners (IT
initiated transformation)
• Organizational Silos
• Lack of decision making
• Unaligned processes
• Poor knowledge management
Truly agile companies are adept at the “bob-and-weave”
Forcesthatimpedeenterpriseagility
INTERNAL forces that work against
agility
EXTERNAL forces that work against
agility
#agilityblockers
7. • Clearly stated
• Well Groomed/Refined
• Real, testable acceptance criteria
• Easily traced back to strategic themes (Features/Capabilities and Epics)
• Scoped well enough to fit into a sprint
• Owned by one dedicated team
A Day in the Life of a Story
WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG?
7
8. 8
What could go wrong, you say?
Capacity IssuesX
Change Management ProcessesX
Conflicting PrioritiesX
Push vs PullX
#agilityblockers
10. 10
Delivering on Promises
Brand
Promise
Brand
Promise
Brand
Promise
Value your customers can expect to receive every time they interact with you
Business
Strategy
Business
Strategy
Business
Strategy
Business
Strategy
Plan of action designed to achieve a set of goals or objectives
Value ValueValue
Capacity, materials and
expertise an organization
needs in order to perform
core functions
End-to-end Delivery
11. 11
Business Capabilities
Organizing for Continuous Delivery
Enterprise Architecture
Data & Information
Architecture
Technology
Architecture
Application
Architecture
Business
Architecture
Organizational
Architecture
21. 01 Agility starts with a promise
02 Anticipate impeding forces
03 Align to business capabilities
04 Elevate strategy over governance
Agility Principles
Recap
21
22. Part II
Part I – Planning is key to Agility
• Brand and strategy alignment
• Impeding forces
• Aligning to business capabilities
• Agile governance
Part II – Agility in 0perations
• Architecture
• Infrastructure
• Intelligence and Automation
• Attitudes
Agility in Operations
26. Don’t take your eye off the runway
#HowToBeAgile
05
Agility Principle
27. Common issues that arise in the life of a scrum team
Let’stalkinfrastructure!
• Infrastructure teams find it difficult to plan capacity in the data centers when the demand is
coming from agile teams. Architectural runway helps, but there are often elongated lead
times required.
• Scrum team MVPs usually need to scale as solutions are implemented across multiple PIs.
The total capacity needed may not be known and the beginning and the infrastructure
capacity needs to grow/modify iteratively.
• Infrastructure teams are typically “shared services” and are not dedicated to the scrum
team and must be coordinated with across multiple Release Train Engineers (RTEs) –
making train artificially depended on another train.
27
28. 28
• Greater Automation & Speed – Use of IaC allows entire data centers to be built (&
rebuilt) quickly with high degree of accuracy and quality – all but eliminates lead time for
infrastructure.
• Scaling is automatic – Operations is simplified from this perspective
• Innovation “ready” – The cloud is where products and services are bundled together to
quickly pilot and implement creative technology innovation to support business objectives
and satisfy the sophisticated customer. Support and agile test & learn / fail-fast mantra
with low capital investment required.
Movingtothe cloudhelps enableenterpriseagility
29. 29
• Costs shift from capitalized costs to expense
• Self-service for scrum teams creates disruption in the IT operations world (development
and operations merging)
• Developers need to become for infrastructure aware
• Initial cloud migrations do not realize the full economy of the cloud and iterative
optimization items will need to be added to the architectural runway enablers
Changestothe organizationwhencloudisintroduced
#cloudequalsagile
30. Use cloud as an agility enabler
The new IT
#HowToBeAgile06
Agility Principle
31. A well managed data ecosystem can accelerate the exploitation of data for business insights
Dataismore importantthanever
• Create a coherent data strategy
focused on business outcomes
• Establish data guidelines
• Establish collaborative and
iterative automated data
governance
• Leverage data science to build
predictive models from your
structured data and unstructured
data sources
Statistics
Data
Analysis
Machine
Learning
Algorithms
Models
Scientific
Method
Data
Science
31
32. 32
The data science behind intelligent analytics can improve operations – and provide automation
that can bring greater (unattended) improvements
• Feeding Robotic Process Automation (RPA) with information for cognitive decisioning
• Supporting an environment for IT and business operations “self healing” when processes
cross acceptable thresholds
All of this frees the knowledge worker to be able to do more decisioning and strategy and not
be tied to mundane operational tasks
Intelligentanalyticscanbe afoundationforoperationsaswell
#rpanimble
33. Use analytic insights to predict and
react to changing environments07
Agility Principle
#HowToBeAgile
34. 34
• Lack of understanding of Agile principles
• Corporate Culture my react negatively to certain Agile concepts
• Fail Fast (creates fear)
• Autonomous Teams (creates ambiguity in middle management)
• Servant Leadership (many companies have been successful with command &
control approaches)
• Lack of effective collaboration (breaking down the silos)
• General fear (loss of job, abilities, new skillsets, increased transparency, etc.)
