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15/07/2024 17:20 – Toujours plus de millionnaires !
15/07/2024 13:11 – Overcoming the Obstacles to Cultural Change

Extracted and hastagged by Infusio for preview. We recommend you read the original article instead...
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Overcoming the Obstacles to Cultural Change

Everyone wants a culture of agility, but culture must be balanced with the ability to produce results. In this talk, we explore how to systematically introduce organizational changes that can get people to think, feel, behave, AND deliver with agility.

Video Transcript

How do I get resistors to be overcome? How do I get the culture to change over time to get it more adaptive, more responsive, more all these different things. If I get the systems right, I get the practices right? I create the space for the culture to emerge. And so my general belief is if I have a view of what this should look like and I design it so that I can deal with all of the various competing cultural attributes and all the various personalities and needs and everything, and I'm telling you can with Agile, if you open up your purview of what Agile is, that's how you get to this point of being able to do a transformation, overcome resistance, change the culture over time.

Introduction

Awesome. Thanks guys. Yeah, so I've kind of always had this love hate idea relationship with culture as it relates to Agile. Lemme try to pay attention to clapping over there because it's so many folks in Agile kind of start with this idea that Agile, adopting agile is a culture problem or it's a mindset problem. And I think the reason why it feels that way is because it's like we have a better way to do it and people are resistant and if they would just kind of open their minds and they just kind of see the light, then we could get them to move. So I run a company based out of Atlanta. I work all over the place though called Leading Agile, and we've been in the business of doing transformational change management over the last 14 years and I've worked in a lot of companies before that back into 2000 twos that were doing Agile. So through the last 20 years almost, I just have a really strong point of view and it's a little bit contrarian I think to sometimes how we think about this stuff. So what I'm going to do, just in case anybody wants to get out of here after the first couple slides, I'm going to tell you kind of the end of the story and then I'm going to talk a lot in the middle and then I'm going to tell you the end of the story again. Okay.

Oh, I forgot my intro slides. So if anybody actually wants the deck, if I get all the way through all my slides, this will be up at the end. But you can text culture to 3, 3, 7, 7, 7 and you'll get a link into the deck and you can download it so that way we don't have to, you're welcome to get contact information, but you guys can be self-Serve on this. That's me. I'm not going to introduce myself again, but basically a little bit of my backstory, I never really got to do agile in the small professionally, I was never part of a scrum team. I kind of grew up in project management and I grew up in project management and really, really complex systems. So my was financial services and so you think financial services we were building on top of mainframes that did like a CH processing engines.

So sometimes I just call those legacy monoliths. I mean they're just that big pile of code in the back that takes forever to try to change. But then we had front end systems and we had reporting engines and we had APIs and interfaces we were publishing out. And so when I first started getting my exposure to Agile from the project management world, all the literature I was reading back in 2005 was about how do you form small cross-functional teams? And so as I kind of developed my point of view, I went from that. I worked with version one for a little while. I remember back in the days when it was version one and Rally and Rally was up in Boulder and we were in Atlanta, that was kind of a fun time to be in the agile community. And all the clients that we were going into at version one had these incredibly complex systems.

And what I spent most of my time trying to was trying to figure out how to tweak version one to basically deal with the things that were kind of messed up in some of the organizations that we were working in. And so during that time probably worked with 200 different companies in various degrees of disarray, trying to figure out how to get them to do sprint planning and story points and burn down charts and all that kind of stuff in organizations that were just really, really not wired for it. Kind of like my mental model during that time as I was thinking about and what a lot of my writing was about was if I could, I was like king for a day in a company and I could change anything, what would I change to make agile really, really work? So most of the stuff that I write about is appropriate teaming strategies and governance models and change management and how do we measure it and how do we do just the transformation strategy around it. So that's kind of like my bent.

3 Ways to Approach Agile Transformation

And so over the last 20 years I've kind of observed, there's kind of like three takes on how I see and hear people talk about agile transformation. And the first take is idea of a practices based transformation. And so in a practices based transformation, it's like we use Scrum, we hire scrum masters, we get a coach, teach people how to do sprint planning, daily standups reviews, retrospectives. Maybe if it's a technically more oriented organization, maybe you have XP coaches and it's test driven development and pair programming and things like that. And what kind of, to me, as I started breaking down what I saw some of the failure modes around that was this idea that it was like you think about how Scrum talks about it, if I have a scrum master, their job is to remove the impediments.

But what if the impediments are a 40-year-old mainframe engine that does thousands of aach H transactions a second? That's a pretty big impediment to remove. What if the impediment is siloed org structures and things like that. What if the impediment is I have a three month release management cycle and I can't deploy anything into production? So I kind of had this idea that if you go down to practices first, sometimes it works small organizations or teams within larger organizations, you can get that to work. But in these corporate monoliths that we're working in really, really tough. And so I feel for anybody, any scrum masters in the room, anybody who's doing a scrum master job, really, really hard job. It's like the next gen of project management project management's a thankless job too. I think being a scrum master can be a really, really hard job sometimes because you're betting on the fact that if we start to do these things and the impediments show themselves that we can remove the impediments and sometimes the impediments are harder to remove than doing scrum in a funky way.

It's easier to change Scrum than it is to change the impediments in the organization. I think that's why a lot of practices first transformations fail. Then what we're talking about here today is a culture first transformation. What I'm going to do is I'm going to take personality profiling and we're going to break down a lot of cultural attributes by personality and it's super fascinating topic to me. And so in a culture first transformation, it's kind of like where I started. If we just get everybody to think the right way and to have the right mindset, then the magic will happen, right? We'll get everybody to think and be agile and do agile and everything will be great. I dunno about you guys, I've never seen that kind of a transformation work either, right? Because there's so many diverse interests in a company and so many different priorities and you bounce up against corporate governance, you bounce up against architectural standards, all kinds of different things that make a culture first transformation really, really tough.

So we took this approach that we call systems first. And so what a system means to me is how do we get encapsulated teams? How do we get a team-based organizational strategy when there's dependencies between teams? How are we going to deal with them? How are we going to orchestrate dependencies across teams? How are we going to subordinate that up to some sort of enterprise level prioritization mechanism? How are we going to measure it? How are we going to control it? How are we going to make sure that the system is producing the things that we want? And so what my general belief is around this is that if you start with the systems, you understand your dependencies, you understand your teaming strategies, and you can do that in a more holistic way across the organization, then you can enable a transformation with the practices, whether it be Scrum or safe or less or whatever, XP.

Then you can enable the system, combine I left, combine out. You can enable the system with really solid practices and then you create a space for culture to emerge the culture you want. When people see an incremental and iterative development approach start to work, they can start to suspend disbelief and start to trust it. Okay, so anybody want to leave you guys? Hang with me for a little bit. Okay, cool.

What is an Agile Culture? (And Why You Should Care)

So, I've got a couple slides just to set the stage a little bit. So this is all kind of top of mind when I build back, I'm just like whatever comes to mind, I kind of do. So it's like what is an agile culture and get ready. I'm going to ask you guys here in a minute. So a lot of the words that you guys talked about at the beginning are words that I use all the time When we tend to think of an agile culture, we want to create trust, we want to empower people and have them be able to take ownership.

We want a leadership team and a product organization that's willing to respond to change and inspect and adapt, that kind of a thing. We want to be adaptive, we want our requirements to emerge because of course we don't know everything. We want to create psychological safety for people. We want people to be able to come and feel good at work with the people that they're working in and ultimately get better teamwork. Any other words come to mind for you guys when we think about culture in this context? Did I kind of nail it or at least hit it close enough? Okay, cool. So we kind have an idea of what we mean by culture and then so now we start to think about who might be responsible or have an influence over culture in an organization. Oh gosh, skipped over this slide. So why is that important?

Why are those attributes important? Well, we want to build the right products. We want to get fast feedback, we want attention to quality, we want early delivery, we want to be predictable. That was actually a lesson I learned talking to executives back in my version one days because I would come in with all this, Hey, we want to be able to respond to change and all this stuff. And most of the times people are like, I want you to be able to do what you say you're going to do and be able to make 'em meet commitments. You guys encounter that because at the end of the day, the triple constraints are kind of a real thing. So agile looks at it a little bit differently. We say even project managers say that you're supposed to be able to fix two and the third one floats.

Well, in an agile world it's like we fix time and cost and we let scope vary as the project goes, right as we deal with reality. But anyway, there has to be some mechanism for being able to call back to the organization, say, well, what am I going to get for this multimillion dollar investment? We want efficiency, we want lower costs and we want innovation, we want to build the right products, we want to make sure that people are buying the things that we do. And so there's kind of this jump that kind of says, well, if we build this culture then we're going to get these things. And that's a big leap in a lot of organizations that are really complicated and really heavy. I think in smaller organizations it's more attainable, more directly. But in larger organizations that's a big leap to think that if I empower people and let them decide that all of this goodness is going to happen, I can tell you there is evidence that it doesn't always work that way because of the impediments, because of dependencies, things like that.

So this is the one I tried to cheat up to. So who's responsible for an agile culture? Well, there's a couple different people that are responsible for an agile culture. So leadership of course, we want them to embody the principles of agile. I think at the end of the day, often it starts with individuals and teams. We all have to individually be responsible for the kinds of cultures that we want to build. The one that I think is an interesting wild card is sometimes customers want things from us that are not particularly reasonable. Sometimes it's partners, different organizations that have to integrate complex software solutions. And then the last is that the stuff in the organization, the governance models, audit and compliance, legal sales, all that stuff we have to come up. We have to figure out what their part is in an agile culture.

