Enterprise Agility in under 18 months. Northern Gas revisited?

I originally wrote this article almost a year ago...decided to revisit what was and still is, a very personal perspective on an amazing period of my life, and helped me in my desire to champion "enterprise agility... "

I wondered if a year on I could see aspects I'd do differently and whether I'd missed anything in the original post. Thanks for taking the time to look at my musings!

As ever with all posts on linked in this is a very personal viewpoint on one of the most invigorating periods of business change I've been lucky enough to be involved in. My time as 3iG Director at NGN (cooled title I've ever had btw - Innovation, Improvement and Information Director) a title now deservedly and fully owned by my far too youthful and capable successor Matthew Little.

I share the NGN story to help show that when you get down to it - great people can do amazing things - not technology, not processes....PEOPLE.

Ups and Downs

There were some bumpy parts to the journey and know that at times some of my colleagues felt frustrated, possibly a bit irritated, and I know for a fact that some of the suppliers to NGN felt life wasn't very fair. My hope is that even if they didn't always enjoy the journey that they understood why we were on it.

If I had the patience I'd write a book about the how and why NGN (Northern Gas Networks) were able to achieve so much in such little time to do justice to the people there. So whatever I write down in this short post can only capture 1/10th of the energy, passion, enthusiasm and commitment of the people who made it happen.  

Not a recipe more a list of ingredients?

One think I should make sure I'm clear about, is what worked for NGN doesn't automatically translate to other companies, so it's not a recipe more a stab at the ingredients! I absolutely believe that achieving success at this scale means building your own story and journey that's appropriate to your organisations culture. Bits of the NGN journey may resonate - but sorry to say - trying to just apply them as a formula won't work!

(Update - I'm working with another excellent bunch of folks in another distribution company and more than anything this observation is proving to be accurate. Scotia are different to NGN and the journey is therefore different however their ability to become agile, adaptive and customer focused is just as powerful and doable as NGN's. Different journey - similar ingredients (mixed metaphor!)

It's NOT a linear journey

I'll start by saying it NEVER felt like a linear journey or deeply planned, mainly because it wasn't. We had a pretty clear idea of where we were heading and this direction was to be an outstanding, customer focused, connected and highly adaptive business. It wasn't about being a good utility - we already were - that's not really stretching any boundaries - most utilities aren't very good at Customer centric thinking.

We didn't use phrases like Enterprise Agility! It was all about being an even better business. 

From the outset our CEO Mark (Horsley) understood the power of collaboration, communication and a passion for excellence. 

So FACT ONE. If you've a leader who understands the business, it's people, the power of technology and can inspire folk then you've probably already got an 80% chance of succeeding. If you haven't then you're going to have to work hard.

The words/mantra that we kept using during the journey were "Emergence and Communication" (actually hats of to Mark - he constantly drilled home the need to keep being honest and open about everything)....things will emerge and if we made sure we were constantly sharing stuff with one another we'd be able to adapt the journey accordingly.

The success factors

Relentless and Unstoppable : I've mentioned NGN's CEO Mark as a key reason NGN can tackle and succeed in doing this sort of thing at pace. Equally the can do culture is exemplified in a term which I heard from day one "relentless and unstoppable". The profound and absolute belief that our people were capable of anything if given the freedom and support to do it. 

Customer Value: So many companies today talk about being customer centric, or customer focused and yet it only takes a cursory glance at their culture, behaviours and reward systems to see it's only skin deep. Don't put Lipstick on a pig.  In NGN it doesn't. The entire organisation "obsesses" about two things Customer and Safety. Not bad things to obsess over when you're a gas company serving 2.7m homes! Given the concept of agile being about customer value there was a positive and natural alignment on this one from the outset.

Servant Leadership: Right. There is so much total bullshit flying around about this subject at the minute that I felt compelled to put this piece into this post. I had not realised what this really meant when I started the NGN journey. One of the HiveMind coaches educated me - a chap called Colin Sweetman. Colin's gentle and persistent patience in explaining how he kept seeing this trait all over NGN also helped me understand how you can't just "implement servant leadership". I'll leave it there on that subject but if you'd really like to know what it is and how to do it - ask Colin! (oh and for those people that truly get it, they'll recognise the irony in people who post articles on linkedin saying how they're an excellent servant leader).

Coaching and Mentoring at all levels: I've worked in many top notch consulting firms crammed full of bright young things and sold multi-million pound change programme staffed with them. No-More!  From the outset and I guess a part of my disruptor mindset I wanted to take a completely different approach to making change in NGN be OUR CHANGE and therefore sustainable. I didn't want "land and expand" or rigid methodologies and dogma (update - by the way there's plenty of agile folk that fall into this trap and the problems growing as agile becomes ever more mainstream). Both Mark (CEO) and I had both lived through and run conventional transformation programmes and our experience made us both swear that we'd never let NGN fall victim to that particular horror! I've written other articles on why I've gradually become cynical about the transformation word in business.