• Not enough time with coaches to help re-train muscles – when coaches leave too
early, there’s a tendency to revert to old methods
Common causes for resistance to Agile
Why isitdifficultforpeople to BEcomeagile?
36. 01 Agility starts with a promise
02 Anticipate impeding forces
03 Align to business capabilities
04 Elevate strategy over governance
05 Don’t take your eye off the runway
06 Use cloud as an agility enabler
07 Use analytic insights to predict and react to changing environments
08 Have an adaptive attitude
Summary
AgilityPrinciples
Good Morning = My name is Jim Blizzard - I lead our consulting services at Impact Makers. I am passionate about Agility – helping our clients execute to the changing demands of the market, technology and regulatory environments. Change comes at breakneck speed and I try to help my clients not “break their neck”
ASK: <Write on board>
What is AGILE? What is Enterprise Agility?
How many folks here are currently working in an Agile Environment?
Less than 3 years
3-5 years
Greater than 5
How many are working in a scaled Agile environment?
SM
RTE
PO
PM
Lean Portfolio Management
How many of you would consider your journey in Agile to be successful? Why?
Earlier asked: What is AGILE? What is ENTERPRISE AGILITY
Click
Agile is MORE THAN a project management methodology. An agile (nimble) company is one that can bob-and-weave as internal and external forces constrain or impact their business processes that allow them to fulfill on their promises to their customer
PRINCIPLE #1 – AGILITIY STARTS WITH A PROMISE
Agile is MORE THAN a project management methodology. An agile (nimble) company is one that can bob-and-weave as internal and external forces constrain or impact their business processes that allow them to fulfill on their promises to their company
Get a participant to be the “story,” a PO, You play the scrum master and 2 team members
Run through a Kanban of in progress (include QA here)
Have the PO “approve” the story
The story goes to production or waits for h/er brothers to go to production together
Inconsistent Capacity – symptom of running projects through Agile - funding projects
Un-engaged business partner
How many of you have or are TPOs?
How many have Agile environments initiated and run by the business?
Defects or production issues get in the way
Portfolio decisions are counter intuitive and contradict current sprint or PI objectives
ITSM or QA processes slow us down
Do your sprints look like: Iterate through development and pass off (waterfall style) to QA and Release/Change management
Architecture gets in the way
ASK:
How many have you experienced? Ask folks to stand up and then sit down if you’ve experienced 1 or less, 2 or less, etc.
These are all symptoms of DOING Agile – trying to “check the box”
Organizing around capabilities:
Requires an enterprise understanding of your companies Business Architecture
Becomes a natural structure to identify value streams
There are a handful of ways to represent business capabilities (BC map/model)
Team level Scrum only gets you so far…
As you scale and introduce the program level Scaled Agile Activities, you begin to organize around your business capabilities (value-streams).
A value stream is a long-lived series of steps used to deliver value, from concept or customer order to delivery of a tangible result for the customer. Figure 1 illustrates the anatomy of a value stream. Many companies struggle defining their value streams.
Capability Map >> Value Stream >> Value Stream Canvas
The value stream canvas summaries the value stream
Channels
Customers
Budget
People and GEO of folks that deliver in value chain
Value Prop
What value are you delivering to the customer
Which customer problem is being addressed
What bundles of product/services offered
Which customer needs are satisfied
What is the min/viable/product
Talk about challenges
How much time is spent estimating your projects?
How much time is spent re-estimating your projects?