So this culture thing is so rich and complex to me that because it just impacts so many different parts of the organization that we have to fundamentally attend to.

4 Competing Views on Culture

So, this is what to me probably the first interesting insight of this talk. So about six or seven years ago when leading Agile started to grow, we started getting really into personality profiling and things like that because trying to anticipate and find patterns in what made a good consultant, what made a good coach, what made a good developer, what made a good leader. And what we were finding is that hiring people was a bit random in the early days. And so what we were trying to do is figure out a little bit of a methodology for doing that. And along the way I was working with a coach, like a professional development coach who turned me onto a really interesting personality assessment that we use tons internally and it's kind of changed in my life, it's changed my relationship with my kids, my relationship with other people in my life with my wife, all that kind of stuff.

So I think personality kind of matters and I'm going to tie that culture here in a second, but I want to just explain the model to you a little bit. This model is built on the same fundamental science as a disc assessment, but it has a really just interesting way of going about it. If you're just curious, I don't have any interest in this company. It's called color code. Go to color code.com. And what is interesting about it is it's very natural with just a little bit of practice to start to see how people show up and what they value and what they care about. And very simply, I don't really have the axes on here, but you can kind of see 'em. It kind of puts you on a continuum. If I'm standing in front of the thing too much, I'll try to just keep looking around, man.

I'll get the clue here. So on the vertical axis is controlling and non-con controlling. You guys know anybody in your company's have controlling personalities. So I am super high on the controlling personality. So that will explain a lot of this talk to you super high on the controlling side. And then the other side is non-con controlling horizontal axis is emotional versus logical, and what that implies is kind of a quadrant, a two by two. And so the emotionally controlling quadrant is around intimacy and connection. And when somebody says, well, you're really emotionally controlling, that doesn't sound like a good thing, but my wife is a dominant blue and it doesn't mean that she's a bad person or anything that's on camera doesn't mean she's a bad person or anything. It means she desperately wants people to be okay. So it's like intimacy, connection, that kind of stuff. Now where I fall is in the power quadrant logically controlling. And what that means is that I focus on, I mean all these things have dark sides and light sides of expression, but the healthy side of it is I want outcomes to be achieved. I want to make a difference If it's in my company, I want to be profitable. If it's on a client, I want them to improve their metrics. So to me, the power quadrant is a lot about getting things done and getting them done.

Then you get into some of the non-con controlling personality types and the emotional non-controlling, which is my secondary trait is around having fun and showing up and just having a good time. My middle son is primary yellow and he's hilarious. He's like a comedian in our house. Just makes everything more interesting and more fun. And just as kind of a funny aside, he can roast you like crazy and you'll be laughing at yourself. He is just that personality. And then the lower right, which is my wife's secondary quadrant is peace. So my wife wants intimacy, connection and peace. And so how peace tends to manifest itself is kind of being a rule follower. So when my kids were little or growing up, she would be like, well, you don't speed because it's against the law. You don't do drugs because they're illegal. You don't drink because you're not 21.

But what she's really kind of concerned about is I want you to be safe and I want you to be okay. And she appeals to the rules to try to drive that. So most people that we've personality tested, I'd say all people to some varying degrees are mixes of different personalities and I just find it super interesting. So I'm sitting in meetings or coaching a team or coaching my team. I'm constantly listening for verbal cues that tell me where these folks land and what they prioritize for. And when I can do that, it's kind of neat. I'll talk to one person in the room, I'll be like, we're going to make this happen and you're going to get these outcomes and this return on investment and everything, and then I go to you and I say, everybody's going to love it and it's going to be awesome and it's going to create these great and you're going to have a ton of fun and the rules are going to be super clear so you can start to think about speaking to a room or speaking to a collection of people or speaking to a company in terms of what they value and how they show up in terms of personal relationships and what they're trying to get done.

Yes, well, everybody's kind of a blend. So my son happens to be the one I said, who is dominant yellow? He's secondary white, so he just got his doctorate, physical therapy. It's perfect for him because there's rules and procedures and he understands the science and he understands every little muscle in your shoulder and can tell you what's wrong. And then he makes jokes and tries to teach you how to do things and then you go off and he just doesn't, if you don't do it, that's on you. He's not trying to control you, but he's super smart. I'm not saying he's illogical by any means. He just operates within a structured rule system, but that manifests for him in terms of he tells jokes and things like that. For me as a leader in my company, I say the red yellow personality type is like, I really want you to love it here, but if you don't, I go work someplace else, it's cool.

The red blue personality types, a lot of times project managers, a lot of female project managers will show up in this way and with a red blue personality type and I call that the you're going to do it my way and it personality type. So it's like there's just interesting blends of people. There's some people that we've tested that show up and they're equal in all four quadrants and they're like chameleons when they're in the room, they can just adapt to anybody's personality type. It's super fascinating. I mean, you can go down the rabbit hole for days on this stuff. So I teach you guys this to start to think about culture and what people value in a culture. And so somebody who's in the blue quadrant, they're going to show up and identify culture as things like trust, empowerment, safety, appreciation and connection. Somebody who's read results, accountability, commitment, ownership, performance, somebody who's yellow, recognition, creativity, flexibility, collaboration, fun and white is balanced, clear expectations, harmony, inclusion, autonomy, things like that.

And it's really fascinating. I can almost tell by reading somebody's title of their topic or their talk format or the things they're focusing on, I can go, oh, they're super yellow. Anybody that does games in the talk, you can almost guarantee they're going to be on the yellow spectrum. Anybody who's talking about culture or agile ecosystems from the perspective of teamwork and psychological safety, I almost always just go, okay, they're blue. So what I generally think of is that companies that are really successful with this is that they can attend to all the different cultural aspects. And so it's like if you're a small company, I mean companies definitely bias towards a certain thing. So if I were going to describe my company, we are absolutely a red yellow company, but we have blue whites that work with us and yellow whites and red blues and all kinds of things.

I mean, you can't grow to any scale and have, nor would you probably want to have everybody be the same personality type or the same value system. So we try to create inclusive systems that are where everybody can be successful and get something that they want out of the system. So ideally you want to attend to all the different types. So we want all this stuff to be able to be present in our companies at the same time. Now, it was actually a couple slides later, but I think I mentioned, I did this talk in Detroit yesterday at the Agile and Beyond Conference, and this guy we're talking about systems first and we talked about this different stuff and he raised his hand. He goes, well, I have all the systems in place but it's still not working. And I said, well, there might be a part of the system that appeals to some personality types, but the other people in the organization are experiencing that different.

Imagine if I'm an agile coach and I come in and I teach you Scrum and we're playing games and the CFO's like, well, when am I going to get my project? Or what's the return on investment? That kind of a thing. Or I'm white and yellow, but then these people are over here, but I don't know anybody on my team. I don't feel connected to the people I work with. So if nothing else, we could hard stop here for just a minute and go. As you think about culture in your organizations, think about it through a lens of people are fundamentally different and people value different things in a culture. And yes, certain companies will probably bias more towards one or the other or two or three of 'em or something like that. But I would suggest that the people that show up as resistors to change probably are not getting something that they need to feel safe.

It's a funny, in our community, a lot of times people talk about psychological safety. It creates psychological safety for me, making money and doing things on time, I feel incredibly unsafe if we're losing money or clients aren't being delivered for. But within that, we want to create an ecosystem where people like coming to work and we have fun and we do cool things and people know or are friends with the people they work with, and the rules have to be pretty clear. So the idea is to try to figure out if we can strike some balance.

Agile Delivery Systems and Culture

So, this next sequence of slides, I actually went out and I did this talk for a telecom in Belgium, and I actually added these slides for them and then decided to leave it in because I thought it was interesting. They were really, you think about Norwegians, right?

Culture's kind of a big deal. There's different culture in Belgium and Sweden and the Netherlands than there is oftentimes in the United States. And so they were heavily indexing on culture. And so I was trying to make this point, I stole this from Mike Cohen and I know he lives in this town. I was hoping he didn't come and see me steal his graphic, but I've been using it for years with attribution. So some Mike Cohen graphic, right? So if I think about Scrum and think about Scrum and how it satisfies the different parts when done well, the basics of Scrum, you strip away all the ceremonies and everything. I have a complete cross-functional team of people that operate off of a really clear backlog that can produce a working test and increment software at the end of every sprint. It's kind of like Scrum stripped to its core.

You'd think, okay, cool. So that structure, so I'm tying back to the first thing. That structure affords me a bunch of stuff. If I have a team that can stay together that's operating off of a clear backlog that can produce a working tested increment, then the red in me can say, well, I know the size of my backlog, I know the velocity of the team. I know I got to a definition of done. So I can start to anticipate either when I run out of time, how much scope I have left or what scope things I need to take out. Or I can say, this is how many sprints it's going to take to deliver the project. It creates a ton of safety for me as a red, right? Somebody who's a white says, okay, cool. I know I show up on Monday morning, I do sprint planning.

We break down stories, we do points. We do daily standups every day. We do reviews and retrospectives and we do burn down charts. Everything's good. I know the rules of the game. Now within that team that stays together, I have a group of six or eight people that can start to get to know each other, can start to create work with the product owner, start to understand what they're trying to do. And if you happen to be yellow, then maybe some games and stuff are pretty cool. We do some sticky notes on the wall and we do some fun retrospective stuff and maybe we go out for team outings and things like that and world's good. So now you start to think about you break the structure of Scrum, I have people matrixed into the team. I don't know the size of my backlog. I can't deliver something of value every two weeks.

