Blog

Webinar Recording: Mastering the Art of Integration: Strategic Planning and AOP with SAFe® for Agile Organizations

By:
David Gipp & Resalin Gurka & 
| Dec 04, 2023 |  Agile,  Leadership,  Lean Portfolio Management,  SAFe

Dave Gipp and Adam Mattis AOP webinar recording

 

Recently, Dave Gipp partnered with Adam Mattis of Scaled Agile to discuss strategic planning.

Titled, “Mastering the Art of Integration: Strategic Planning with SAFe® for Agile Organizations”, the webinar explored the challenges many companies face when bridging the gap between strategy and execution.

Predicting results is extremely difficult in any environment, and Adam and Dave sought to acknowledge this difficulty while providing real advice around how to pivot and respond to market changes using improved efficiency and allocation of resources.

Complete the form for a copy of the dictionary of strategic planning terms mentioned throughout the webinar. 


The webinar was followed by a robust Q&A discussion with webinar attendees. Here’s the full transcript of the Q&A:

If you’d like to watch the full webinar recording, click here. 

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Blog

Video Conferencing Best Practices: Why Turning On Your Camera Matters

By: Andy Cleff | Oct 13, 2023 |  Leadership,  Video

Illustration representing a ccamera-off trend in remote collaboration with faceless people sitting around a conference table. Meant to illustrate video conferencing best practices.

Ah, the virtual world of remote work, where Zoom and Microsoft Teams are our modern-day conference rooms, and turning on your camera has become the equivalent of facing the right way at a physical table. But why, oh why, do so many participants choose to sit there with their chairs turned away? 

In this blog post, we’ll recognize why people keep their cameras off and make a case for the importance of flipping the virtual chair around and turning that camera on.

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Blog

The Importance of Articulating Value [Video]

By: Kim Antelo | Aug 29, 2023 |  Leadership,  Lean Portfolio Management,  Video

Instead of prioritizing by unfounded estimates, it’s time to review backlogs on a regular basis and have conversations about value and what can be delivered in shorter timeframes. 

This creates…

  • A shared understanding across the leadership team, across the organization
  • Empowers teams to deprioritize (say “no”) to work that’s not important 

In this video, Enterprise Coach Kim Antelo discusses:

  1. Why traditional planning and estimates are wasted work and can create actual waste
  2. Ways to articulate value with real-life case studies and examples, including how to handle compliance requests or projects 
  3. Unexpected benefits of prioritization by value such as improving leadership teams

Watch this 8-minute video to learn more about prioritizing work by value. Subscribe to our blog and YouTube to keep updated on the latest news and information related to leadership and organizational agility. 

Once you’ve started to identify and prioritize by value, the next step is to take action. Contrary to what you might think, one of the best actions to take would be to start stopping! Learn more in this webinar recording – Start Stopping! A Lean Approach to Portfolio and Budget Management. 

 

 

 

Video Transcript: 

According to studies from Pendo and the Standish group, somewhere between 64 and 80% of all of the work your teams are doing is providing little to no value to your organization.

We see this often in companies where leaders have a hard time prioritizing the backlog for their company, their department, or even just their teams.

Patrick Lencioni, best-selling author on teams and leadership said, “If you prioritize everything, you prioritize nothing.” The trick to prioritizing your backlog is being able to articulate the various types of value to help your leadership team determine which projects and initiatives are the most important for your teams to work on.

I remember back in the 2005 to 2011 time frame when every year I had to vie for my projects to make it above that project budget line.

There were lots of spreadsheets and lots of unfounded estimates on how much money we were going to make or save by doing these projects.

Sometimes people did time studies or very complicated maths with Net Present Value or return on investment.

They were all guesses though they were all wrong.

It really didn’t matter because no one ever went back to look to see if that value was ever captured or even if those projects were ever used.

Instead of prioritizing like that, we want to look at prioritizing our backlog on a regular basis and having conversations about the value and what can be delivered in shorter time frames so that we have a shared understanding across the leadership team and the organization and help our people on our teams to say no to the work that is not important.

There are a few common ways of looking at articulating value.

