Transforming Organizations for the Flow of Value

In today’s dynamic business landscape, fueled by cutting-edge technologies such as Generative AI and Cloud computing, organizations find themselves at an existential crossroads. Their mission? To deliver value to customers swiftly and seamlessly. Gone are the days when large-scale projects and extended lead times defined product launches. Industry trailblazers now recognize that customer expectations have shifted dramatically. Instant gratification is the new norm, and organizations must adapt accordingly.

In the pursuit of accelerated speed to market, market leading organizations have shifted away from traditional large teams and delivery models. Instead, they have embraced small, autonomous cross-functional teams working within shorter development cycles. These agile teams swiftly construct products, deliver services, and seamlessly deploy new features, updates, and fixes. At the core of this acceleration lies organizational performance, achieved through alignment around value flow and a dynamic work culture. “Culture change is not to first change how people think, but instead to start by changing how people behave – what they do” (Shook 2010). The research done by the Accelerate team confirms that Lean Management, along with a set of other technical practices known collectively as Continuous Delivery (CD) (Humble and Farley 2010), do in fact impact culture.

Organizations that transitioned successfully to a continuous delivery model modernize along four dimensions in parallel: Modern Teams, Process, Engineering, and Platforms, including Data Architecture. Companies advance along each dimension incrementally, starting with the easy wins and continuously improving on each dimension.

In this article, I delve into four key organizational levers that propel transformation within the Modern Team dimension. These levers address associated challenges and pave the way for positive change. Additionally, I introduce a people-centric framework designed to mitigate the fight-or-flight response—often triggered by significant organizational shifts. It’s essential to recognize that these insights stem from my personal perspective and remain independent of any specific workplace or affiliation.

Means to the End

In the pursuit of effective business management, the initial and crucial step lies in recognizing and aligning with business value rather than rigid departmental hierarchies. To achieve this, one must delve into comprehending the various activities, resources, and the flow of value. In essence, the focus should be on organizing value delivery to customers through well-defined Value Streams.

After identifying the Value Stream, the subsequent crucial step involves evaluating the organization’s talent pool. This assessment benchmarks the skills and readiness necessary to operate within the value stream framework. By doing so, it sheds light on the current skills proficiency within the organization. Furthermore, it guides the trajectory for each role in terms of learning and development. Ultimately, this process provides a roadmap for either upskilling existing resources or acquiring external talent with the right skills.

The subsequent step involves analyzing dependencies and connections within new workflows. The goal is to establish fully enabled teams that can reduce dependencies, enhance connections, and facilitate seamless flow. These cross-functional teams encompass all the necessary roles and skills to deliver value efficiently, enabling speed-to-market. They handle the end-to-end process, from defining and building to testing and deploying elements of value. This team model emphasizes speed, quality, product impact, and empowerment—an organizational practice encapsulated by the motto ‘you build it, you break it, and you fix it’.

In the realm of organizational management, the goal isn’t to abruptly discard the hierarchical model that underpins efficiency and stability. Instead, it’s about embracing a dual operating system, as articulated by John Kotter. This dual model combines the agility and innovation inherent in an entrepreneurial network with the reliability and consistency offered by the hierarchical system. By doing so, enterprises can simultaneously nurture novel ideas and drive their execution, delivery, operation, and support. Many leaders experience an ‘Aha’ moment when recognizing the value of this approach, which is pivotal for achieving Continuous Delivery.

Organizational Levers

Navigating the transition from the traditional approach to Continuous Delivery can be intricate, especially for organizations lacking adequate support. However, the benefits of embracing this operating model are substantial. These rewards include achieving sustainable value delivery velocity, enhancing problem-solving capabilities through collaborative swarming, and maintaining a focus on quality to prevent downstream issues. Drawing from extensive experience and research, organizations that adopt Modern Teams capabilities set the stage for success by:

• Promoting an inclusive and nurturing culture that supports team transformation during performance.
• Investing in people to foster both business and technical agility.
• Leveraging lessons learned from past work to disseminate successful patterns throughout the entire organization.
• Cultivating a learning culture aligned with engineering best practices.
• Transitioning toward well-defined roles that empower team members to actively engage in their work.
• Implementing industry-proven Agile and DevSecOps practices while continuously evolving technical capabilities to drive product strategies.
• Allocating time for innovative thinking beyond error-prone manual processes.
• Embracing a culture of continuous learning, capturing insights, and adjusting approaches over time to achieve desired outcomes.
• Prioritizing team success over individual accomplishments.