And somebody shows up and says, okay, well we're going to play games. Or somebody says, I'm going to show up an over index on the rules, or I'm going to come to you because I have no other ability to control and put you on a death march. And it doesn't look anything like scro. It looks more like waterfall. So you start to see how when I don't get the fundamental elements of Scrum in order, I don't create the space for everybody to get what they need out of the system psychologically saying it's interesting. So for these guys in Belgium, what I did is I started thinking through other ones. And so I picked on Spotify a little bit and I picked on safe a little bit. We'll get to safe here in a second. Anybody use Spotify? Is that a thing anymore? Yeah. Cool. Do you guys use anything more than the word squad?

Tribe, guild, chapter? I'm, I'm being sarcastic a little bit. Those words have totally permeated, but I don't see anybody actually really, really trying to pull this off. At the end of the day, as you start to scale up these methodologies, it's just all fundamentally shades of the same thing. To me, a squad is basically a scrum team at the end of the day. A tribe is a collection of scrum teams. Think of it as like a release train or something like that. Chapters can be things like part of the management hierarchy. Guilds can be things like communities of practice, that kind of stuff. So what we're doing is we're creating at scale. If I've got cross-functional teams at the squad level, I get all the benefits, all the cultural benefits of Scrum, but then people start to feel disconnected from leadership or they start feeling disconnected from other people that are doing the same types of skill sets. If I don't have a tribe or some collection of teams that can organize to deliver something, well then I'm just introducing a bunch of chaos and everybody's doing their own thing. So as we start to think about implementing a methodology from a structural perspective, from a practices perspective, we can start to think about how the elements of the methodology are contributing to the kinds of cultural values that we want to have within the organization.

I love that diagram. That's awesome. Safe is not as complicated as people think it is. Does anybody think safe's too heavyweight to that kind of stuff? Oh, that's a few. That's cool. Raise your hand. Yeah, it's cool. So I think back, I'm old enough at this stage in my life to remember implementing rep processes and of course waterfall and things like that. And most methodologies, I know there's some confusion about this in the safe world, but most methodologies were kind of built PMI was kind of built this way. PMBOK was kind of built this way. It's not designed to be taken in its entirety. It's designed to be scaled and tailored to the unique parts of your organization. At the end of the day, what safe fundamentally is, it's a way of orchestrating across multiple teams that all have to integrate to go deliver something together.

So there's kind of a base pattern. I actually kind of like this base pattern. We have scrum teams really at the execution level, we have some sort of orchestration mechanism that rides on top of that. We have some view of the portfolio so we understand what our priorities are. We tie up to some sort of corporate goal or objective, an OKR or KPI, something like that because at the end of the day, the stuff that I do at the lowest level has to get up to the top and help us achieve our corporate goals. So you could look at something like safe through this lens. People will oftentimes, somewhat cynically say safe really is for the managers. So they can pretend they're doing the stuff they've always been doing, but they can call it safe. Now they have an agile framework to put around it, but in reality there is a way of thinking about safe and implementing safe that creates the connection at each of these levels.

We have the opportunity for fun. There's still a whole lot of rules, and if safe is done really, really well, then we get the business outcomes that we want. And so it's just a way of addressing all of the concerns. But if you happen to be an agileists that believes in just small teams and empowerment and things like that, you see where these cultural words start to come in, we're probably missing some of the cultural values and goals of the rest of the organization. So where I'm getting ready to go here is we're going to strip down into some of the fundamentals and we're going to start thinking about this is my way of sneaking a little bit of a transformation, talk into a culture talk. But I think it's important because there's another lens to look at this through. If I go into an agile transformation, my cultural values in an agile transformation are maybe connection and fun and how team members feel, that's cool, that's all valid stuff, but it might not satisfy the people who are white and are red.

So again, as we even think about transformation, not just the system of delivery that we're moving towards, but the way that we're actually going to transform the organization and the clarity that that needs to provide for people that are spending the money to do that, we can think about culture through a transformation lens as well.

What Gets in the Way of Culture Change?

And so, before I get there, we have talked about dependencies for just a second. Anybody have dependencies in their organization? Okay, come on. Seriously. Really? Yeah, just a few. Do you guys manage them explicitly or do you trust that the teams will self-organize them?

Or both, and that's probably true to some degree, but to me, when I think of the barriers to transformation, the barriers to agile, the barriers to creating the cultural conditions that we want to create, almost everything that gets in the way of doing what we want to do is because of the dependencies. Why can't I form a complete cross-functional team? Well, I don't have enough people of the right kind of skillset. Well, that's a dependency. I have a legacy technical architecture that won't let me deliver incrementally and iteratively. That's a dependency. I have three or four systems that all have to work together to create some sort of integrated deliverable that's a dependency, right? Dependencies are everywhere. And so too much work in processes kind of dependency. I have to get this done before I can get this done before I can get this done.

Dependencies are just absolutely everywhere. And dependencies to me are fundamentally what get in the way of creating the teaming strategies that give us really the agile secret sauce. Almost everything that we mess up in Agile is some form of capitulation to a dependency we can't resolve. And once you see it through that lens, it's hard to unsee. Once you see the world through this problem of dependencies, it's like everything starts to light up as to why we can't kind of create the organizations that we want to create. And we're going to unpack that a little bit.

The Role of Organizational Structure in Culture Change

So, what we fundamentally have to do is we have to organize for collaboration, but more generally, we have to organize for the cultural attributes that we want to prioritize for in our companies because the system and the practices in my worldview is what creates the space for the culture we want and it gets everybody what they want.

So the fundamental patterns, I'm not a methodology guy per se. We work with companies that do safe. We work with companies that do Scrum with Kanban with large scale Scrum xp, DevOps, you name it. We play in that space. But what I believe is super important is that you have to understand, excuse me, what's really going on? What are the fundamental, call it a reference architecture versus a reference implementation up underneath Safe and Scrum And last, there's is a common reference architecture that becomes manifest in different reference implementations depending upon what you're trying to accomplish in your organization. You could say that SAFe is a reference architecture that is fully built out with a implementation model. And if you understand the reference architecture is safe and you understand how the implementation model, then you can start stripping down parts of safe and you can start extracting the pieces that you actually need.

Large scale scrums kind of like that too. Beautiful reference architecture up under large scale Scrum, but most organizations are not dependency free enough to actually implement large scale Scrum, right? Less so to me, the fundamental things to be aware of as we start to organize for the culture we want is that there's different kinds of teams that do different things. And so the base pattern that I kind of think about a lot is oftentimes if we're going to get Scrum teams that provide services to other Scrum teams like an API or a database, or it could be a marketing or a sales or a legal or something like that, you can think of services in lots of different ways. All those services teams can absolutely do Scrum or Kanban, whatever. All the same rules apply. We have our product that we build is a product that is consumed by other parts of the organization.

The service that we offer is a service that is consumed by the other parts of the organization. We need to encapsulate that team, create all the conditions due to Scrum. They can run off a backlog, they can produce a working test and increment of product or software or service at the end of every sprint. So we want to recognize the things that are common and shared across the organization, paying attention to time. Okay, cool. Product teams in this model are just the things that consume stuff from services. And so the really simple example, back from my financial services day, if I have an online banking app on my phone, you guarantee that's making a service call most likely to a mainframe somewhere. And so anything that I want to do of value probably requires user stories there. And it probably requires user stories here. If I'm going to get that feature out, then these things kind of need to be sequenced and timed together.

Then oftentimes above that is something like you could call that a value stream team or a business capability team or something like that. This is where I'm stitching multiple teams together and that work has to be orchestrated across the whole thing. But that's a team, that's a team that can be a team. And then you have a portfolio team, somebody that does the macro level prioritization for the organization, and that can be a team. All the same rules apply teams all the way down. You guys ever heard that expression? Elephants all the way down. It's actually a thing. Go look it up, I'm telling you. But it's like teams all the way down from the top all the way down to the work surface. But they all have different roles and they get kind of structured something like this, a little bit of a pyramid, but the unit of value, the unit of work is not the individual.

This is an org structure or hierarchy. It's a relationship between teams. And so one word that I know is not incredibly popular in the agile world, so I said I'm a bit of a contrarian, is that we typically will put Kanban based governance systems over top of multiple teams to do that orchestration work. And back in the day, back when I was at version one, I wrote a blog post that said, Kanban is just waterfall with smaller batches. It's kind of true, you think, right? And David Anderson, the guy who invented Kanban, he actually messaged me and he goes, I guess it is probably 15 years ago. So it surely wasn't like instant messenger. It was probably a text or an email or something like that. And he goes, I really wanted to be mad at you for your post, but it was actually right. So that was a bit of an acquiescence.

If anybody knows David, that was a bit win for me. So basically when I think of governance, it's like how do I get the big things broken into small things so that as multiple teams deliver them, I start releasing things into market faster. Really hard to do in a complex environment if we're just talking about Scrum and we're not managing the dependencies that exist and we haven't broken the dependencies. So we have to start putting in some sort of construct that integrates stories, something that prioritizes and does some initial decomposition. Oftentimes there's a strategy tier where corporate governance lives, and we go often in our world. We say, well, that's not agile. And I go, well, what is agile? Is agile, scrum is agile, safe is agile. This is agile mindset. Is it values? Well, agile is all those things. So at the end of the day, what we fundamentally want out of Agile is you want to be able to efficiently put small things in market so our customers can buy them and give this feedback fair.

