The Goal Is Business Agility: What's in Your Way?

This is a chapter from my upcoming online book Going Beyond Lean and Agile: Introducing FLEX – FLow for Enterprise Transformation (online book)

FLEX is Net Objectives' Lean-Agile approach to helping organizations improve at all levels. FLEX can be used to help organizations achieve business agility – the quick realization of value predictably, sustainably and with high quality. It does this by codifying the author’s 20+ years of experience in Lean, theory of flow, theory of constraints, Agile, Scrum, Kanban, technical agility and more in improving organizations. It presents what needs to happen for organizations to increase their effectiveness . To help achieve this the book presents common challenges organizations have and provides common patterns for their solutions.

Business Agility – our true goal

Agile has mostly focused at the team level. The Agile Manifesto mentions the team in almost every value and principle statement but rarely mentions business and doesn’t mention management at all. As Agile as grown its purpose has shifted more to creating business agility with team agility being a step along the way.

Business Agility is the ability to quickly realize value predictably, sustainably and with high quality. This requires much more than the team and must go from the beginning of the initiation of projects through their deployment and support. It requires attending to which customers add the most value to the business and then creating a focus on customer value to those customers.

Having business agility enables the company to be proactive when they discover new opportunities for better products as well as to be able to respond quickly to changing environments, customer needs and competition.

What’s in your way?

Our analysis of hundreds of companies indicates that if one looks at related types of companies, they pretty much have the same types of problems.  The difficulties to achieve business agility get harder and harder the bigger an organization becomes. The reason for this is more because the dynamics between what people want gets more complex than a lack of understanding what is actually required to figure out how to do it. In other words, getting agreement on what’s the most important work to be done is usually at the root cause of most of what’s causing problems.

Not resolving this can cause too much work in process, unclear requirements, building things of lesser value than what’s needed, and many more. Each company will have its own set of specific challenges. As well as what makes them difficult to overcome. But, as we shall see, these are surprisingly common across many companies. What’s important to keep in mind is our top-level goal (business agility) and to see what’s needed to solve that.

Although there are general consistencies in problems, and even the solutions to solve them, it is important to know what your particular challenges are because even if you want to end up in the same place as other companies, the way you’ll need to get there will likely vary on several factors. These include your culture, organizational structure, skill sets, number of constraining factors and more.

Seeing Your Challenges in the Value Stream

In the same way that we saw how value moves through our value stream, we can look at the value stream to see our challenges. The most common challenges that companies have are:

• It takes too long to get anything done
• work is not properly prioritized
• chunks of work are too big
• work takes place on too many things
• there are unclear requirements
• teams don’t understand the needs of the business
• some people have too much to do and are constraints on multiple teams
• there is high technical debt
• there are many integration errors
• there is insufficient collaboration
• ops is blindsided and pulled in many directions
• there is a lack of visibility of what is taking place

These challenges are represented in the figure below:

Showing common challenges in the value stream

These challenges usually are seen by having by having work be stuck in large queues before the step where the problem is. Lean suggests that instead of focusing on how people can work faster we should take steps to keep our queue size down. This mostly involves working on small batches, how we do our work, and how we organize our talent.

Online courses on FLEX are available. Please message me if interested