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Companies Need to Build Agility & Resilience into Their Business or Risk Being Left Behind
Technological innovation is playing a massive part in how businesses operate and indeed what it takes to be a leader in any given sector. With investors scrutinising performance like never before and the landscape of many industries changing at breakneck speed, many companies that ignore this change to continue to operate as they have for decades, risk being left behind by modern-day disruptors.
Despite the need for companies to remain agile to respond to keep pace with these industry disruptors, almost half of those asked have been slow to react to these new threats, with some even being completely passive. Where this stance is likely to be most keenly felt, however, will be on the balance sheet, as investors are much more likely to scrutinise poor performance since the crash of 2009.
STAYING PASSIVE ISN’T AN OPTION
Organisations who find themselves in this position cannot afford to ignore change, as their future existence could depend on it. Building agility and resilience into their businesses is key to being able to react quickly to changes in their industry, which means that ‘business as usual’ planning just won’t cut it any more when it comes to countering new industry threats and making the most of new opportunities that present themselves.
A RESILIENT AND ADAPTIVE MINDSET
The first change that needs to occur within an organisation is the will to change and embrace new ways of working. Accepting that the status quo within any given industry can change and that a company needs to be ready to respond quickly is a major step in the right direction. This change in philosophy involves being ready to make use of new tools, such as dynamic data analytics that provide insight into what customers what and where their concerns lie.
EFFECTIVE PLANNING
The next step that needs to be realised is a platform being created for a company to be able to demonstrate their agility and react if an industry crisis or polar shift were to occur. This involves targetted planning, to reshape how said companies operate and in many cases, this can require a radical alteration in strategy. However much resistance to change there is within an organisation to this change, the CEO needs to see it as an operational necessity and implement accordingly.
TAKING DECISIVE ACTION
Making data-driven decisions, interacting with stakeholders, stress-testing and taking a forensic view an organisation’s structure is the vital third step in a company’s journey to achieving agile transformation. Only by taking decisive action to legislate for future challenges and disruptors can a company accurately call itself agile, as expecting it to happen by itself will not achieve the necessary optimisations that need to take place.
IN SUMMARY
To stay competitive in this ultra-competitive, almost constantly changing business landscape that exists today, CEOs need to take the concept of agile transformation seriously can give it the necessary amount of focus. Only by stress-testing their business model in a range of possible scenarios can companies understand the likely impact that changes can have and how quickly they can respond to them.
In these uncertain times, CEOs must prepare themselves to compete in all kinds of new ways and reinvent themselves where necessary. Fail to do so and the chances are, they’ll eventually be overtaken by those who can and left behind for good.
Learn more on how you can bring agile transformation to your organisation
The communication landscape is different than it was 20 years. Two main factors are defining your organisation’s success while designing an amazing digital transformation. They are the human touch and connecting the business around the customer.
As the adage goes “the experience employees feel is the experience they deliver”.
While the majority of organisations and managements think of digital transformation as changing the technical aspect of the business but digital transformation begins with the employees and the customer – the human aspect.
According to Canon research, 78% were willing to improve the employee experience by adopting digital transformation in contrast to the 55% of businesses which opted to focus on customer experience.
When both the internal stakeholders (employees) and external stakeholders (customers) as internal users and actual buyers get involved in a digitalisation project, the more likely a digital transformation will succeed.
EMPLOYEES ARE ALWAYS THE KING
It becomes impossible to shift the organisation’s practices and processes without onboarding the employees. Inculcating positive guidelines to the teammates helps in creating a harmonious working environment essential for better output. Change of management, therefore, forms a critical parameter for a successful digital transformation. Focus is on creating and cultivating a culture that encourages a digital mindset, a motivated workforce will be well placed to drive an organisation’s digital transformation process into digital maturity and help elevate the organisation to the ranks of a digital leader.
The leadership landscape has changed into collaboration and teamwork. Organisations need to provide their teams with new capabilities, tools, technologies and mindsets to drive new behaviours and outcomes. Organisations and their executive management should learn to trust their teams can make decisions. Organisations should help all team members visualize the future and prepare for the changes. Training should be a way to help people feel confident and ready to do their jobs with the new systems. Employees to be encouraged to think like customers. Employees too have many experiences as consumers which might help the company identify and participate in more innovative solutions.
CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE IS THE KEY TO DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION
It has become imperative to design customer processes and touchpoints to provide a unique and personalized customer experience for every single customer that you have. Great features or price no longer holds power. It is the “memorable experience factor” determines the business winners and losers. Businesses must prioritize optimizing their websites and apps to deliver positive, experience-driven customer engagement.
According to a recent survey from Oracle, as I quote :
81% of customers are willing to pay more for superior customer experience.
89% of customers switched brands after poor customer experience.
20% of annual revenue is lost due to poor customer experiences.
93% of executives say improving customer experience is one of their top three business priorities.
Can you describe the customer experience at your company?
THE STRATEGIC ROLE OF PROCESS AUTOMATION IN DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION
No matter which industry you are in, you would surely find an increase in the use of process automation. Instead of humans, software bots mimic our activities and intelligently interact with applications. They effortlessly complete tedious tasks, working as a virtual business assistant, freeing up more time for the leadership and employees to focus on more innovative, revenue-generating tasks.
PROCESS AUTOMATION A KEY DRIVER FOR DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION
Process automation has brought on a complete metamorphosis, with future-ready businesses. It has successfully dismantled the traditional siloed ways of business operation. Automating workflows, infrastructure, back-office processes which are labour intensive, and repetitive tasks are handled by the virtual workforce. More importantly, it has gifted leadership with enough time and space to think and come up with ideas, valuable initiatives and formulate actionable strategies.
A combination of algorithmic, natural language processing and machine learning capabilities have allowed organizations to automate task just like people across application and systems. A study by Deloitte in 2017, shows 53% of organizations have started RPA processes, increasing to 72% by 2020 and reaching a near-universal adoption by 2022.
UNLOCKING THE VALUE OF THE INVALUABLE DATA
An overwhelming level of data and insights are available in today’s digital world. Utilizing these vast new flows of information can help your organization, as they provide astute insights into critical elements of the business. A key aspect of analytics technologies and deep learning is that they rely on data, and the more data, more accurate and meaningful are the insights.
The world is gradually shifting towards open systems and open data. Organizations and businesses that leverage open data will dominate the future. Leaders are now challenged to find ways to overcome current organizational boundaries, and deciding how to assign and share data among departments. Also to spot new trends and work to ensure that data is used to its fullest potential.
MAKING THE JOURNEY CUSTOMER CENTRIC
The customer experience landscape is changing rapidly so knowing how to operate in it is becoming a key priority. In a study by McKinsey over 70% of app users preferred added functionality over “look and feel” of any app. Automation is therefore here to stay and enhance human activities enabling higher value delivery, speed and innovation.
Successful leaders pursue digital transformation by launching an integrated operating model organized around customer journeys. The starting point would be to begin the process of developing an agile digital delivery system within a cross-functional team.
A TRANSFORMATIVE STEP-UP
Process Automation is becoming increasingly refined with groundbreaking technologies and smarter with time, introducing minimalism in place of myriad complex processes. The advent of disruptive technologies has brought in speed and cost optimization elevating business processing centres on the technology curve.
BPA can be applied in different departments within an organization, such as operations, IT, sales, marketing, business development, human resources, legal, financial and administration departments. Business process automation involves automating the recurring tasks of a business process rather than doing it manually.
Let’s examine a manual and an e-purchase order process. A manual PO process tends to have problems, incorrect data entry, or delay in documentation etc. It is also time-consuming as it involves manually raising a purchase order requisition, then going and getting approvals from various departments, verifying the order and raising invoices before getting final approval. As compared to an e-procurement system, where purchase requests are digitally initiated, routed to the appropriate stakeholders for quick approval. Making it much easier to use and e-process, as all its computations are automatically handled.
THE ULTIMATE PURPOSE OF PROCESS AUTOMATION
That would be to improve the work environment for people who are the driving force and not to replace them. As a leader your task is to ensure that all of the team and staff understand this fact, enabling people and machines to interact more naturally.