So when you look at Agile that broadly there's a lot of agile. You can do it every level of the organization, not just at the scrum tier. The reason why this matters, and I'm just going to drive this point home, is because what we value here often in a large organization is not what is valued up here. Leaders are often very willing to delegate if they have a reliable system they can delegate into. They want you to have fun, they want you to be connected, they want you to have a best friend at work. They want to know what the rules are, but at the end of the day, the system has to produce the desired outcome or they're going to stop putting money in it, or they're going to stop having money to put in it because they won't be selling things and they'll be going out of business.

So I get back into my red, yellow, white, blue thing, and you can have red, yellow, white, blue at every one of these levels. But I think sometimes in the agile world, we under index on the red side, the actual producing of stuff side. And again, where I think we suspend disbelief, and so we just kind of mess up the methodology a little bit is back to the dependency thing. So it's kind of like I have a general rule. When we're coaching organizations, you either have to break dependencies and truly let all these teams operate independently or in the presence of dependencies, you have to orchestrate them. I will admit you will be more agile if you can figure out how to break everything up into two or three teams. But if that's not your reality, you need some way of being agile at the top that enables us to flow work through the aggregate system, not just at the story point system.

I can't tell you how many people call us and the first thing they say is scrums working great, but my leaders aren't getting what they need. Or I'm doing scrum awesome, but it's not working. I'm like, why? Right? Well, systems, governance, structure metrics, then the personality type gets laid on top of that. So then that brings me into, if the problem is this big and I have to hit, oh, there's a metric slide here in a second. So backlog, size, velocity, burn down. But as we start to get up here, things like cycle time defects escaped up here, we're starting to think about time cost, scope, value, ROI, capitalization, things like that. These are real things that our leaders are dealing with. So the metrics matter.

Iterative and Incremental Change Patterns

So, then I start to explore incremental and change patterns. So in what we do, we think about a system of delivery, and then I think about a system of transformation. So how are we going to create safety for leaders to start to want to do the change? Well, we have to incrementally and iteratively transform the organization. And so approaches like going and train everybody running through leadership workshops, while all valuable I find insufficient as far as change goes, because again, it doesn't deal with all the aspects of the system and it doesn't address all of the cultural desires in the organization. So again, we're always hunting, getting red, yellow, blue, and I almost said green, white. There you go. Okay, cool. Y

You're taken an incremental iterative change model approach, you have to run two systems in parallel. One for leadership and what they're accustomed to.

And hold that thought for just a second. I actually have a slide on that in a little bit, but I don't think of it as building layers. I think about as building vertical slices and the metaphor to software is spot on because a lot of times we have, we'll build a database, we'll build the backend or we'll build the middleware, we'll build the front end or we'll build this, right? And we think about our agile teams and layers, and you can do that, right? You could form a scrum team at this level and then you could orchestrate, but that's the least desirable way. And sometimes we find ourselves in the midst of transformations where we are doing a lot of team stuff before we can do the orchestration and before we can get to the top stuff, it all varies, but ideally you want a slice of the organization from the top to the bottom.

But I will do, we did a mega transformation over the last five years and there was an interesting approach we had to take to deal with just the thing that you're talking about. Okay, so I'm just kind of doubling down on this idea that delivery and delivery teams are only part of what we have to try to figure out how to accomplish. We have to create a home for product management, strategy, articulation, budgeting, and funding technology and architecture compliance and controls. Our talent organizations have to be brought along. Our leadership has to be brought along. They're all stakeholders in this broader ecosystem, and they all have different personalities and different concerns, and all of that stuff has to be addressed. So we fundamentally have to think more broadly across the whole stack. There's a story about blind men and elephant. I've heard, I got introduced to it through the agile community, and it's basically you have three blind men and it's an old Indian parable and they're all describing an elephant and someone's touching its trunk, says it's like a snake.

The other one's touching its leg, says it's like a tree trunk. The other one's touching its ear, says it's like a palm frond. I think a lot of times is that we're dealing with an aspect of the problem, and because we're dealing with the small aspect of the problem, we're not dealing with the entirety of the problem and the entirety of the problem for a truly agile enterprise, a truly agile organization or department or work group or whatever, is that we get all these pieces to integrate simultaneously. And so one of the coolest little things that I did is, and some of my other talks, I actually spell this out pretty explicitly, but we created our own little two by two, and we talk about predictability versus adaptability, emergent requirements, things that change all the time versus requirements where people think that they know what they're supposed to build.

And the cool thing about it's that we articulated this little quadrant system and we created this little base camp metaphor and expeditions all the climbers here from Colorado. We'll probably appreciate some of that little fourteener things going on here. And that was kind of the metaphor that we drew from. And the idea was is that, oh, the reason why I thought it was cool is because Jeff Sutherland heard it and actually used it in one of his presentations before, and I thought that was super cool when the guys that you learn from will take some of your stuff and use it with attribution of course. But that was actually cool. I was a little highlight of my career. So what we started to think about was it's really hard to go from where you are today into a lean startup totally emergent model over time.

So what we first kind of hypothesized was a more iterative approach to transformation. And for us that meant let's get the system predictable. Let's get the reds out of our hair for a little bit. Let's get some of the white stuff put into place. Then we can start figuring out how to reduce batch size and start to deliver more frequently using teaming strategies. So the yellows and the blues are getting what they want out of the system. Then we start to break dependencies so we can really, really start to take off because the more encapsulation, the less orchestration that I have to do, I'm creating more opportunity for those teams to operate autonomously. And then if I can get the teams broken up, then I can start to think about team-based funding. And now I have a team that stays together that's responsible for a long-lived product.

I can fund that long lived product. Then I get the opportunity to start engaging directly with customers and start getting really super innovative. But again, it's back to the dependencies. These are kind of compensating controls, not as agile as I would like to be, but I get the stuff going. I get again, the reds and the yellows out of my hair for a little, or the reds and the whites out of my hair for a little bit. I start to break dependencies between the different teams, and then I can start to really accelerate some of the other aspects of the transformation. But to your question, and the largest transformation we've ever been a part of was 13,000 people, and we could basically take it up to the first two levels just systematically across all 13,000 people. But we had to create almost like I called it like an abstraction layer, because the corporate governance wasn't going to change right out of the gate.

There's not enough safety in the system for the financial controls and the audit controls for them to say, okay, here's just a pile of money. Go invent some stuff. So what we did is we got the 13,000 or most of 'em into a place where they could reliably and predictably deliver in small batches to where they could get feedback, they could make and meet commitments. They could do what they say they were going to do using traditional agile, but also governed with Kanban governance processes and things like that. And then we came back and we started hitting the governance stuff because once the organization is at critical mass and you start to think about flipping it to different corporate structures, then we start, the organization has a trustworthy system it can delegate into. They get more comfortable going from an annual funding cycle to maybe a three month funding cycle because they know they can make smaller bets and they know they get more opportunity to change as the market changes, the macroeconomic conditions changes.

Then we did this step, which was super fascinating because one of the things that I think is a challenge when we start talking about value streams in large organizations is that value streams are often not encapsulated. The value streams run through common business capabilities. Well, so anytime I have basically a dependency, I have something that intersects, I create a constraint in the system, I create bottlenecks in the system. So we had actually organized this gigantic organization into a business capability aligned model, started measuring where all the dependencies are. We couldn't break all the dependencies, but we could see where decisions had to go all the way up and all the way back down, right? Super inefficient. And that starts to guide, if I'm going to do a reorganization, let's group things together where the dependencies are strong. Let's push the dependencies lower in the organization.

One of the things I say about Scrum a lot, which I think is a hundred percent true if you have a single team, that value stream from concept to cash is analysis, design, build, test, deploy, basically, right? And what Scrum really fundamentally did is it said, we're going to take that entire value stream, we're going to wrap it into a team, and we're going to let it self-organize and manage that value stream independently. What Safe did is it said, okay, value streams span teams, so we're going to fundamentally organize around the value stream and start delivering and release trains and do big room planning and all that kind of stuff. It was a cool evolution of it, but the problem with safe is when you get past that 150 people or so, and now I've got dependencies outside of that value stream, how do I orchestrate those? So your question was great. Sometimes you've got to get it working enough to where the organization trusts it, and then you start tackling the corporate governance stuff here I'm maybe funding teams or work groups or parts of the product maybe here now I can start to think about having persistent products, persistent business capabilities as an organization. When you get the organization broken up small like that, that's when you really get the opportunity to sense and disrupt in the marketplace place. Okay. Yeah. How

Audience

Did they measure? Did the top just let the bottom go as far as measurements go?

Well, so what I said abstraction layer. So I learned little trick back in my project management days. When I first started getting introduced to Agile, we had no control of the PMO, no control of audit and compliance, no control of anything. So I could actually out project manage all the other project managers on my projects using Agile, but it was a very strict agile, it was like size of backlogs. We understood constraints in the system. I just read David Anderson's early book on agile management had read Eli Gold Rats, the goal. And so what we would do is we would deliver in an agile way, but present it to the organization as if it was a project plan. So we played by the rules of the organization, but we delivered against the rules in a more agile small batch kind of way. So I think of it as there's an abstraction layer and the organization will often, again, these are gigantic.