These strategic actions are rooted in how individuals relate to their work and the necessary organizational changes required to embrace new ways of working. They can be grouped into four key organizational levers: Transformational leadership, Work & Flow Structure, Processes and Policies, and Talent.

Transformational Leadership: this stands as the cornerstone among all organizational levers. Research consistently underscores that robust, transparent, and prominent leadership serves as the most reliable predictor of success. Effective leaders actively engage in the transformation process, assuming a guiding role to champion the adoption of a growth mindset within the organization. They drive acceptance of necessary changes, realigning people, resources, and activities around the delivery of customer value. Moreover, these leaders create and sponsor an environment that encourages exploration, problem-solving, and continuous learning. By incentivizing the testing of new ideas, they foster an innovative culture across the entire organization.

Work & Flow Structure: Organizations must strategically reorganize their people and resources to align with the key processes that directly benefit customers. Under this new structure, teams undergo a transformation into cross-functional, fully enabled units. These teams possess a comprehensive range of skills and knowledge necessary to consistently and predictably deliver value to customers. Collaboration between these enabled teams and the broader organization becomes essential. Additionally, functional knowledge dissemination to these teams is crucial for their success. Auxiliary functions play a vital role in supporting the teams, ensuring the agile delivery of client value.

Talent: In the context of adopting Continuous Delivery, it’s essential to recognize that not all talent is prepared for this paradigm shift. The majority of the population lacks the necessary skills and mindset to effectively operate within this future model. To bridge this gap, individuals must embrace and apply lean-agile frameworks. Traditionally, the approach to behavior change centered around altering people’s mindset, assuming that this would subsequently impact their behavior. However, my findings suggest a different path: changing behavior directly can lead to shifts in mindset. Therefore, targeted training and intensive coaching should be tailored to each team member’s role within the organization. Additionally, it’s crucial to align the functional organization with the empowered teams, fostering collaboration and harmony. Ultimately, the goal is to instill a continuous improvement and learning mindset across the talent pool, enabling ongoing growth.

Lean, Agile & Continuous Delivery Standards, Process and Policies: Establishing robust standards, processes, and policies is crucial. These guidelines serve as the rules of engagement, commencing with the adoption of an agile mindset and the associated commitments tied to value-based delivery. By doing so, a clear benchmark is set for cross-functional teams, encouraging continuous learning and improvement. Additionally, these standards foster institutional acceptance of decision autonomy within these teams, enabling swift end-to-end value delivery. Furthermore, they codify the organization’s dedication to innovation, creating forums and processes that facilitate knowledge sharing and collaborative problem-solving across the entire organization.

Implementing change across any of these organizational levers in isolation can be daunting and trigger fear among stakeholders. Fear, a natural response to change, persists even when the change is beneficial. To address this, a disciplined, structured, timely, and relevant change management strategy is essential. When transforming the context of Continuous Delivery, it’s advisable to address all four levers simultaneously, ensuring overall success by managing the evolutionary resistance to change.

People-centric Framework

To achieve a successful continuous delivery transformation, organizations must embrace a comprehensive yet modularized framework. This framework involves a deep understanding of organizational levers and the strategic application of neuroscience-based tools and techniques. These interventions and capability enhancements are grouped into four key readiness methods:

• Engagement: This method focuses on control and reinforcement. It ensures that teams are aligned with the transformation goals and actively participate in the process. By reinforcing positive behaviors and maintaining a sense of ownership, engagement becomes a powerful lever for change.
• Communication: Effective branding and inspirational communication play a vital role in driving transformation. Clear messaging, storytelling, and creating a compelling narrative around the change initiative motivate employees and foster a shared vision.
• Organizational Alignment: Alignment across different functions and teams is critical. When everyone is moving in the same direction, the transformation gains momentum. Leaders must align their strategies, processes, and structures to support the desired changes.
• Learning and Development: Continuous learning is at the heart of any successful transformation. Organizations should invest in developing their talent, providing relevant training, and creating a culture of curiosity and growth.

However, like any other method, there must be a baseline established, followed by continuous monitoring of progress. Team measures serve as the yardstick for evaluating the effectiveness of the transformation efforts.

Conclusion

To achieve rapid delivery, it is imperative for organizations to transition to a continuous delivery model across several critical dimensions: Modern Teams, Process, Engineering, and Platforms, including Data Architecture. This transformation involves strategically adjusting organizational levers in a controlled manner. Simultaneously, it is crucial to closely monitor the organization’s response to this intricate change. Implementing targeted interventions and capability enhancements will foster ongoing learning, enrich experiences, and facilitate a smoother transition for the entire organization.