So to help on this accelerated change journey, we engaged with a bunch of smart independents and micro-consulting firms who work in a professional services network called HiveMind (and yes I thought they were so good, it's the network I joined/invested in a year ago). They cajoled, persuaded, explained, forced (nicely) for us to examine ourselves and drive change from within - sounds zen but it's not, and sometimes coaching sounds like a soft option - if you've experienced it - you'll know it's anything but! They put there money where their mouths were - if they didn't add value we didn't pay! (ps didn't happen)

Be Brave or don't bother at all...

Trying to do this level of disruption at this pace takes courage for those on the journey.

It's about the people who's job's changed, the executives who were used to a particular way of doing things and exercising power, but tried another, the departmental staff from HR, Comms, Finance, Customer, Ops, IT who suddenly had to become part of a "Business Capability Squad" and talk to each other about business problems, teams having to applying weird concepts such a "pace layering", architects trying to figure out what the hell emergent architecture really meant, supplier account managers trying to figure what their purpose was (hint, there is one but not what most of them thought it was), Health and Safety worrying about an outbreak of unattended whiteboards, people having to translate my Gartnerspeak to plain english (something I've worked on over the last year)....so ONE thing helps in this context - people are allowed to fail fast and learn fast. NGN excelled/excel at this.

Believe it's worth it!

Given what I've written so far I realised I should have answered the "why on earth would anyone wan't to try and do this much in such a short space of time".

Ambition.  NGN has built an enviable reputation in the world of Customer Excellence and business change (we won awards for this stuff - against some highly respected private sector commercial operations). Mark H recognised that if we could be this good with poor systems, processes and technologies then just how awesome would we be with a business powered and enabled by smart systems and great business capabilities.

FACT TWO - We had a simple and clear measure of success based around bringing  "Ideas to Life". A simple way of asking the question and measuring "how many great ideas can we get, which fit with our strategy and make a difference to our performance into our business operation as quickly and efficiently as possible!". We stopped talking about IT and "Gathering Requirements" - we aren't squirrels so lets not behave like them.

FACT THREE - we reduced the time it took to make a simple change to our processes and systems from 100 days (unforgivable) to 5 days - just about acceptable. In fact we got to a place where our operations colleagues asked us to slow down on releases - there was a moment of celebration.

FACT FOUR - we reduced IT costs substantially whilst doing a shed load better stuff (have a really smart well thought through sourcing model not some repetitious me too model - kudos to Matthew Little on building a hybrid, and clever sourcing model.

FACT FIVE - we implemented a Customer Experience Management system in 12 weeks and at a quarter of the cost of old school thinking and models.

Business capability modelling doesn't belong to architects.

If you're going to do some sort of version of Spotify's Guilds and Squads that works in something less trendy and cool than an on-line music business - it's pretty important to try and find a way of creating squads around something which isn't just a function (HR, OPS etc) or a software package (this is just so wrong it makes my nose bleed). We chose business capability models - I'm not going to go into detail about these in this first post (will cover next week) but here's another fact - starting here is FAR FAR better than becoming obsessed with process models (imho) - WHY because examining processes causes tinkering, examining capabilities creates innovation and disruptor type thinking. When we got really good we could connect experience and journeys to capabilities - which was cool.

Customer & Digital Strategy should take a few weeks or so to suss...

I was luck enough to work with some great people to help create a customer and digital strategy in weeks not months (Custerian - again a member firm working with other member firms in the Hive Network). This wasn't some arid dry document it was a highly visual and easily understood set of materials that would work at any level of our business. It helped frame almost everything we did. I now firmly believe IT strategy is more or less dead in this context. Oh and digital has no real meaning other than "modern things!" - happy to argue that point with anyone!

Pace Layering in reality

My Gartner colleagues had produced a brilliant piece of thinking around something called pace layering (I was so annoyed when they started blathering on about bi-modal - pace was better in my view). We took this concept and MADE it REAL in NGN. Then we iterated it to an ever cooler - classes of service model (Mark D thinking and Kenny G). Pace is a fab model that our Exec got completely...it also fits with digital thinking really well.

Agile or Accelerated Delivery

Agile isn't about software. I'll say that again - agile isn't about software! We took the concepts of lean/scrum/kanban and with the help of the guys from the Hive helped make the thinking become that of "accelerating delivery" - we deliberately used this term to break away from the baggage of agile as a software development model. By accelerated delivery we wanted to promote the idea of accelerating "ides into life" - not software changes.

Reflection 12 months on...

Culture, Culture, Culture....this is why we achieved the results we did. Open, honest, people prepared to try new ideas and learn how to keep improving....

We didn't try and force specific agile "methods" - which was spot on

We didn't approach agility as an IT "thing" - in fact the opposite really

We had guts (and I'm sure still have!)

more to come....

I'll do the next bit of this post next week where I'll share the points where it all got a bit hard and how we dealt with it....

Thanks folks :-)

Dave