This does not typically happen in a two to 300 person organization. As you start to get into 1500 to 5,000, then you start to get really distinct things. So what my general guidance is, is transform the organization underneath, put the abstraction layers in, and then once the organization's at critical mass and most of the folks are doing things in an agile way, it creates more optionality from a leadership team perspective that you can begin to start to lean into. And so just so I don't make this a transformation talk instead of a culture talk, I mean if you look at it through that lens, I was talking about if I'm a yellow blue biased analyst down here, how is this ever going to change? But if I can start to say, okay, we value yellow, blue, but we're going to wrap it in some really, really crisp, clean, red, white, we're going to manage our dependencies proactively until we can break them, cool. Then we can start influencing the rest of the enterprise. But it requires a bigger view of what we're trying to do. And so in our world, we call those vertical slices, expeditions, summits kind of deal with all the other stuff around it. For the most part. That's what I'm trying to communicate here.

The Leading Indicator of a Balanced Culture

So now, back to where we started.

When you guys go into your organizations and you're trying to lead change and you're trying to approach this, I'll go back to that comment that guy made. I got all the systems, but I still have resistors. How do I get resistors to be overcome? How do I get the culture to change over time to get it more adaptive, more responsive, more all these different things. I'm a big believer that practices are never going to get us there. I'm a big believer that leading with culture. Now, again, I get in trouble and I've had some customers tell me, I love your view on culture, Mike. And I'm like, I never talk about culture. I just talk about systems and practices. But some people made the hop before I did. If I get the systems, I get the practices. I create the space for the culture to emerge.

And so my general belief is if I have a view of what this should look like and I design it so that I can deal with all of the various competing cultural attributes and all the various personalities and needs and everything, and I'm telling you can with Agile, if you open up your purview of what Agile is, that's how you get to this point. Being able to do a transformation, overcome resistance, change the culture over time. Okay, cool. So I got through it. Awesome. Thanks for the five minute warning. Okay, we'll do questions here in a second. That's the text. If you want to text it again and I'll just leave that up there in case any, yeah, what do you got, Jess?

Q&A – Skills and Experience

Well, so it's interesting, right? So skills are kind of different, right? Skills and experience are kind of different. I would suggest that when somebody is squarely within their skills wheelhouse and they're comfortable and they're doing a job that they're very experienced to do, most people operate pretty along type.

I think people can expand their type when they're really comfortable in their type. They can be more chameleons. But it's a little bit like some of the personality tests show like, okay, this is how I operate normally, this operate under stress. There's a lot of people are complex, and I'm not saying that this labels any, I'm not even saying it's universally right? I don't think disc is right. I don't think Myers-Briggs is totally right, but it's just a pattern. It's just a way of thinking about it. But I will tell you, I can show up blue all day long. Well, I say I can show up blue for three or four hours and then I'm kind of done. I'm done being blue, right? My wife can show up red for 15, 20 minutes, but then she's done being red. So again, anytime you try to categorize human beings, you get into trouble.

So, I'm not saying this is absolutely right. Just use it as a thinking tool. Even if you take my little personality profile assessment out of it and you don't want to use that, just recognize that across those color abstractions, there are people who value different things. And to that guy's question in Detroit yesterday, I think I've got everything right? And I still have resistors. It's like they're not getting something that they need out of it. Now granted, there's a dark side of that too. Sometimes what they want is power and control. They want to build an empire they're doing. So there is that, but if I think it was Esther Derby, or maybe it was Diana Larson who said something one time, let's assume that nobody's evil if we just assume nobody's evil and everybody wants the right thing for the company, they just have differing ways of thinking about it, different ways of going about it, different views of what they think is right. Then we give them that grace and regardless of color code or whatever, and we start to realize what are they not getting out of the system? What things create safety for them that they're not getting? And is there some way I could use Agile to give them more of what they need so they'll get out of my way. I'm just kidding. That's the red in me coming out. So anything else? Yes, sir. Yeah, I mean, again, I've been consulting in my company for 14 years. I've been in this for about 20 at this point.

It's like I try to take the whole metaphor of bad practices, bad this out, and it's like we have to come up with something that helps us deliver in small batches, gets fast feedback, put things in market, sell it for money. I mean, that's kind of like the reason the company's in business. And so in a long-term consulting engagement, there's so much work that has to be done to align people. We take those expeditions, we'll do vertical slices, and it's like sometimes you got to prove it to me first. So it's not a line, it's loops. Right. Just like everything we do, it's all loops and circles and stuff like that. Okay. I'm getting the hook now. Thank you. Appreciate it. Thanks for coming, guys. I really appreciate you having me.

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How Cloud Rescue Enables Enterprise Transformation

Up Next:

Addressing the Hidden Cost of Outdated IT Systems

What is Modernization A modern IT system is one that uses minimal and predictable effort…

Creating Psychological Safety for Your People to Change

How Cloud Rescue Enables Enterprise Transformation

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15/07/2024 13:10 – How Cloud Rescue Enables Enterprise Transformation

Extracted and hastagged by Infusio for preview. We recommend you read the original article instead...
Approach

The CompassDecide your level of Agility

The JourneyAn incremental approach to Transformation

The RoadmapA change model for success

Field NotesA resource library for all things Agile

How Cloud Rescue Enables Enterprise Transformation

Listen to the SoundNotes Podcast on the go!

Many companies are moving to the cloud only to realize that they aren’t getting the cloud benefits. Not only are they not able to improve performance and scalability, but they’re also paying more than they were before. The reality is that the economic drivers pushing these companies into the cloud, inevitably lead to large lift and shifts where monolithic, legacy applications get moved to the cloud without the necessary modernization required to reap the rewards of cloud migration.

Today, those same companies that moved to the cloud are looking to move back on-prem or toward a hybrid environment to cut costs, but what if there’s another way? What if you could strategically refactor your applications after they’ve been moved to the cloud and rescue your cloud initiative? Learn how cloud rescue can get you the benefits of the cloud while reducing costs.

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Creating Psychological Safety for Your People to Change

Up Next:

Addressing the Hidden Cost of Outdated IT Systems

What is Modernization A modern IT system is one that uses minimal and predictable effort…

Creating Psychological Safety for Your People to Change

How Cloud Rescue Enables Enterprise Transformation

Many companies are moving to the cloud only to realize that they aren’t getting the…

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WhitepaperLead a Structured and Disciplined Agile TransformationDownload Now Popular Searches

Agile Teams

Acceptance Criteria

Enterprise Transformation

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Product Development
15/07/2024 13:09 – Creating Psychological Safety for Your People to Change

Extracted and hastagged by Infusio for preview. We recommend you read the original article instead...
Approach

The CompassDecide your level of Agility

The JourneyAn incremental approach to Transformation

The RoadmapA change model for success

Field NotesA resource library for all things Agile

Creating Psychological Safety for Your People to Change

You want autonomous teams who are empowered to do great work. But leadership is constantly micromanaging everything you do. You want the freedom to collaborate, do team-building exercises, and have fun. But you feel that leadership is judging your every move. You want a different culture, but leadership keeps getting in the way.

Maybe you're not seeing the big picture. Perhaps you're only thinking about the change you want to see and not considering everyone's concerns.

In this talk, we'll use personality profiling to understand what's getting in the way of the culture conversation and what different people value in the workplace. Utilizing that understanding, we'll explore how your operating model, teaming strategies, governance models, and measurements predict the kind of culture you can achieve.

Finally, we’ll discuss how to systematically introduce the organizational changes that make it possible to think, behave, and deliver in a truly Agile manner.

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Addressing the Hidden Cost of Outdated IT Systems

Up Next:

Addressing the Hidden Cost of Outdated IT Systems

What is Modernization A modern IT system is one that uses minimal and predictable effort…

Creating Psychological Safety for Your People to Change

How Cloud Rescue Enables Enterprise Transformation

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Enterprise Transformation

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Product Development
15/07/2024 13:09 – Addressing the Hidden Cost of Outdated IT Systems

Extracted and hastagged by Infusio for preview. We recommend you read the original article instead...
Approach

The CompassDecide your level of Agility

The JourneyAn incremental approach to Transformation

The RoadmapA change model for success

Field NotesA resource library for all things Agile

Addressing the Hidden Cost of Outdated IT Systems

What is Modernization

A modern IT system is one that uses minimal and predictable effort to maintain and operate. Whenever something is acquired or created, it is normal for maintenance activities to be required to keep it operating in the same capacity as the day it became an asset. Ideally, minimal effort is spent on this routine maintenance.

Figure 1 illustrates the maintenance activities required to maintain an IT asset.

Only thirty percent of the IT industry is able to give continuous attention to technical excellence. Over time a focus on technical excellence optimizes operations costs by leveraging innovative cost saving technologies. For the rest of the industry, as the technology evolves over time, performance degrades and the effort required to maintain compliance, ensure security, and deploy enhancements grows. Unfortunately, the maintenance required for IT systems isn’t visible to the casual observer, so typically the problems have to become serious before they get attention. For businesses at this point, modernization is an event to get the IT system back into a good state. When approached correctly, modernization results in a system that is not only restored to health but also one that can be maintained with minimal effort using modern software engineering practices going forward. The goal of modernization is to restore application health and reduce the total cost of ownership.

Why Modernize

There is significant profit and developer capacity to be freed by modernizing. This is especially true in businesses that are more than 20 years old where the cost of feature delivery has been increasing over a long time.

What was once a simple feature delivery in a clean architecture and a popular development platform performed by one or two teams, over time has become extremely complex, resulting in:

Specialized skillsets required to work old systems

Systems architecture stored in the tribal knowledge of a few key people

Complex, expensive, and lengthy testing and deployment processes

Rising cost to operate and maintain the system year over year

These factors drive up the cost to release resulting in releasing less frequently, causing a slowdown in the release of new features and the loss of the revenue those features would produce.

Figure 2 below illustrates how rising operations costs are leeching profitability from your product.

