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.
