Using Agile to Increase Organizational Resiliency During our New Normal

It goes without saying that the The COVID-19 pandemic has forced organizations to go through rapid change. Working from home, social distancing, disrupted supply chains, volatile markets, the list goes on.

Given the new environment, several of the client organizations I work with have questioned the usefulness of their investments in transiting to a more agile way of thinking and working. How can we rely on an approach that requires so much face to face collaboration, how can rely on self-organization when every one is working from home? Can we really favor learning over planning? How can agile coaching even be effective?

I am sure I am not the only practitioner in the agile community who is facing some of these questions, so I wanted to share some stories of how various clients have doubled down on their agile journey to help them increase their resiliency to adapt to an unprecedented amount of turbulence. A focus on Agile values and behaviors will continue to be a key differentiation for these organizations, as look to improve their resilience in the face of future waves of disruption.

What I mean by Agility

There is no standard definition of agility or agile, which is a good thing. In order to ground this post, I'll share how I define agile.

Agile is a mindset, a set of connected values, beliefs, about people, customers, and our work. These values and beliefs guide our behavior, and influence practices and methods we may use to demonstrate those behaviors.

Likely you will have a different take on the exact values, beliefs and behaviors in your definition of agile, and that is OK. Hopefully something in this definition resonates with you.

Steps to a Resilient New Normal

Almost every consultancy/business expert/industry analyst has outlined some kind of three to four step set of "phases" that organizations will go through. They all tend to look similar to one another and go something like this.

1. Survive - making sure employees and customers are safe, focusing on the barest of essentials required to operate
2. Reset – bringing the organization back online with increased tactical resiliency
3. Succeed – rapidly iterating on existing products / services and their underlying business models to being value in the face of altered market conditions.
4. Accelerate – shifting mindset to organizational resiliency so as to be able rapidly refocus and re-structure in response to future disruptions.

It's incredibly naive to look at this as a linear set of stages, one that an entire organization can go through lock step, but I do find it helpful to provide examples of how agility can help a (sub set) of an organization in each of these stages. So I'll share my thoughts as a four part article, one for each "stage".

Resetting with Increased Tactical Resilience 

We are now well past this stage, but we are not past the fact that we will likely face more disruptions in the future. Also it is likely that many organizations have not taken some of these steps to increase their resiliency.

In this case, with the advent of the pandemic, organizations needed to shift their focuses to deliver value in a massively disrupted market. Adding to the complexity entire workforces suddenly found themselves working remotely.

The goal during Reset is to bring the organizations value creation activities back online. But we want to do so with an increased sense of tactical resiliency. Despite people working from home, being disconnected from physical channels and face to face customers, we want to sustain and even increase our ability to adapt and adjust at an organizational level. Here is how Agile helped many of our clients do just that

1. Digitize agile concepts to enable virtual teams and increase effective collaboration
2. Use visual (flow) management to improve transparency across the organization
3. Elevate agile practices to enterprise levels so as to rapidly re-deploy people into teams based on shifting market conditions

Digitize agile concepts to enable virtual teams and increase effective collaboration

When looking at Organizations and their ability to respond with resilience, a common theme became apparent. Organizations that had both a strong culture based on teams as well as easy access to digital tooling responded better than those that did not..

The majority, but not all of our clients were able to able to take advantage of both digital tools and well-established teams to create “virtual” agile team collaboration spaces. They adopted a remote work culture that was really an extension of their existing agile team oriented one.

Agile coaches worked closely with teams and leaders to digitize all aspects of agile team practices. Digital Kanban boards, collaboration boards, team video conferencing, chat, all were focused on creating the “virtual team space”. They implemented dedicated team collaboration and individual focus hours using team wide calendars.

Use visual (flow) management to improve transparency across the organization

Many of our clients immediately enhanced their visualization of both their backlogs as well as their flow of value at program or portfolio level. This may sound simple and obvious to some, but we have witnessed a number of organizations not invest in this effort, and face significant challenges in aligning how to respond, and managing the logistics of delivery as a result. The clients who simple practices in place,were able to provide transparency across organizational silos and hierarchies. These organizations sustained their ability to align on, and address organization-wide concerns as they happen.

In one example, a client of ours was to get a large scale program made up of 11+ teams back on track in a matter weeks. They were able to use the elevated transparency to shift people to meet these new conditions and refocus priorities accordingly.

Elevate agile practices to enterprise levels so as to rapidly re-deploy people into teams based on shifting market conditions

Doubling down on visualization has made it easier for what most of our clients needed to do next, rapidly re-direct teams and people to mission critical activities necessary to support the shifting market, Examples include increased support for call centres and IT operations, as well as discrete initiatives focused on providing services to customers who required immediate support.

We have witnessed a number of our clients managing this continued shift in priority both thoughtfully and quickly. They have rapidly agreed on value-for-effort and ensure the best use of limited resources and people. A key component of success has been the use of lightweight planning methods to break up priorities into smaller, minimal increments of value, and then shift people and teams as required to deliver on these priorities.

A great example is how one of our clients, a large FSI, was able to rapidly respond to an asked by the Federal Government to deliver on an emergency program that would facilitate the direct deposit of relief funds to both consumers and business account holders. Leveraging portfolio level visualization, our client was able to quickly re-structure a cross functional team (pulling from many areas) to successfully deliver on the mandate. The Federal Government praised our client’s ability to quickly and flawlessly deliver on the mandate.

That is it for this post, In my next article I will go over how Organizations have started to Succeed by rapidly iterating on existing products / services. How they have tweaked their underlying business models to being value in the face of altered market conditions.

Note: this content was taken from an excellent post by a colleague of mine, Andrew Larosa on Business Agility and the New Normal