Number one is the easiest direct hard benefits that are going to impact the bottom line.

Number two are things that are going to enable us in the future.

And three is addressing risks or compliance issues, things that will hopefully keep our leaders out of orange jumpsuits.

So the first one hard benefits: “What’s going to impact that bottom line by building this new product feature or thing, we project that we’ll be able to sell X millions of additional widgets resulting in Y profit.”

Now this is easy for people to understand. We have sales people out there telling us that if we build this thing, our clients will come.

We just need to make it when we think about creating Lean budgeting teams or teams that are prioritizing the work.

Hopefully, we’re not just taking the word of our sales people. Hopefully, we’re doing some sort of validation with our customers to see who would really buy these things if we built the proposed thing.

Since Lean budgeting teams meet regularly, we can see if we’re actually capturing the value that the salespeople projected and we can choose to pivot, persevere, or to stop the project or product altogether.

These hard benefits are much easier for us to articulate and track as we more easily see how they will impact the bottom line.

The next two types are softer and more fluffy but still extremely important for us to focus on.

The second item is enablement. In the 2015 timeline, there was a lot of talk about the internet of things IOT. In order to focus on those things, we needed to learn a lot.

We needed to look at new ways of handling technology, building a data lake.

We needed to teach our business partners how to help us prioritize work and clean up the data from disparate systems from all over the organization, pull it into one place and make some sense out of it.

We thought we would be able to get a lot of value out of all of this work, but it was hard to put our fingers on an actual dollar value.

The data lake itself wasn’t the value. It, and the learnings from the whole process, enabled us to leverage data in new ways and to come up with better products.

We were talking about AI and ML well, before chatGPT came along. The companies that were enabling new ways of capturing and leveraging data are now much more able to take advantage of the next big thing.

This is just one example of enablement enablers, which are things that are helping us to prepare and learn so that we can build those big revenue items in the future.

The third value bucket I want to talk about is risk and compliance.Now we could do an hour-long talk just on this particular value bucket.

Since I’ve had the opportunity to work in the credit, health care and aviation space, I’ve had a little bit of experience in compliance and regulations.

Too many times, someone will write up a business case with this big expensive thing that needs to be done all under this justification of “compliance and we have to do it.”

I had a mentor, Chris. As we were working through what needed to be done, she said just because it’s compliance doesn’t mean you get a blank check.

What’s the actual risk here? How often does it come up? What is the least work we could do to meet the rule or regulation? These are all great questions and help us to put this into perspective.

If a regulation changes, that will have a big impact on the majority of your revenue. Maybe we should do that big expensive thing.

But if it’s only going to impact a handful of small clients, then maybe you look them along with a workaround.

Trust me, I wanna keep our leaders out of orange jumpsuits.

But the question is: “What’s the most simple thing that we could do to stay compliant but also not saddle our employees with unreasonable workarounds?”

Often as new regulations come closer to being implemented, the priority will go up just like we’ll look at time sensitivity.

For anything that has a specific date that needs to be released, it could be a revealed date for a product, it could be a conference or a convention, or something like tax day that will drive the specific value.

After looking at these three buckets, you can choose whether or not to swap these out for something that would make more sense for your specific context.

But now that we have value buckets to look at, we can leverage individuals and interactions to talk about how we compare the value across the initiatives.

We’re not just fighting for our own special project, but we’re looking at driving a conversation within the leadership team to prioritize these things and to look at the bang for the buck or value over investment. We see how that value relates to our estimate and the total cost or the total efforts to get these initiatives into the real world, not just the technology costs, Instead of using detailed spreadsheets that are full of guesses, we’re quickly estimating the value and the cost and then we can spit out an easy calculation to tell us what we think the initial pass would be.

After that, we leverage our leaders who understand now a full view of our Book of Business to discuss the priorities and change them as they see fit. Because you don’t want to just rely on a calculation. That’s why we have leaders and these conversations help build better leadership teams. They’re building more empathy and a better understanding of the whole book of business.

For the organization from there, we publish these priorities, we share them across the organization so that everyone knows what is important and what is not.