In the end, it is a human analysis that provides real value and contextual insight. There is also a clear need for organizations to empower the workforce by creating an exponential Agile learning environment.
Are you interested in learning more? Stay tuned. We shall try to clear some of the common misconceptions in our next blog. Meantime, invite you to read some of our recent blog posts and share your comments.
You can drop us a line on hello@leadership-tribe or reaching us through contact us
There have been a few coaching discussions lately and the term ‘coaching’ and ‘training’ are sometimes used interchangeably. The terms may seem similar but have a fine distinction between them.
From a personal perspective, I have been working as an Agile trainer and I am also getting qualified as an ICF credentialed professional coach. This article aims to address the confusion and I hope it can be helpful for people to obtain a better understanding.
Training vs. Coaching
So what is the difference between Coaching and Training? Whilst there is a learning process involved in both concepts and they are complementary to each other, they serve different purposes and adopt different approaches in the delivery process.
Please see below the key differences I have summarised:
Training
Coaching
Trainer transfers knowledge and skills
Coach actively listens and asks powerful questions
A trainer provides external information to the audience
Coach helps coachee to build self-awareness and belief, and removes inner blockers
Learning focused
Development focused
A trainer is an expert
Coach may or may not be the expert
Trainer drives the learning process, the trainer owns the actions
Coach partners with the coachee and facilitates coaching conversations, coachee owns the actions
Usually structured and follow fixed agenda
Usually unstructured and follow the coachee’s agenda
Typically done in a group setting
Typically conducted on a one-on-one basis
Short-term timespan
Mid-term to a long-term process
Be Trained to Become an Effective Coach
Coaching is about partnering with clients in a thought-provoking and creative process which inspires them to maximize their personal and professional potential. It is a refined methodology that enables maximum effectiveness, and a set of skills that can be developed through practice. Some people tend to mix up coaching with problem-solving, but coaching offers far more than merely providing ‘quick fix’ solutions.
Coaches actively listen and ask the right questions to help people improve self-awareness and build capability to transform and achieve the desired outcome. They work in partnership with clients to motivate, challenge and inspire them to maximise their potential and generate innovative and sustainable solutions from within. For the coaches to gain their competencies, they need to develop the skills, experience, character and compassion to positively influence their clients’ development journey. This involves being fully trained on the subject, and a lot of learning and practices.
Make sure you also check my other article on coaching here.
Adopt Coaching Skills to Become an Effective Trainer
Trainers have an abundant understanding of the subject matter and can transfer their knowledge to the audience in a structured and logical manner. Training implies a linear transfer of information, and research conducted by IBM on adult learning suggested that the if the audience is being told of a piece of information, only 70% of them can recall it after 3 weeks and 10% after 3 months. In other words, the effectiveness is limited if training is intended to just pass on pieces of information.
The recall score increased dramatically when the audiences are not only being told but also have experienced the learning. The IBM research revealed that in this case, 85% of audiences can recall the information after 3 weeks and 65% after 3 months. This finding echoes with the ‘Concrete Practice’ from the 4Cs in Training From the Back of the Room (TFBR) while designing your class.
In my practice as an Agile trainer, I found coaching a very useful tool to engage the group and provide the class with a unique journey with a great experience. I have actively asked audiences questions, invited them to think on their feet and resonate with themselves. I introduced Agile concepts and training content, facilitated the class to practice in teams, and delivered impactful and sustainable results.
Make sure you also check my other article on Training here.
Training and Coaching
In summary, training and coaching complement each other in equipping learners and driving them to move ahead to achieve their goals. I use the analogy of training and coaching working together like the way we playing tennis. Training is about the technicalities of developing the skills on how we serve, hit the ball, and move in the court which are extrinsic. Coaching is about the belief, the drive to succeed, and removing the inner barriers which are intrinsic. Despite that training and coaching are distinct practices, they can work well together and deliver successful outcomes. Training transfers the desirable knowledge and skills, coaching instil the learning and enthusiasm from the training to the workplace in a more sustainable way with greater influence.