A modernization initiative is a good way to catch up once you’re behind. To further optimize costs, better to continuously improve to avoid waste to begin with. (Quarterly at a minimum.) Everything between Optimal Cost and Benefit is Wasted Revenue.

The ROI of investing in modernization comes from reversing the trendline of the cost to operate your system. The goal is to return capacity back to the organization in the short run and install new software development practices that continue to improve the system's performance and decrease the cost to operate over time.

In the illustration above, if the cost was kept close to ideal, three additional products could be operated, shifting what was historically investment in maintaining existing systems to additional revenue generating activities.

How to Modernize

Modernizing only IT systems without addressing the organizational problems that got the system in a bad state is only part of the problem. Reducing licensing costs without addressing the poor work-surface processes that are eating into profit margins leaves a large portion of the benefit unrealized. Moving a product into “the cloud” isn’t going to generate cost savings if its architecture isn’t modernized and it stays a monolith. If development team practices aren’t modernized and they are still using quality practices such as manual testing, manual deployments, and quarterly releases to production through a change approval board, the cost of feature delivery will remain expensive. Without addressing the organizational structure and how work flows across teams, dependencies between teams will continue to cause delays and slow down delivery.

Given the benefits, should everything be modernized? The reality is that resources are finite, and not every application or system will benefit enough to outweigh the cost. Simply “updating” the oldest technology, people, and processes may improve a product for the better, but it may not be money well spent any more than if a homeowner spent all their budget on building a new roof when failing plumbing continuously floods the basement. To make good investments, the big picture of the technology platform must be considered. That view, informed by data about your applications’ performance relative to the business capabilities they support, is needed to guide the decision on where to invest and how much to invest to modernize. While modernization can drive significant benefits, it’s also important to weigh those benefits against the cost to ensure investments generate the needed return.

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Addressing the Hidden Cost of Outdated IT Systems

What is Modernization A modern IT system is one that uses minimal and predictable effort…

Creating Psychological Safety for Your People to Change

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Product Development
15/07/2024 12:57 – Alignment Tools: Creating Better Relationships Between Stakeholders and Teams

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**TL;DR: Alignment Tools**

Understanding and implementing the right alignment tools in agile product development can significantly enhance the effectiveness of your team and organization. Fostering better relationships between stakeholders and teams can ensure strategic clarity, improve adaptability, and maintain a user-centric focus.

This article provides actionable insights on leveraging these tools to build trust, enhance collaboration, navigate risks, and maximize value creation. This will ultimately lead to more successful product outcomes aligned with organizational goals.

**Introduction To Alignment Tools**

Achieving alignment between stakeholders and teams is crucial for successful product development. The “Big Product Picture” illustrates how integrating vision, strategy, and execution improves return on investment through effective risk mitigation and enhanced relationships.

By aligning key objectives and maintaining clear communication, teams can ensure that every stage of the product lifecycle is aligned with organizational goals. This comprehensive approach helps in product discovery and validation, providing a structured way to visualize the product journey, prioritize tasks, and adapt to changes. As a result, this fosters better decision-making and collaboration and ultimately leads to more successful outcomes.

**From Vision To Execution: Aligning Your Team For Success**

Creating customer value starts with your team’s product vision, which defines how you plan to deliver on the company’s mission and encapsulates the big picture of what the organization aims to accomplish. This vision, combined with the product strategy—a plan to achieve that vision—forms the foundation of your efforts.

“Operation” focuses on positioning your team for success. This phase involves creating product roadmaps or sequences of Product Goals. These mid-term planning tools answer how your team can contribute to realizing the product strategy. Central to this process is product discovery, which involves forming hypotheses and running experiments. Validated hypotheses then feed into the Product Backlog, ready to be refined and prepared for Sprints.

Finally, we move to “Tactics,” where we focus on realizing the product vision by creating valuable Sprint Goals and, consequently, valuable Increments, improving our customers’ lives while contributing to our organization’s bottom line. This involves turning Product Backlog items from the Sprint Backlog into Increments that can be released to customers.

To ensure your team’s success, you must be vigilant about two critical thresholds:

Product Discovery: Determine what is worth building.

Validation: Ensure that anything added to the Product Backlog is validated with real users. Exceptions include non-functional requirements, bugs, prototypes, spikes, or legal necessities.

Everything else must be validated first for a straightforward reason: While you can draft a new product vision on a napkin during a coffee break, building an Increment to test customer reception is costly, both in money and opportunity costs. Therefore, shifting product discovery efforts as far left as possible is crucial.

Let’s explore the alignment tools you can employ to support your team’s journey from vision to execution, ensuring a seamless transition from strategy to tactics.

1. Product Strategy Canvas & Lean Canvas

A good product strategy outlines a long-term vision and is an integrated set of reinforcing choices to enhance success. It defines the market, focuses on uncontrollable customers, and theorizes persuasion tactics. It details needed competencies and resources, is unique to competitors, applies to various organizational levels, and supports hypothesis formulation.

Paweł Huryn’s canvas helps everyone on your team and interested stakeholders understand your product environment, for example:

What problem do we aspire to solve?

What do the market and competition look like?

Do we have a moat?

Or are we facing cut-throat competition?

Created by Ash Maurya, the Lean Canvas is a variation of the Business Model Canvas designed explicitly for startups. It’s more problem-focused than the Business Model Canvas. It emphasizes aspects like problem identification, solution ideation, and key metrics, making it particularly suited for startups still trying to identify a product/market fit.

There are three main reasons to choose the Lean Canvas for startups before product/market fit:

Problem and Solution Focus: Startups in their early stages often pivot based on the problem they’re trying to solve and the efficacy of their proposed solution. The Lean Canvas has explicit slots for “Problem” and “Solution,” emphasizing the importance of these aspects.

Adaptable and Quick: Given its simplicity, startups can quickly modify their canvas as they iterate, which is often required in a startup’s fast-paced, ever-evolving early stages.

Metrics and Channels: These are crucial for startups to understand early traction and growth. The Lean Canvas provides a dedicated section to outline these.

Comparing the Product Strategy Canvas to the Lean Canvas:

Product Strategy Canvas: Best for long-term vision, market analysis, and established businesses.

Lean Canvas: Ideal for startups, emphasizing problem-solution fit and rapid iteration.

Market Focus: Product Strategy Canvas for broader market and competition understanding.

Speed and Adaptability: Lean Canvas for quick pivots and adaptable strategies.

Strategic Depth: Product Strategy Canvas for a comprehensive, integrated strategy.

Startup Suitability: Lean Canvas for startups seeking product/market fit and business model validation.

Download the alignment tools here:

Product Strategy Canvas

Lean Canvas

Cannot see the form? Please click here.

2. Go Product Roadmap & Now-Next-Later Roadmap

In agile circles, a classic product roadmap, with its feature-centric nature, is not understood to foster alignment and stability, notably when it includes milestones and delivery dates.

Here comes Roman Pichler’s Go product Roadmap to the rescue. The GO roadmap is goal-oriented, emphasizing outcomes such as user acquisition.

It offers significant advantages, particularly for Lean Startup and Scrum-based product development. It emphasizes goal-oriented and outcome-focused planning, ensuring discussions center on strategic objectives like user acquisition. This approach aids in making smart investment decisions and aligns stakeholders with clear time frames and defined goals. Its structure provides comprehensive guidance, including dates for alignment, names for version clarity, goals for strategic value, high-level features, and specific metrics.

Consequently, the GO product roadmap fosters flexibility, adaptability, and iterative development, ensuring that teams achieve meaningful and measurable outcomes.

Alternatively, there is Janna Bastow’s Now-Next-Later Product Roadmap model, which focuses on prioritization and flexibility. Instead of binding the team to strict deadlines, it emphasizes what’s currently in progress, what’s up next, and what the future might hold. This dynamic framework is especially suited for agile environments where change is frequent and adaptability is critical. The “Now-Next-Later” product roadmap template focuses on outcomes, supports OKRs, and connects objectives to roadmap initiatives. Each card represents a problem tied to objectives and ongoing experiments.

The benefits of the Now-Next-Later product roadmap are apparent:

It is a flexible, human-centric approach that fosters informed decision-making tied to business objectives.

It streamlines planning by prioritizing immediate needs, embraces varying certainty levels, and ensures impactful product decisions.

It also saves time by avoiding overcommitment to distant goals.

Source: Janna Bastow, see below.

Comparing the GO Product Roadmap to the Now-Next-Later Roadmap:

GO Product Roadmap: Focuses on goal-oriented development and measurable outcomes. It is ideal for time-sensitive product launches.

Now-Next-Later Roadmap: Emphasizes flexibility, adaptability, and prioritization in agile environments.

Strategic Alignment: GO Roadmap aligns features with specific business goals.

Agile and Dynamic: Now-Next-Later Roadmap suits fast-paced, evolving projects.

Time Frame Management: GO Roadmap includes time frames for better planning.

Long-Term Vision: Now-Next-Later Roadmap provides a clear long-term direction while remaining adaptable to change.

Download the alignment tools here:

Goal-Oriented Product Roadmap

Now-Next-Later Product Roadmap

3. Opportunity Canvas & Product Goal Canvas

Jeff Patton’s Opportunity Canvas is an excellent tool for evaluating potential product features emerging from product discovery. It helps teams understand the problem, user needs, expected outcomes, and business impact, thereby mastering product discovery and avoiding waste.

The canvas guides teams to define the target audience and their characteristics, identify user challenges and needs, assess existing solutions and the competitive landscape, and understand business challenges and their impacts.

