My learnings on creating a value driven organization

How to go from your Agile dream towards Value Streams, tackling culture along the way?

We’ve been working with a client the last two years in creating a new organizational structure, we call it Agile, but you might as well call it ‘flexible, value focused, iterative, learning’, but that is a bit of a mouthful. With Agile we strive for having a fun place to work, closely aligned to organizational goals. The size of the organization is little under a 1.000 people and we transformed them over a course of 2 years, with a 'project team' on average 8 people, most of which internal employees. We did this in five easy steps.

?Define your dream state – why do you want to have an agile organization

The way we start these type of initiatives is to define where we want to end up in two to three years time. What is the value we want to bring to this organization when working agile. Do they want to deliver to their customers faster, do they want to establish a better way of working. Just as important, what is the current state of the organization. Are there similar projects running, how can we incorporate these?

Create Blueprints – High Level description

We designed blueprints of the value streams. Initial sketches of People, Process and Technology. To understand potential gaps, to create a team of people focused on creating the right structure for their own value stream. This helped us to answer questions like ‘what is really our purpose and value’, ‘how big will these value streams become, is that manageable’, ‘what will the organization look like’. This is a crucial step, often overlooked. Mostly you would jump right into the value stream design. This intermediate step was an important fundament, to build on!

Define Value Streams & incremental role out plan – Including Application, Teams and Leadership

We designed the value streams based on the blueprints and the key decisions like ‘how do we limit the number of dependencies’, ‘can this work from an application perspective’. In designed the streams, we also started the implementation. We had an incremental roll out plan, supported by an agile playbook. This helps us to create common ground. Everyone knows what Agile means in their organizational context. We deliberately decided to have a phased roll out. To allow for incremental learning.?

Move to Portfolio Management – Lean Budgets & focus on value prioritization

Having value streams, scrum teams, etc. all operational, we also needed ‘Lean Budgets’, where a value stream has an end to end budget and the ability to make decisions on their own. Easier said then done. Mainly because we are still ‘one organization’, we still have dependencies, we need each other. So. How do we do this according to our ‘think big, start small approach’. We created a playbook, we conducted alignment sessions on strategies and priorities, and went on with it! Agreed we could make mistakes, as long as we respected our agile principles.

Share – Iterate – Improve: Focus on Leading by Example

And now we are done! Or so we thought. We keep on iterating in our design. We challenge culture, keep innovating and every week we see something that needs an update. In portfolio management, in tooling, in scrum sessions. And that is OK. Our main landmark event is ‘Quarterly Planning’, that is where we see improvements!

Our goal: a better place to work, where we improve every day. That is where we are, the challenge remains.

?We at PA believe are ‘thinkers that do’, we work together with your team, infusing them with knowledge and experience, leveraging their potential. They are the face of the change, we work hand in hand, to ensure the change fits your (accelerated) pace. Want to know more? Please reach out!?

#LeanPortfolioManagement #agile #paconsulting #BringingIngenuityToLife