Living in a time of significant changes: A glance at Leadership Traits
Leadership traits are the personal qualities that help a person to shape himself or herself into an effective leader. These traits help one to address specific challenges and work efficiently in different fields. For example, leaders in IT must deal with the constant industrial change, as well as issues with cybersecurity threats, legacy systems, and legal compliance, etc. Leaders should also model some of the leadership qualities to motivate employees to achieve high performance and meet business goals.
Key Leadership Traits
Throughout my career, I have been working with quite a few leaders, many of them are competent but only a few are extraordinary and influential. What makes the difference? Some people suggest that great leaders should be resilient, responsible, respected, and should have a solid base in domain knowledge. Some people say that outstanding leaders should be kind to their subordinates and demonstrate ethical conduct. Others reckon that a charismatic style of the leaders is more desirable and will draw people to them.
I have summarized the following qualities which I have observed working with leaders, and I believe all leaders should consider embodying them to be effective.
Empathy
When a leader treats all with respects, shows genuine concern for others, listens carefully to understand, it helps the leader to create awareness, earn trust and foster relationship. Leaders who create strong rapport, develop deep bonds between themselves and their employees, help to improve team collaboration and warrant the long-term success of organizations.
Emotional Intelligence
A leaders’ emotional intelligence is as important as professional ability, if not more. It is not only about recognising and managing one’s own emotion, but also understanding the people around you, how they feel and how your emotions affect them. Have you witnessed any emotional outburst in the workplace, and how did that impact the working relationship? Leaders need to master their emotions and navigate through stressful situations to succeed.
Foster ‘No Blame’ Culture
When the team make mistakes or encounter issues, instead of looking for a scapegoat and blaming individuals, leaders should focus on the problem, looking for constructive solutions and moving forward. By fostering a ‘no blame’ culture within an organisation, leaders encourage employees to participate actively, learn and improve constantly, and help the organisation to more transparent and continue to grow.
Humility
Humility is the recognition of people being human and have both strengths and weaknesses. Leaders who show humility, don’t think less of themselves, instead, they think more of the others. They prioritise the success of the organisation over their own. Humble leaders present themselves like everyone else, they attract and inspire followers and bring people together to contribute to their business’ success.
Responsibility
Leaders should take full responsibility for themselves, as well as the success of the project, team, and organization. Responsible leaders stand by their success and take ownership of their mistakes. They take the initiative to do what needs to be done and they will hold others accountable. They are willing to cross the boundaries and help out where needed.
Self-Confidence
Leaders’ confidence is influential. Employees are drawn to leaders who are confident, seeking their opinions and advice. Leaders should also recognize the value of building self-confidence within the others and are not threatened by doing so. This will help to promote new ideas and maximise participation from everyone. Also, self-confidence enables one to be more flexible in adapting others’ suggestions, taking responsibility, and keeping on improving, which is key to today’s businesses.
Courage
Courageous leaders are assertive and willing to take calculated risks. They are willing to try new things, test new ideas, and facilitate constructive disagreements for the best interest of the organisation. These individuals often champion new ideas and breakthroughs and enable the team to achieve creative solutions.
Focus
Extraordinary leaders don’t wait to start, they plan, and are extremely organized. They encourage collaboration and inclusive leadership. Also, they think through multiple scenarios with viable alternatives and plan toward success. They devise strategies, formulate plans, define processes and monitor progress to warrant high performance. They take calculated risks and prepare contingency plans in the event of unexpected changes.
Leadership focus on how leaders use their authority in the decisions they make, actions they engage in, and ways they influence others. Effective leaders exercise a high level of integrity, leading with confidence, communicating clearly and concisely, addressing problems without finger-pointing, demonstrating courage and real accountability, and keeping focused on delivering the business’ objectives. They are people-oriented, aware of how their decisions impact others and use their power to serve the greater good and motivate teams to achieve high-performance.
Also, don’t miss to check our Leadership course curriculum. Contact us at [email protected].
If you want to become a great leader, make sure you embody and demonstrate the qualities discussed above. It isn’t easy, but the rewards can be truly phenomenal. If you want to become a transformational leader and need help to improve your leadership skills, Contact usto find out how we can help.
