This is some fairly stock standard copy for the corporate blog…
We were at least 20 years into an Internet-fuelled digital disruption before the COVID-19 pandemic abruptly destroyed all of our excuses to not change. Agile delivery approaches, customer-first investment, data, and cloud-first technologies, were already acknowledged as the critical enablers for digital transformation. The organisations who were the most advanced in their digital capabilities were also the most effective in their response to these sudden changes. Elsewhere, we saw just how fragile our interconnected global supply chains could be when financial and non-financial risk scenarios hadn’t been fully accounted for.
Agile delivery is has been proven as a key component of how organisations innovate and respond to change. But we believe the time is quickly approaching where agile becomes business-as-usual and the competitive advantage that can be derived from agile, “new ways of working” initiatives is reaching diminishing returns.
To survive and then thrive, businesses must not only provide superior experiences for consumers, customers, employees, and citizens, but deliver on their promises in a faster, more innovative, nimble and trustworthy way to meet new expectations and needs.
McKinsey recognised early that “The COVID-19 recovery will be digital”. Their surveys showed that “…we have vaulted five years forward in consumer and business digital adoption in a matter of around eight weeks…”.
But what is even more striking is how these changes have been unbounded by the structural silos within our organisations. McKinsey (see article link above) cites examples of:
- “Banks transitioned to remote sales and service teams”
- “Digital outreach programs launched to customers”
- “Increased flexibility in payment arrangements for loans and mortgages”
- “Shifts to online ordering and delivery as the primary business of supermarkets and grocery stores”
- “Schools and universities shifting to online learning”
- “Doctors delivering telemedicine”
- “Regulatory changes rapidly implemented to enable more flexible employment contracts, trade, and operating model changes”
These types of shifts require all business units to take the lead.
Agile development approaches were developed as a response to the overly complex, document-heavy approaches that once dominated software development. But it’s been over 20 years since The Agile Manifesto was first signed at a ski resort in the Utah in February 2001.
Agile approaches are now the dominant approach in a majority of technology departments, and in some cases specific organisations have developed operating model changes which allow the approach to be extended to other parts of the enterprise.
The level of commitment and success rate of enterprise agile initiatives has been varied. But operating model innovation itself is always difficult and just to see organisations consider the way they work as an important source of competitive advantage has been encouraging.
Missing Alignment
The missing pieces of the agile approach have started to show as adoption spreads and scales. Part of the success of agile for IT and software delivery can be attributed to simply getting out of the way.
Software developers stopped hiding behind elaborate development processes that required top-down agreement of high-level requirements, followed by a sign-off, followed by detailed designed – again, which required a sign-off.
At any point in the old process, if something from a previous step changed the whole process went back to that step. This meant it was often months before any software was even developed.
But the bargain agile makes with other business units is that they will value responsiveness to changes – which is a certain specific type of agility, at best – over trying to predict what is required.
Know what you want? We can do that right now if it’s the highest priority thing you want to do. But ask why it wasn’t done that way in the first place and the answer is likely “nobody told us”.
Agile is a success because it gives somebody else the responsibility of knowing what to do, it doesn’t judge too harshly when mistakes are made, and it responds rapidly when changes are required.
What agile isn’t very good at is acknowledging that it’s difficult be the person that the agile team relies on prioritise the work, to make trade-offs, to know what’s required, to understand dependencies with other teams, and to make the executive commitments that the agile team is unable to make under their approach.
Supporting “product owners”
The person the agile team might call their product owner always has other responsibilities and priorities. They wouldn’t be a good product owner if they didn’t have other responsibilities.
But they might not have the influence over other teams that the agile team wants them to. The perfect product owner doesn’t exist for all the same reasons the perfect design document never existed, and more. Organisations are complex – there is risk, uncertainty, and change.
Reaching for Alignment
Agile teams sometimes take the perspective that the rest of the organisation is there just to provide them with clear requirements, user stories, and priorities so that they can do the risk.
But that’s not why the rest of the organisation exists at all. It exists to serve customers, be accountable, manage risk, implement change, consider the future, manage diverse teams, defend budgets…
Alignment with organisational goals and strategy is almost entirely outsourced by agile approaches and is at the heart of both which capabilities are invested in, and how they are invested in.
Alignment is about taking the organisations market position and strategy, and then deploying that strategy. As part of strategy deployment, any gaps in business capabilities are then addressed via an end-to-end approach the considers the people, process, information, and technology impacts for each business capability.
Powered by Awareness
Our organisations have bifurcated, as they often do, into those deciding what needs to be done and wishing they could be more certain about those decisions, and those doing what needs to be done and striving to be more agile.
We believe that between agility and alignment is a missing competency that combines the power of direct feedback from your customers, and a data-driven approach to decision-making, to continuously optimise how your organisation operates.
Awareness recognises that when people have the right information, they make the right decisions. By removing the idea that some people decide and other people do, you can focus on ensuring the information required to make the right decision is right their when you need it.
But Awareness goes beyond how you make decisions internally. By implementing dynamic, digital-first channels you create a direct feedback loop as you service your customers.
This feedback looks puts the capabilities of your organisation in the hands of your customers. It gets out of the way and allows internal processes to respond and optimise based on customer data that is continuously being integrated from customer channels.
This once seemed far-fetched but is already happening across hundreds of global organisations. What we might call The 3A Enterprise has the foundational capabilities to enable this shift.