This helps employees say no when someone distracts them and work comes in, that isn’t on the priority list.

Remember those statistics I shared 64 to 80% of the things your teams are working on will rarely or never be used. Because these leadership teams meet regularly, some once a quarter, some once a week, and everywhere in between, they can pivot when they learn new things about their customer’s wants and needs.

We can stop initiatives that are not returning the value we expected or hoped for.

There are a whole slew of other benefits such as employees understanding the value of the work that they’re bringing, which makes them more connected and improves their happiness, productivity, and turnover.

Blog

Lean Prioritization Matrix (or Bang For Your Buck Matrix)

By:
Sally Tait & Randy Hale & 
| Aug 23, 2023 |  Leadership,  Lean,  Lean Portfolio Management

Business guy prioritizing a list using Lean Portfolio Management

There are many ways to prioritize work…

  • MoSCoW (Must have, Should have, Could have, Won’t have)
  • WSJF (Weighted Shortest Job First)
  • HiPPO (Highest Paid Person’s Opinion…not recommended but it happens).

We work with organizations that have used all of the above, but our favorite ways to prioritize, and the ones that we recommend, have an undeniable connection to business value or value drivers.

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Webinar recording: Start Stopping! A Lean Approach to Portfolio and Budgeting Management

By:
Randy Hale & Sally Tait & 
| Aug 15, 2023 |  Business Transformation,  Leadership,  Lean,  Video,  Webinar

A key to improving the impact of your IT portfolio operations is identifying the things you need to stop doing!

In this video, Transformation Coaches Randy Hale and Sally Tait discuss how to:

  • Apply Lean budgeting to simplify financial processes and focus on value
  • Use Lean Portfolio Management techniques to optimize enterprise flow
  • Leverage KPI’s and metrics to accurately show portfolio health

Deliver More Value With The Same Amount of Resources. Follow this link to get the Bang for your Buck! template mentioned in the webinar recording. 

Ready to take the next step to better prioritization and outcomes? Learn about our Portfolio Agility service.

Blog

Video: What is Business Transformation and Why Should You Care?

By:
Randy Hale & Resalin Gurka & 
| Jun 14, 2023 |  Agile Transformation,  Business Agility,  Business Transformation,  Leadership

There’s a lot of chatter about transformation….possibly because the entire world just got through (still going through, processing, reeling from?) a pandemic. We saw first-hand just how important agility is when reacting to massive disruption. However, an organization’s ability to be nimble is just as important when the landscape is steady. 

One way for organizations to prepare for the next disruption, whether caused by competition, new technologies, or global dynamics, is to build the internal capabilities necessary for pivoting, persevering, and harnessing change to their advantage.

Enter Business Transformation. 

But what is Business Transformation and how does it relate to, and differ from, other transformations like digital, product, and Agile? 

I sat down with Enterprise Transformation Coaches Randy Hale and Richard Dolman to discuss the benefits of Business Transformation, why it’s worth consideration despite the investment, and how you can get started. 

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Webinar Recording: Ensure Your Entire Organization is Delivering on the Right Things at the Right Time with Lean Portfolio Management

By: Agile Velocity | Apr 04, 2023 |  Agile Transformation,  Business Agility,  Leadership,  Lean,  Strategy,  Webinar

Companies needing to compete and win with less time, fewer resources, and more pressure to deliver can find massive benefits by implementing and running a lean portfolio. Organizations are often overloaded with competing priorities and more demand than capacity, so how do you decide what to focus on, when? 

During this webinar Agile Transformation Coaches David Gipp and Colleen Johnson discussed:

  • Signs that your organization could benefit from LPM (Lean Portfolio Management)
  • Why shifting to a value-oriented, outcomes focus matters
  • The jobs to be done to set up a healthy LPM Function 
  • Success measurements to track progress along the way
  • How to start the conversation in your organization
Blog

The Top 5 Reasons Teams Regress and Tips to Avoid Them

By: David Pointer | Mar 08, 2023 |  Agile Transformation,  Leadership,  Team

As an Agile Transformation Coach, I have seen my share of successful Agile teams. I have also seen teams plateau at some point struggling to move beyond the initial stages of transformation. A trend I would like to focus on is team regression, which is when an Agile team starts their journey, but along the way may slide back into old habits and processes.  

