Agile Enterprise Transformation: The complete 360-degree change in the working of an organisation, evident in the change of entire business style or change in the target market.
This approach impacts the operational activities of a business related to its people, process and technology to be in sync with its business strategy and vision. The long-term objectives will be achieved through a process of fundamental change. An often-repeated question asked about the process of enterprise transformation is, “How can it be achieved? Do we have to first start transforming the business or is it the IT?” The answer to this is simple. Business and IT are two sides of the same coin. We cannot do changes in one without thinking about the impact on the other. Hence, enterprise transformation should take place for both, the business and IT, at the operational and strategical level. This is the so-called ‘two-level’ alignment:
Alignment at strategic/planning level ensuring IT plans and business plans are fit and synchronised.
Alignment at the operational level ensuring the planned activities are prioritised and executed, desired objectives achieved, and business benefits realised. It is also worth pointing out that, ‘strategic alignment’ is not merely an event or activity but a process of continuous change and adaptation.
An Agile Enterprise strategy is iterative, within phases, between phases and throughout the process. The breadth of coverage of the enterprise to be defined and the level of detail to be defined should be freshly decided for each iteration before starting on it. Hence, the main aim of these iterations is a positive business outcome. Developing the future business architecture state derived from the current baseline of the business architecture is documented at this stage. You can easily move to the next phase of the iteration without completing the target business architecture in this model. It is interesting to note that you can move between parallel phases of transformation by shifting from one phase to another simultaneously working on them even without completing each one of them. A completed target business architecture might be a good thing but it is not compulsory as you will have whatever you need already defined to understand the transformation path. With the required information of the transformation path clearly defined, you may move on to working on the information system and/or the technology architecture phases.
The methodology of ‘Target First’ and ‘Baseline First’ has to be considered. This gives us a clear picture of exactly where we have to start. Being sure of the final state that we want, we can always adopt a ‘Target First’ approach and work backwards to reach the baseline. If we are not sure of the target or final state, then we need to follow the path of ‘Baseline First’ working our way towards the target. Irrespective of the path you choose, the final call is to have a clearly and effectively defined baseline and target. The main thing to consider is the gap between what we have and what we need. By shaping and getting defined within this gap, the enterprise transformation evolves with new vigour. While the baseline provides the information on the current state, target informs us of what state we want to achieve at the end of the transformation. By consolidating all such information, we can define an accurate transformation roadmap and it will help us in measuring the progress/success in reaching the target state.
Enterprise transformations can be realised by using some frameworks available in the market. Some of the widely used frameworks are the Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF), Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), Dev-Ops and Large Scale Scrum (LeSS), to name a few.
Leadership Tribe specialises in identifying the baseline for the organisations and helps them in creating a target state with the assistance of executives and market leaders and will coach them throughout the journey until completion.
Based on your circumstances, we will help you to select, tailor, define and implement the best Lean and Agile approach. Solutions that suit one organisation or project will never work well for another. Different organisations face similar kinds of challenges while implementing Agile, but with each organisation being unique, the solutions to these challenges are also distinctive. With organisations and circumstances changing continuously, the solution that may work well today may not work effectively tomorrow; creating stability in this realm is what we are experts in.
I didn’t know much about jellyfish (apart from the fact that they are squishy!) till I come across one episode in the documentary series ‘Hostile Planet’ premiered on the National Geographic channel. Despite the controversy, I am fascinated with some amazing facts about the creature.
Jellyfish have inhabited the earth’s oceans for over 650 million years, and that is more ancient than dinosaurs. Whilst the dinosaurs went extinct about 65 million years ago, jellyfish continue to expand their habitats and even threaten to dominate the ocean. They are some of Earth’s most ancient animals that are still alive today and there is a reason for it.
As a matter of fact, some useful lessons can be drawn from how jellyfish survived the harshest environment to help organisations to improve their business agility and thrive in today’s rapidly changing market.
CONTINUOUS GROWING
Jellyfish never stop growing and some species can become monsters with a diameter of 7ft 6in and tentacles of 120ft long. In the business management context, it is important for organisations to continuously facilitate staff learning and transform themselves. It is also known as the ‘growth mindset’ to develop people’s learning and capabilities for greater accomplishment. Just like jellyfish can clone itself and reproduce, organisations in their transformation process can always pilot with a self-development team and then roll out the success to the remainder of the organisation.