As an Agile coach for one of the top globally renowned Fortune 100 companies, I had the privilege to work with various clients and assist their Agile transformation. In the journey, I have often been approached by leaders with the question: how we are doing? In this article, I’d like to share a case study and my thoughts on defining and adopting Agile metrics which is a critical part of the Agile transformation. The Agile metrics help to measure not only the velocity, throughput, product quality, team health, etc. but also reveal the value delivered to customers.
Case Study
Background
In 2016, I had the privilege to work as part of a team of 55 Agile Coaches to roll out Agile adoption and transformation across a client’s CIO division which has over 2,500 people. The client’s CIO division is comprised of several domains and subdomains. It has adopted the Spotify organizational model of Squads, Tribes, Chapters and Guilds. Just for your background, the specific structure can be described in the broad sense as follows:
A Squad is a basic unit of a development team;
A Tribe is a collection of Squads working in related areas;
A Chapter is a small family of people with similar skills and competencies in the same Tribe;
A Guild is a community of people with the same interest across the organisation.
A more detailed explanation of the Spotify way of working can be found following the link, should you need more information.
Capturing Agile Metrics
We adopted the Wave Planning model which is a phased planning technique for large and complex projects like this one. The entire 2016 was marked as Wave One. We worked collaboratively with the client, formed the right teams, trained them on Agile principles, values, tools and practices, mentored and coached the teams to adopt the new way of working.
After the teams and workflow have been established, we started working with specific Squads to capture the Agile metrics. We held a few discussions with the teams and collected their thoughts. We understood that the velocity, story points, burn-down/burn-up charts, defect trends, throughput, and cycle time are some of the key metrics that are crucial to them. During the reflection sessions, we reviewed the metrics with the teams and made sure they still serve the purpose of performance measurement for the specific team.
After Wave One has been successfully implemented in January 2017, the leaders were keen to devise the metrics to the other Squads, which I have advised them not to. I had separate discussions with the targeted Squads regarding if measuring velocity and story points help the Squads to get better and if they receive feedback from management on the metrics they have submitted at the end of each sprint. The Squads suggested that it is not the sprint velocity that mattered. Instead, the trend of the sprint velocity and analysis of the variations/deviations would help the team to course correct and get better. A few team members felt that velocity is more of a predictable number, and it is the value delivered to the customer at the end of each sprint that should be measured. Some also suggested that there should also be a measure of the benefits realized for the work done by the team. Therefore, it is advised that the Agile metrics be defined and owned at the individual Squad level and not to be compared with each other.
The Agile Metrics
To sum up, Agile metrics are an important tool to help teams understand how effective they are, and allow teams to continue learning and improving processes. They need to be understood and applied properly to deliver value. Below are some of my advice to help Agile teams establish powerful metrics:
Don’t measure everything for the sake of it.
Management team not to impose the metrics on teams.
Teams to adopt the metrics that matter to them and add value.
Consider using a few metrics together to provide a comprehensive view of the Agile activities.
Make them easy to understand and update.
Maintain metrics regularly (daily or weekly) and be consistent in the way you measure them.
Different units in the organisation may use distinctive metrics, what works for one may not work for the other.
Don’t merely focus on the numbers, interpret the factors that are impacting the team.
Ground the measurement in the agile process, observe trends and understand whether there’s an improvement or fallback.
Make visual charts of the key metrics, and make them visible to the team.
Agile metrics provide stakeholders with the baseline of where the teams are and transparency over their journey. You may consider the measurement from four key aspects: people, customer, financial, and process. Below are examples of some key metrics that have been used by teams we have worked with.
People: Team Satisfaction, Attrition Rate, Skills Gap
Customer: Release Net Promoter Score (NPS), End-User Satisfaction, Escaped Defects
Financial: Unit Cost per Transaction, Total Operational Cost
Process: Agile Velocity, Sprint Burndown, Lead Time, Cycle Time, Throughput, Backlog Size
Are you interested in learning more about Agile transformation best practices? Are you looking for help to understand what types of metrics would be relevant to your teams? Leadership Tribe has been helping organizations of all sizes with their transformation journey and we are here for you.