It outlines the solution idea, allocates a preliminary budget, visualizes user interaction, defines outcome metrics, and strategizes user adoption. This comprehensive approach distinguishes verifiable aspects from assumptions, ensuring informed and effective product development.

Ralph Jocham’s Product Goal Canvas provides a structured framework for defining and achieving clear Product Goals, ensuring alignment and clarity for Scrum teams. It breaks down the goal-setting process into specific components, ensuring all aspects are considered.

The Vision highlights the broader context and overarching ambition. The Product Goal box captures the primary objective and any time constraints. The Description section offers a narrative detailing observations, intended improvements, and rationale. Valuable Outcome and Measures define expected benefits and introduce leading and lagging measures. The Stakeholder box identifies essential stakeholders and engagement strategies. The Risks section uncovers potential challenges, and the Scrum Team box details the team members responsible for achieving the goal. This holistic blueprint guides teams from vision to execution, ensuring a comprehensive, aligned approach to product development.

Source: Ralph Jocham, see below.

Comparing the Opportunity Canvas to the Product Goal Canvas:

Opportunity Canvas: Excellent for user-centered product discovery, competitive analysis, and linking features to business outcomes.

Product Goal Canvas: Ideal for Scrum teams defining clear product goals, aligning with vision, and balancing proactive and reactive measures.

User Focus: Opportunity Canvas for a deep understanding of users and the market.

Goal Alignment: Use the Product Goal Canvas to align product development with organizational vision.

Risk and Stakeholder Management: Product Goal Canvas for comprehensive planning and risk assessment.

Validation vs. Execution: Use the Opportunity Canvas for validation and discovery and the Product Goal Canvas for structured execution.

Download the alignment tools here:

Opportunity Canvas

Product Goal Canvas

4. Opportunity Solution Tree & User Story Mapping

Teresa Torres’ Opportunity Solution Tree is a map to guide the continuous discovery journey in product development. It visually represents the plan to achieve a desired outcome, making implicit assumptions clear. This approach aids in navigating opinion conflicts, framing decisions, aligning team understanding, and communicating the path to the desired goal.The process starts with identifying the desired results, such as user engagement, business metrics, or market influence, and establishing measurable indicators to track your progress toward these desired outcomes.

Recognizing your target users’ main challenges or needs identifies areas with significant impact potential while understanding business leverage points highlights where addressing these needs can benefit your business most. Listing potential features and enhancements addresses these identified opportunities, emphasizing iterative exploration to find the best solutions. Designing experiments as validation mechanisms ensures solutions address the opportunities before full commitment. Establishing learning milestones tracks progress and guides whether to pivot or persevere based on insights gained.

Jeff Patton’s User Story Mapping is a holistic product development approach that emphasizes the user’s journey and experience. By visually mapping out user stories in the context of the overall user journey, teams, and stakeholders gain a shared understanding and can more effectively prioritize features.

User Story Mapping offers numerous benefits, including creating a common visual framework that ensures shared understanding among team members and stakeholders regarding the user’s journey and the overall picture. It enables effective prioritization of features based on user needs and experience, encourages cross-functional collaboration by allowing stakeholders to co-create the user journey, and remains adaptable to changes and new insights, ensuring a user-centric product development process. Additionally, it facilitates continuous delivery by breaking down features into smaller, deliverable tasks and supporting incremental releases.

Comparing the Opportunity Solutions Tree to User Story Mapping:

Opportunity Solution Tree: Ideal for outcome-oriented development, focusing on strategic opportunities and business leverage.

User Story Mapping: Best for visualizing and understanding the user’s journey, ensuring user-centric product development.

Strategic vs. User-Centric: Opportunity Solution Tree for strategic planning and the User Story Mapping for user journey focus.

Diverse Solutions vs. Detailed Prioritization: Opportunity Solution Tree encourages exploring various solutions; User Story Mapping aids in detailed feature prioritization.

Experimentation and Adaptability: Opportunity Solution Tree for structured experimentation; User Story Mapping for adaptability and continuous delivery.

Visual Tracking vs. Collaborative Mapping: Use the Opportunity Solution Tree to track progress towards outcomes and User Story Mapping to understand user stories collaboratively.

Download the alignment tools here:

Opportunity Solution Tree

User Story Mapping

**Conclusion**

There are four main advantages to applying alignment tools and getting everyone—stakeholders and team members—on the same page:

Trust Building: Harness alignment tools that build and sustain trust throughout the product journey.

Collaboration: It’s about more than just working together; it’s about fostering genuine partnership between the team and stakeholders to create a shared understanding of the Why and What of our journey.

Risk Navigation: Product discovery isn’t without its challenges, but we can efficiently navigate these risks with the right approach.

Value Creation: Above all, always aim to maximize the value of every effort, ensuring that each team member’s contribution to solving our customers’ problems also drives the organization forward.

Armed with these insights and the tools we’ve explored, you’re now better equipped to ensure you build products that resonate with users and serve the organization’s objectives.

What alignment tools do you use to create a better working relationship with stakeholders and among team members? Please share with us in the comments.
15/07/2024 12:52 – The Strategic Value of Internal Product Expertise

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In this LinkedIn post, Grant Hunter raises an important point. Many companies are bypassing building internal product talent in favour of acquisitions or outsourcing. And while these approaches can provide short-term gains in velocity, they rarely cultivate enduring innovation and advantage. So, let's explore the strategic value of internal product expertise…

What's the Value of Internal Product Expertise?

Bringing outside capabilities in-house can certainly supplement competencies. However, exceptional people, who intrinsically understand your customers, vision and commercial objectives will think more expansively. Offer those people creative license and they will reward you with game-changing ideas.

Admittedly, establishing proficient product teams is an investment. It requires executive patience, adequate resourcing and acceptance of market uncertainty. Yet the long view pays dividends – once assembled, these groups accumulate know-how and form connections that manifest competitive differentiation over decades.

Quick hits can sustain. Yet resonant brands with perpetual growth mindsets are only achieved by internally immersed, product leaders with an entrepreneurial mindset. Does over-indexing on external partnerships save upfront costs? Perhaps, but by doing so, you send a message that product excellence lives elsewhere.

A balanced view likely sees a blend of both strategies. But in our experience, companies that choose to cultivate their own product people, reap exponential gains in:

innovation equity enterprise value

In the end, the choice comes down to prioritising short-term gains or enduring market leadership. We welcome perspectives on achieving both!

Invest in your internal product expertise

Accelerate your product capability by plugging in Spark…

We work hand-in-hand with you to identify problems and co-create solutions together… building the skills and communities you need to be self-sustaining. Invest in our private masterclasses, which are focused on YOUR products and organisation. We can deliver them individually, or as part of a programme of learning to get your organisation to the next level.

Let's talk! Book a virtual chat.

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15/07/2024 12:49 – AI Won’t Save Your Workplace Dysfunction (But Humans Can)

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GenAI promises to revolutionise many aspects of work. However, it's crucial to recognise its limitations. AI cannot solve the deep, systemic issues plaguing our workplaces.

The Fear Factor

The rapid rise of AI has sparked concerns around job security. This is despite findings from a recent MIT Sloan survey that only 1% of organisations polled had eliminated any roles because GenAI now performs them. That said, 3% of organisations admitted that some roles had changed since GenAI took over many of their tasks.

The changes brought about by AI can sometimes feel out of control and overwhelming. Understandably, employees worry that their roles could be automated, leading to a profound sense of insecurity and for some an existential threat. Instinctively, humans respond to this type of stimulus by escaping, freezing, fighting or appeasing. All of which destroy psychological safety within teams, eroding productivity, and morale and hampering collaboration… the opposite of what we need for a healthy, successful workplace.

The AI Race Is Not A Fair One

Depending on their typical tasks, some teams may find it relatively simple to adopt GenAI as a tool, and gain productivity fast. However, this will not be true for all. Teams solving complex problems tend to work in a cross-functional way. This means, of course, that a team working closely with a more productive AI-assisted team will struggle to keep up. Consequently, leaders will start to notice symptoms of burnout in the non-AI-augmented team.

In turn, systemic issues that block the flow of value to customers will worsen. More dependency management will emerge, and governance issues will become exacerbated. It may appear that work slows down from the enterprise level… which requires all the systemic solutions we’ve learnt to optimise groups of teams, portfolios and departments and, if possible, the organisation as a whole.

How will your organisation form a strategy to adopt GenAI? Will they expand capacity chaotically? Or work strategically to bring the most successful business outcomes?

A Case Study

With a recent client, we found work impeded and waiting for availability for 192 days. In partnership with leadership and the people affected by the change being proposed, we reduced this lead time to 5 days for greater speed to market. That’s over 97% acceleration in only two weeks, with less multi-tasking and higher focus for people doing the work.

What’s more, we achieved this with a small change to organisational design and no additional capital expenditures or operating expenses. From the systems perspective, this meant faster time to market for the teams dependent on this group. Happier employees, faster to market and less noise from leadership escalations.

Typically, we find at least a 30% improvement of this kind across all organisations we partner with. So if you want results like these for your company, enquire about our Spark program (the flow module in particular).

Remember: AI Cannot Solve Systemic Issues

AI excels at automating specific tasks. Yet it cannot address the root causes of workplace dysfunction.Issues such as:

operational bottlenecks lack of alignment between work and vision low process efficiency poor prioritisation lack of two-way communication broken feedback loops between customers, strategy and vision unhealthy conflict ineffective decision-making processes mismatch of leadership style and context lack of time and space for innovation, or to think creatively systemic biases homogeneous decision-making groups bureaucratic structures lack of psychological safety

These problems are complex, unique to each organisation and as a result best practices don’t often work. They need human intervention, continuous improvement from short-term hypothesis-driven approaches and cultural change. Change that builds trust and supports people to work together to find creative solutions.