UNPARALLELED FLEXIBILITY
Despite the wide range of sizes, Jellyfish’s umbrella-like bodies allow them to pulse upwards and downwards without expending much energy. Organisations embrace an Agile way of working enable great flexibility in product development and reduce wasted effort by instant testing and modification. Being Agile does not only help organisations to improve product quality and speed to market through rapid iteration and experimentation, but it also enables the organisation to focus on value creation for clients, optimise process flow and reduce handovers across functions.
EFFECTIVE ‘NERVE NET’
Jellyfish have no brains, instead, they use nerve nets to sense changes in the environment and process sensory information such as light and movement in the water and coordinate response. For an organisation to be successful, the teams must be able to operate and cooperate effectively. Agile organisations establish and sustain a scalable network of empowered teams to organise efforts. These teams operate with high standards of responsibility, collaboration, transparency and alignment, and are able to react instantly to changes.
SIMPLE STRUCTURE
Jellyfish don’t have lungs, stomachs or intestines, their bodies are composed of only two cell layers – the external epidermis and the internal gastrodermis. The simple body design enables the jellyfish to absorb oxygen, consume food, expel waste, and exchange reproductive materials – just enough to get work done. Heavy organisation hierarchy can be counter-productive, whilst the right level of governance and control is required, a streamlined organisation structure and simplified system and workstream design can help teams to focus on what really matters.
ESTABLISHED RESILIENCE
Jellyfish is perfectly suited to today’s transforming oceans, resistant to increasing temperature, decreasing oxygen, changing salinity, rising acidity, and plastic pollution. When it is injured or cut in half, it can regenerate and grow new organisms. It is increasingly important for organisations to improve business agility and become more resilient in the volatile market. Agile methodology offers an invaluable solution to streamline organisational structure, optimise systems and workflow, integrate business and IT, enhance alignment in people, process and technology and boost flexibility and scalability of the business.
In summary, I have introduced some fascinating facts about jellyfish in this article. If organisations can exhibit these characteristics and continue to scale the Agile way of working, it will help them to become more effective and responsive to changes, enhance team collaboration, improve product quality and throughput, and outpace their competitors to deliver value to clients faster.
Leadership Tribe specialises in assisting organisations’ Agile transformation. Find out more about our Agile Transformation services here.
The social media explosion has made us present to human phenomena; the emergence of self-organising groups. Be it on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc, we get to see people converging and organising into groups based on common views, affiliations, interests, and relationships. These self-created virtual spaces facilitate shared ideas and realisations. I am sure most of us follow or participate in online self-organised forums that have been created with a common interest and a shared world view that even you subscribe too. The intent seems clear, teams are founded on shared ownership perform better. But what is exactly the technology behind this? Is it all about setting corporate goals and giving freedom to motivated members enough to generate high performing teams? Let us examine the issue:
THE STRUCTURE OF HIGH PERFORMING TEAMS
A high performing team is first and foremost a team. Alex van der Star in his article on Characteristics of High-performance teams list eight fundamentals:
In a team:
Leadership is fulfilled by shared leadership roles (in a working group, leadership is strong and clearly focused);
Members have individual and mutual accountability (in a working group, accountability is on an individual level);
The purpose motive comes from a specific team purpose that the team itself delivers (in a working group, the purpose motive is the same as the broader organizational mission);
People work on individual and collective work products (as opposed to a working group, where members only work on individual work products);
Performance is greater than the sum of the individual bests of the team members (in a working group performance is the sum of the individual bests of its members);
The meeting goal is to have an open-ended discussion and active problem solving (in a working group it is efficiency);
The focus of the meeting process is on the discussion, decisions and real working together (in a working group these are discussion, decisions, and delegation), and;
The measurement of effectiveness is directly done by assessing collective work products (in a working group it is indirectly measured by its influence on others).
Based on the above, a self-organising team would be dependent on:
A specific team purpose that the team itself created
Mutual accountability that each individual commits to. Each team member takes responsibility for the result obtained by the team as a whole.
Result Orientation where it is not the individual output, but the collective output that counts.
Open-ended discussion and decision making. On an established zone of trust and mutual understanding.
Sound inter-team communication. Team members give each other constructive feedback and collaborate. Conflict is a necessary occurrence borne from free-thinking and candour, hence dealt with as the desired output.
Agile mindsets create Self Organising and High Performing Teams by default. Due to its inherent practice and ideology, Agile transforms groups into highly efficient and vibrant teams due to the following accomplishments that get set:
Agile team members have a place where they can add the most value. Each team member aligns his personal goals with the team goal.
In Agile, leadership within the team occurs naturally; Agile demands shared leadership roles. It permits autonomy on the task at the functional level.
Agile allows extensive use of metrics and encourages objectivity in decision making. Agile allows effectiveness to be directly measured by assessing the collective work outcome.
