Approach to Implement Scaling Agile

One of my companions is asked to start coaching a business team that consists of 200 team members. He was started thinking of how he should set up the transformation program, which is a large scale in nature.

He was initiated by measuring the complexity of the present state of the department before he commences any transformation steps.

He has asked his Spotify friend; he prescribes to create Tribe and Squads. He asked his SPC friends; she recommends to introduce Release trains. He asked is LeSS Friends; he recommends introducing the Feature team with the scrum of scrum. My friend was confused.

How do we know complexity?

Complexity is a measure of the total number of properties transmitted by an object and detected by an observer. Such a collection of properties is often referred to as a state. In physical systems, complexity is a measure of the probability of the state vector of the system.

e.g. rewire the old electric line, you are the lineman!

Complexity can be typically described as a system feature and means interweave, networked, and connected.

R L Daft defines complexity in organizations as the number of activities within the organization, measurable by three dimensions: Vertical complexity, quantifiable by the number of levels in an organization hierarchy, horizontal complexity represented by the number of job titles or departments across the organization, and spatial complexity expressed by the number of geographical locations.

Organizations that describe high levels of complexity are inferior at creating value.

Environmental, political, and competitive changes conspire to create a challenging and complex operating environment.

We can support the organization by enhancing organizational effectiveness by eliminating complexity.

Complex organizations are far more difficult to manage than merely complicated ones.

Organizational complexity is accompanied by trying to align the views and secure the endorsements of organizational committees with distinct roles, responsibilities, perspectives, and priorities.

How can to discover the complexity of the organization?

We can compile useful information, structured interviews or focus groups are also useful for collecting quantitative data about the intensity of complexity and qualitative information on what drives the complexity.

There could be many things which lead to complexity high, like a proliferation of products and/or services, conflicting and overlapping processes, misaligned incentives, bureaucratic hierarchical organizational structures, and inadequately articulated strategies, generally in some form of combination.

“Any darn fool can make something complex; it takes a genius to make something simple.” (Pete Seeger)

After the complexity assessment, my friend established the discussion with the key stakeholders, the theme of the discussion is — how can Organization descale the complexity. The transformation Journey starts and activities going on…

You have been assigned to a transformation project like my friend. Have you evaluated the Organizational complexity? It will benefit you to understand the system you are going to deal with.

He also looked into various silos issues and how to resolve those?

Business and IT collaboration for a large enterprise.

What thoughts come to our minds? Layers? Large? slow? multi-locations?

Sometimes we have observed that Business is blaming IT, that they are not getting benefits from IT. Business is too busy, they do not have time to participate in the solution building process.

IT claims that they are already Agile. IT blaming that business is not appreciating their deliverable. At the end of the day end, users are the victim.

The end-user is not getting a faster solution so they looking for other vendors who are quick in providing the solution in the rapidly changing world.

What can we do about it?

Shared ownership? How to establish that?

Let us look into the current Value stream Map and discover what can we do about it.

The purpose of these maps is to create a ‘ wake-up call’, to get employees to question current practice, to identify what needs to change, and also to indicate which tools and techniques are likely to be required.

Maps help to define the value streams of the firm and the activities that support the primary principle of ‘understanding customer value’.

the primary principle of ‘understanding customer value’.

a) Let us identify our key value streams within our business. It should be a sequence of activities intended to produce a consistent set of deliverable to produce customer value and customer is willing to pay for those.

b) How to identify Value stream(flow-level kaizen)? — Identify the product line with the various process steps or various services. With a clear picture of how the entire process is currently operating.

c) Once we identify value steps, we need to discover how can we maximize execution speed by discarding non-value-added steps. Understand the Real Constraints.

d) Some of the questions we may have to look( to identify the waste in the system)

• Highest Product/Service volume in units
• Products/Services with the highest errors or defect rates
• Products/Service with the highest customer related issues
• Taking more time to deliver solutions
• Delay, waiting time, downtime, etc
• Under utilize resources

e) How can we optimize the release by addressing all these challenges currently the organization is facing? Create a Value Backlog. Value Backlog will have Theme, Epic and Dependencies, and timeline

Value-Stream-Mapping makes it visible that the biggest problems aren’t individual people, but the system they work in. Everyone focuses on how to improve the system.

f) New Team structure. New release process. New Governance. The most important process that must be designed is how the senior managers can lead change through becoming ‘change champions’.The position of power of the senior manager means that they can ‘unblock’ problems and promote change throughout the business

We may stop treating Business, IT, and support as a separate entity. They are all one and working for a common goal. Who will bell the Cat? we all

The purpose of a value stream map is to develop a common understanding and identify activities that don’t add value to the end product. By eliminating these activities you will gain a faster throughput, higher level of quality, and reduced inventory.

To achieve this we may remove some of the organization layers, make it lean. We may remove local optimization and politics by giving end to end ownership. You build, You own and you maintain, You face to the consequence.

The proposed solution could be, we break the silos and optimize the flow

Some of the changes what we are recommending for the organization in this structure are

a) Deeply interconnected self-driven and self-managed team and organization

b) Less Boss(flat structure), Self Organized, autonomous team

c) Span of control reduced and span of support increased. Distributed power

d) Sharing and caring Ecosystem.

e) True sense of ownership

f) Decentralized decision-making

g) Support healthy and product collaboration. Fear of failure has eliminated.

h) Best solutions emerge from collective intelligence.

i) Many Community to support the system

We will achieve a faster time to market with great customer satisfaction

How do we know if we are successful, how to measure?

Traditional IT measurement, with its long-term focus on efficiency metrics for the managing infrastructure, applications, and components, is no longer acceptable.

Is there a clear cause-and-effect relationship between the change and the resulting gain that can be quantified and measured on the income statement?

• Key elements of transformation include focusing on the experiences of both customers and employees.
• The number of licenses department purchased to the number of employees who are actually utilizing the software.
• How department tools are being used will give you a clearer picture of how effectively your employees have adopted the tools and actually achieve meaningful benefits.
• Change in customer behavior over time across channels
• Number of customer touchpoints addressed to improve customer experience positively
• Reduction in time to market new products to customers
• Number of innovative ideas reach concept to implementation
• Percentage of revenue from new products/services introduced
• Percentage of the profit from new ideas implemented
• New onboarding to the platform, the new user is using this platform, they are growing or stagnant
• How new Digital platform is enabling customer/user KPI
• Survey user satisfaction
• Responsiveness of the user
• Data Volume(TB), Variety(Types of the data source), velocity( Data generated/analyzed per time period), What is the cost savings due to these easy data usages?

Leading indicators measure change. They deal with immediate progress and show the likelihood that you will achieve your goals.

• Unique visitors
• Daily active users
• Time spent on the website
• The average revenue per user

Lagging indicators measure results. This means they are the direct result or output of your organization’s activity.

• Brand recognition
• ROI
• Customer acquisition costs
• Customer renewal rate
• Churn rate

Success requires consistent monitoring and course correction based on what we find out.

We are Transformation Change agents; we need to guide the team to come out with better KPI to measure the transformation initiatives.