This trend is not abnormal and is dependent on the environment an individual team finds itself in. Most expect Agile teams to be self-sufficient or well established. But, without the focus on improvement or the support to progress, teams tend to slip back to old ways of working, even if they are detrimental to the team’s health. Let’s talk about the top reasons a team may regress.

Reason #1: Lack of Leadership Support 

One of the most common reasons an Agile team may regress is a lack of support from direct or indirect leadership. Teams truly desire autonomy and control over how they work, but this desire may not align with how leadership expects teams to behave. Many times, this is because of the lack of synergy between teams changing, while the rest of the organization maintains the status quo. There could be misalignment between leadership expectations vs what the team is actually doing, so the pressure begins to be applied to circumvent the team’s new way of working. Because of this pressure, teams can start to shift back to the old ways of working. Leadership may not see the benefits of Agile or do not want to change themselves to meet the needs of what the team is trying to accomplish.  

Reason #2: Conflicting Workplace Culture

Along with leadership, culture can have a big impact on the success of an Agile team. Typically, I see pockets of Agile champions who are challenging the status quo, making ways for new practices, but also some still stuck in old ways resisting the transformation. This conflict between new and old ways of working is challenging for teams on the ground to maneuver through. The organization’s response may be slow, uncertain, and unexpected at times as the initial stages of any transformation are chaotic.

The culture of an organization can also influence how psychologically safe a team feels in changing their way of working. If an organization does not promote psychological safety as part of the culture, individuals and teams will not feel comfortable challenging the status quo and the likelihood of an Agile team thriving or even surviving is greatly impacted.

Reason #3: Unclear Organizational Goals 

The focus of an organization can also influence how successful an Agile team becomes. The main goal of any organization is to please and delight their customers. For many, that means a focus on delivery, which can translate to chasing a timeline, which in many cases are not realistic or inclusive of opinions of people on the ground developing and testing. Spending time on innovation and learning may not support that delivery-focused mindset. Teams without a clear goal to work towards will often revert back to old ways of working when things get tough.

Reason #4: Inadequate Staffing of Roles 

Another aspect which can cause teams to regress is not having experienced, empowered roles on the team. If an organization does not put effort into hiring or training quality Scrum Masters and Product Owners, the team can suffer. When an organization starts their Agile journey, they may not fully understand the roles needed for a successful Agile team. The organization may experiment with filling these roles before fully committing to adding these roles permanently. The organization may also utilize existing employees to fill these roles or have an employee wear multiple hats of responsibilities. These employees may not have the skillset or aptitude to perform these roles which can slow the ability of the team to mature.  

Reason #5: Inability to Make Decisions

In many organizations, decisions are made in a vacuum without clearly communicating those decisions to all affected. Teams on the ground floor don’t know the reason behind the decision, the desired outcomes, or their role in supporting the decision. This leads to teams feeling like cogs in the machine, which reduces employee morale, and the desire to be innovative and think outside the box. By centralizing decision-making, an organization can reduce their ability to get products and services to market quickly. By decentralizing decision-making powers down to the people who know most about the work, more can be accomplished with quicker delivery.

How to Avoid These Traps and Build Successful Agile Teams

Organizations can avoid many of these pitfalls by being intentional about how they start their Agile journey. This would include understanding the outcomes it is trying to achieve, being transparent about what is trying to be accomplished, and communicating this information out to all affected. Organizations need to be more intentional about how they start their Agile journey, starting with:

  • Right sizing the team
  • The right roles and skills in each function
  • Empower the team to make decentralized decisions
  • Ensuring there is enough leadership support to sustain the strong foundations of an Agile team
  • Break down organizational silos 
  • Communicate, communicate, communicate

The more intentional an organization is about how they start their Agile journey the higher the chances of success.

If you’d like to improve your organization’s ability to create successful Agile teams and operate with true agility, I’d love to chat. Learn about our team agility service, here.