In Agile teams comes up with improvement initiatives continuously. The team is willing to invest to become better.
Agile teams are iterative and depend on innovation and new thinking. Agile team members share their ideas actively and the team cares for relationships outside of the team.
Agile team members are collaborative in nature. There exist healthy attitudes within the team. There are established rules for their way of working and the team has frequent, fun, team building activities.
The agile team manages and examines its own performance. Team members are able to identify the constraints within the team and act on it, whether it is some process that does not work or a team member who does not perform. The team is able to solve inter-team conflicts as a matter of routine.
An Agile team has a will to be technically excellent and proficient.
As times get tough, working together intensifies. Agile enables every team member with a strong sense of loyalty, commitment and purpose towards the team.
There is more to leading a self-organizing team than exercising leadership and getting out of the way. Agile Leaders influence teams in nonintrusive and indirect ways. It is impossible for a leader to accurately predict how a team will respond to a change, whether that change is a different team composition, new standards of performance, a stringent selection system, or so on. Leaders will never have all the answers, but Agile ways of working help leaders address them in a more fulfilling and constructive manner. Agile creates empowered leaders, leading teams that are self-generating and fully integrated towards the achievement of high-performance tasks and goals.
Servant Leadership was first recorded between 570BC to 490 BC in the writing of Lao Tzu, an ancient Chinese philosopher, it gained popularity in the early 1970s as Robert K. Greenleaf coined the phrase, and has been inspirational to leaders worldwide ever since.
“The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others.”
– Mohandas Gandhi
This article provides an overview of Servant Leadership, its application and benefits in the corporate world, and the key qualities of a Servant Leader.
In oppose to the ‘Power Leadership’ which involves the accumulation and exercise of power at the top of an enterprise, ‘Servant Leadership’ turns the traditional pyramid model upside down where the leader puts the need of others first and helps people to develop to achieve common goals.
Servant leadership is not merely a leadership style or technique that one adopts for a particular scenario, it is a means of working that is being embedded in one’s approach and practised over the long term. It shares a few similarities with transformation leadership and complements democratic leadership style which we will explore further in a dedicated article for various leadership styles. Robert Greenleaf regarded servant leadership as a “philosophy” which is a “set of practices that enriches the lives of individuals, builds better organisations and ultimately creates a more just and caring world”.
SERVANT LEADER
A servant leader ensures others’ highest priority needs are being served before one’s own. He/she engages all stakeholders, acknowledges and appreciates different perspectives; supports and empowers employees to unlock their potentials and meet their goals; promotes collaboration, trust and empathy in the workplace, cultivates a sense of community and improves corporate performance and innovation.
“The servant-leader is servant first… It begins with the natural feeling that one wants to serve first. Then conscious choice brings one to aspire to lead. That person is sharply different from one who is leader first, perhaps because of the need to assuage an unusual power drive or to acquire material possessions…”
– Robert K. Greenleaf
It is worth mentioning that individuals, as well as organisations, can be servant leaders, and as a matter of fact, Robert Greenleaf had great faith that servant-leader organisations could help to build a better society, creating more opportunities for its people, and changing the world.
HOW TO BECOME A SERVANT LEADER
So we have discovered what is a ‘servant leader’, its merits and how it differs from a leader in the traditional sense, the next question comes naturally is how to become one? There are a number of studies aiming to generalise the important characteristics and qualities of the servant leader, and a few key qualities are summarised below.
Key Qualities of the Servant Leader:
Lead with others in mind
Listen to and value different opinions
Cultivate a culture of trust and build community
Commit to both professional and personal growth of people
Develop long-term strategy
Persuade and encourage the team to take action
Able to self-reflect and course correct
Whilst the qualities of a servant leader help to portrait a targeted ‘role model’, the virtue and essence of servant leadership resides in our belief and practice, and it is a long-term commitment that one needs to devote oneself to in order to achieve the desired influence.
In summary, servant leadership is a powerful approach in which the leader acts to serve those who are led to achieving common goals. Servant leadership is a philosophy and set of practices that engage and empower individuals to build better organisations, communities and ultimately a better world.
Remember, you must be the change you want to see in the world.
In Leadership Tribe, our dedicated trainers and consultants can help you to transform your leadership at both individual and corporate level, please contact us or find out more about our transformation services.
Too often, when companies attempt to conduct an agile transformation their chances of success are greatly reduced thanks to a misconception of what Agile truly means. Some believe that the term refers to a distinct set of methodologies, whereas in truth, Agile is correctly used to describe a set of principles with which to discover methods of developing software in a way that helps others in an organisation to do it too.
