Plan & Initiate: Plan and Prepare for Agility
- Initial meetings with leaders.
- Thinking/Planning Assessment and Focus Management Workshop (usually 2 days)
- Map the group goals and current situation, set the goals for the new process
- Introduction and discussion of key Lean/Agile solutions with a focus on the group’s context and goals
- Understand how Agile approaches can help the group reach its improvement goals (discuss small batches using Agile Requirements, Scrum, Kanban, Scrumban, Agile releases, Lean Startup approaches, commitments in Agile, etc.)
- Design the high level process approach to delivery and improvement for the group and understand its implications and implementation steps
- Establish the vision for the journey
- Build buy-in among the leadership team for the need and the approach
Key Deliverables:
- List of pains / opportunities
- Goals
- Common language
- Management/Leadership buy-in including willingness to put in hard work and make some compromises as part of a non-trivial journey
- High level plan for the journey and more concrete plan for Kickoff and first 100 days of the implementation
Kickoff: Achieve Basic Agility
Key Deliverables:
– All initial process and building blocks deployed and can be observed in operation
– Organization is starting to learn the new way of working and gets ready to stabilize
– Established key metrics/indicators we will monitor to help guide the Agile journey to achieving the desired outcomes
Stabilize: Reach Competent Agility with the Current Process
Key Deliverables:
- Reached the agreed upon goals
- Reduced significantly the identified pains
- Current process feels reasonably ok, feeling we are after the initial storming.
- Can sustain current process/practices even without support/coaching
- Can expect limited amount of further improvement/tweaks will happen without support/coaching
- Have updated goals/pains to work on in the Improve phase
Recharge Organizational Energies for Further Improvement
“Digest” the new process and maintain stable operation
Key Deliverables:
Recharged energies and now ready to take significant improvement steps
Improve: Competent at Adapting/Improving
Key Deliverables:
- Continuous improvement ability – can expect continued stream of significant evolutionary improvements without external coaching
- Reached the agreed upon updated goals
- Achieved significant reduction in level of pain in areas identified at the end of Stabilize.
- Organization is familiar with – and knows how to use – a set of key improvement techniques and tools to continue their ongoing improvement journey.
Closure: Learn from the Journey
Key Deliverables:
– Lessons for future change initiatives
– Identified next steps to ensure continued improvement
– Identified and implemented mode of external coaching support/maintenance
– Identified opportunities to leverage agility elsewhere in the organization
Maintenance: Keep the Fire Burning
Key Deliverables:
– Periodic meetings with role players, to support and keep energy levels high
– Support improvement initiatives
– Health checks to identify areas that need attention
Metrics/KPIs – Measuring progress on the Agile Journey
A key question along the journey is “Are we there yet?” or even “Are we on the right track?”
In the Initiate and Plan stage we identify goals/desired outcomes
In the Kickoff stage we establish key metrics/indicators – whether qualitative or quantitative – to accompany each goal/desired outcome
While these are customized for each journey, we’ve helped people through enough journeys/transformations to actually notice patterns that can be a good starting point for the customization process. This slide deck describes this set of metrics/indicators