The path to Agile Transformation is different for every business, meaning that a one-size-fits-all approach just won’t work. However, said transformation is carried out, it aims to discover and implement new ways of working that focus on better, faster, cheaper, happier employees, customers and that harness changes whenever they occur, to obtain a competitive advantage.
OTHER REASONS YOUR AGILE TRANSFORMATION MIGHT FAIL
So, we’ve addressed the general misconceptions that lead to the failure of Agile Transformations, but there are many other components comprised within a business. Here we look at some of the other reasons why transformations of this kind don’t succeed.
REASON #1 – A CLASHING OF VALUES
Sometimes there is a mismatch of what a company is and what a company wants to be. Though many companies may feel like they are agile, high tech enterprises, in truth what they have is a business culture with a strong command and control. This has its merits of course, but businesses that operate this way can find it difficult or simply don’t want to change their established core principles to those that Agile extol.
Takeaway: When an Agile Transformation is attempted, a will to change needs to exist.
REASON #2 – RESISTANCE FROM TEAMS
Teams within an organisation can often be complex, with their own set of motives, which can result in a resistance to change. It could be that one particular team might not want to share knowledge for fear of losing some of their authority or there could be a lack of trust within the organisation that is deemed to not respect its employees. Or it might even be that there is a high turnover of staff within an organisation or a lot of short-contract workers on the books, meaning that neither trust nor respect has time to develop.
Takeaway: For Agile Transformation to succeed, the will to implement change must run throughout the company.
REASON #3 – CUSTOMER RESISTANCE
What shouldn’t be forgotten is the fact that an Agile Transformation is something that will also affect the end-user of an organisation’s services, i.e. the customer. As well as convincing everyone in your organisation that Agile Transformation is the way forwards, in the event of customer resistance to change, some time also needs to be paid to selling the change to them too.
Takeaway: Don’t forget to consider the needs of your customers.
REASON #4 – RESISTANCE FROM LEADERSHIP
An important fundamental that needs to be considered is whether or not your organisation’s leadership are fully on board with your Agile Transformation. If those at the top are dubious, perhaps for reasons relating to cost, they might not have their full commitment in the project and as such might not be putting their full effort into training and the many other elements involved. Without the endorsement of leadership, the chances of a successful transition go down greatly.
Takeaway: Leadership need to be fully on board for your Agile Transformation to succeed.
REASON #5 – DEVELOPERS WHO DON’T PLAY WITH OTHER WELL
Another important factor in an Agile Transformation is the developer, who also needs to understand the need to collaborate both with customers and other members of your organisation. There are developers out there who got into the role because it afforded them a degree of autonomy in their work and as such, they don’t work well with others, whether talking about customers or even other developers. Use developers like these for your transformation and you’ll likely hit problems.
Takeaway: Your developer needs to be committed to the collaboration aspect of your transformation.
REASON #6 – UNCOORDINATED EFFORTS
There are some instances where separate teams within an organisation have implemented their individual Agile and whilst this can lead to those teams to improve their performance, having a disparate, uncoordinated strategy where no one is talking to each other will, more often than not, slow down the delivery of the product. For an effective enterprise agile transformation to take place, this disjointed arrangement needs to be replaced with a uniform one where everyone is on the same page.
Takeaway: All of your organisation’s teams need to be pulling in the same direction.
REASON #7 – RESULTS AREN’T BEING MEASURED
Whilst you may have implemented the perfect processes to make your Agile Transformation go smoothly, if you don’t have a way to measure your success, you’ll have no idea of how well it’s going. You need to have metrics in place, as well as a method of storing analysing this data, as, without this information, you lose the ability to make considered adjustments based on your results.
IN SUMMARY
Takeaway: Measuring success is vital if you’re to implement ongoing and continuous improvements to your processes.
The key to implementing an effective Agile Transformation is understanding exactly what’s involved and having every element within your organisation engaged, fully committed and working towards a common goal. It’s also a constant evolution and to be truly agile, you need to be set up to react positively to any changes, whenever they occur during the process. Fail to do so and you’re increasing the chances of poor performance significantly.
At Leadership Tribe, we have the experience and know-how to make your Agile Transformation achieve everything it should so that you can keep pace with your industry competitors. We have assisted many companies from a variety of industries to implement effective agile strategies tailored to the specific needs of their business.
To find out more information about how we could help you, you can either visit us online at https://leadershiptribe.com/uk, speak to a member of our team on 0207 096 0346 or fill out our contact form here and we’ll be in touch as soon as we can.