AI cannot instil the agile mindset. Nor can it foster the trust and self-organisation necessary for true transformation. These are inherently human endeavours. They require empathy, emotional intelligence, and a deep understanding of organisational dynamics.

GenAI is Biased and Can Perpetuate Harmful Stereotypes…

We know that organisations have invested time and effort to improve Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. Unfortunately, the systemic biases in our organisations (and our world) are not only reflected but exacerbated by GenAI. A study of Stable Diffusion’s text-to-image model found that it takes “racial and gender disparities to extremes — worse than those found in the real world”.

For example, image sets generated for all high-paying professions predominantly featured individuals with lighter skin tones, while prompts like “fast-food worker” and “dishwasher” more frequently produced images of people with darker skin tones.

In addition to this, women were significantly underrepresented in high-paying jobs and positions of power… far more so than in the real world. For example, only 7% of the image results for ‘doctor’ were women, yet 39% of US doctors are women (47% in the UK).

“Every part of the process in which a human can be biased, AI can also be biased.”– Nicole Napolitano, Center for Policing Equity

…and it’s not a quick fix

Google developed an AI image generator that had seemingly taken into account these systemic biases. It had apparently been programmed to produce more diverse and representative images. Unfortunately, when prompted for historical images, these were not only inaccurate, but occasionally inappropriate in the extreme…

“Users found that asking for images of Nazi soldiers or the US founding fathers would create pictures consisting mostly or solely of women and people of colour.”– Andrew Griffin, The Independent

Google has since taken their Gemini AI image generator offline, but remains committed to taking “representation and bias seriously”, according to Jack Krawczyk, senior director for Gemini experiences at Google.

This is a powerful example of deep systemic issues that need to be addressed by human intervention, rather than by algorithmic adjustment.

Humans at the Helm

Individuals and teams are experimenting with GenAI to improve their work and become more productive. However, for employees to innovate in this way, their workplace must provide an environment that encourages and enables them to do so. When employees have a voice in how AI is implemented and how it impacts their roles, they feel more secure and confident about the changing nature of their work.

To harness AI's potential, while addressing systemic challenges, we need humans at the helm. Leaders must create environments where employees feel:

able to speak up (psychologically safe) valued respected empowered to embrace change

Teams must cultivate trust, collaboration, and a proactive mindset, continuously seeking improvement. This human-centric approach is not only essential for leveraging employee-driven innovation but also for navigating the complexities of modern workplaces… complexities that AI cannot resolve.

The Way Forward

As GenAI continues to shape the future of work, we must strike a balance. While leveraging its capabilities as a tool, humans are needed to offset bias, monitor for hallucinations, identify errors and continuously improve model training. People are the very essence of what makes our workplaces thrive, and are crucial to successful business outcomes even with GenAI.

“The most overlooked, the most powerful, and the least leveraged of all the skills and tools we have available to create success is the power of people.”

Simon Powers

According to MIT Sloan, 24% of the organisations polled are experimenting systematically with using GenAI on specific tasks. Unsurprisingly, organisations are looking to harness AI's incredible potential. At the same time, they must address the systemic issues that hinder success. Together with our sister company, Bryter Work, we can help your company to:

build a culture where people thrive improve team dynamics and foster psychological safety develop leaders from expert to catalyst improve process (flow) efficiency promote human agency and reduce conflict embrace an agile mindset AI Won't Save Your Workplace Dysfunction… But Humans Can

Transforming our workplaces requires a symbiotic relationship between human ingenuity and technological advancement. AI is a powerful tool. But it is humans who must wield it wisely. We must be guided by our values and principles… along with a relentless pursuit of making working life better.

This article was written in collaboration with the AWA AI Community. With special thanks to Kim Greenwood and Dr. Ulla Raithel-Beck for their advice, support and input.

AWA Global and Bryter Work help organisations build cultures where people thrive. We equip leaders and teams with the tools and strategies needed to navigate the complexities of the modern workplace… including adapting to working with GenAI.

Want to join us on this journey? Sign up now to be among the first to hear about our upcoming AI events, tools, and support offerings. Together, we can unlock the full potential of AI while preserving the essence of what makes our workplaces truly exceptional… the power of people.

This is your opportunity to shape the future of work.

Sign up today and stay ahead of the curve…

Interested in joining our Community Kickstarter? Find out more and complete the survey here.

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15/07/2024 12:49 – How to Futureproof Your Employability Through the Super Skills of Agility

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The modern workplace is characterised by constant change and disruption. To stay employable, workers need to be agile. That is, they must be able to swiftly adapt to fluctuating situations and handle uncertainties. By developing key skills of adaptability, critical thinking, and learning, you can futureproof your career.

Embrace Change and Discomfort

The first super skill of agility is getting comfortable with change. It sounds simple, but this can bring up strong feelings such as anxiety and trigger imposter syndrome. Start to seek out assignments that force you outside your comfort zone and build your change tolerance muscle. Rather than resisting change, view it as an opportunity for growth.

Critical Thinking and Innovation

With business conditions rapidly evolving, the ability to scrutinise options, anticipate outcomes, and create novel solutions becomes mandatory. To be able to exercise skills such as critical thinking and creative problem-solving, you and your team need to feel psychologically safe. Both the Agile Team Coaching (ICP-ACC) and Agile Team Facilitator (ICP-ATF) courses can help you gain the skills to cultivate a safe, supportive and collaborative atmosphere where teams can thrive and contribute their best.

Continuous Learning Mindset

Every day is a school day! Learning doesn’t stop at graduation. Adopt a growth mentality, focused on relentlessly upskilling yourself. Identify emerging in-demand agile skills in your industry and undertake training via online courses, workshops and bootcamps. Set quarterly learning goals and share your progress with peers to stay accountable.

By intently focusing on adaptability, critical thinking, and continuous upskilling, you can build career resilience regardless of external changes. Turn agility into your superpower. Boldly volunteer for stretch assignments and gain skills like agile coaching and facilitation that let you bring teams together and guide them through uncertainty. The future rewards those who can rapidly respond to its demands.

Next, find out why agile coaching skills are essential in the evolving world of work.

Upskill to Futureproof Your Employability Gain skills like coaching and facilitation with the following engaging and interactive courses: Certified Agile Team Facilitator (ICP-ATF) Agile Team Coaching Course (ICP-ACC) A new program for an entrepreneurial mindset

Being entrepreneurial is no longer a nice-to-have. It's a critical skill that employers are actively seeking. Around 50% of all job ads ask applicants to demonstrate an entrepreneurial mindset.

NEW: Entrepreneurship Accelerator for Product Leaders & Change Agents

This power-packed two-month program will kick off with a 3-day online workshop. It’s run in a cohort format… designed to help you master the entrepreneurial mindset. You'll work with our CEO, Simon Powers, to stride that tightrope of balancing risk and reward. You'll do this through application work and four integration calls.

Develop the confidence to embrace freedom and responsibility. Nail the sweet spot between risk, profit, and growth. And make ethical decisions that drive the business forward. You'll build stakeholder trust and rapport while boosting innovative thinking.

Understand & use metrics to engage your stakeholders

Metrics are pivotal for cultivating strong stakeholder relationships and product success. However, understanding how to effectively use metrics is crucial. Otherwise, the numbers become mere noise… leaving you feeling stuck while failing to convince stakeholders. This is where our expertise proves invaluable.

We adopt a partnership approach, guiding and supporting you. Our aim is to help you decipher data and make informed product decisions that inspire stakeholder confidence.

We can help in the following ways.

Subject Matter Expert SupportWorking hand-in-hand with you, we’ll identify your problems and co-create solutions together.

1/2 Day Clinics & MasterclassesOur private workshops focus on YOUR products and organisation. We can deliver these individually or as part of a programme of learning to get your organisation to the next level.

One client experienced a remarkable 97% acceleration to market after partnering with us. Imagine the transformative impact this could have on your organisation.

Take the first step towards unlocking your product potential through the strategic use of metrics. Reach out to start our partnership.

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15/07/2024 12:47 – Creating an Effective Data and AI Strategy: views from the frontline

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Get in touch

***CREATING AN EFFECTIVE DATA AND AI STRATEGY: VIEWS FROM THE FRONTLINE***

Written by Zane Gambasin Jon Parish Ollie Happy

Regardless of industry sector, most companies are eager to seize on the transformative promise of AI and push ahead with projects. Once again, boardrooms are turning to their tech teams to get them in race and win. So, how do information, technology and product leaders establish themselves as the ‘go to’ resource for insightful leadership on AI? More importantly, what does it take to craft a successful – and outcomes led – strategy to operationalise this tech across the business?

We asked tech leaders from some of the UK’s biggest and most innovative brands to join us for breakfast and share their AI experiences, hopes, dreams, and pragmatic adoption plans. Here’s what they said.

**Bridge The Knowledge Gap – Focus Minds On Strategic Use Cases**

There was universal agreement that tech leaders have a key role to play when it comes to educating board members and business leaders on the potential benefits and limitations of AI.

Chiefly, these conversations need to be focused on ensuring that everyone understands the resource requirements involved and the importance of committing to use cases that will offer the most potential value for the organisation.

This can prove a tricky endeavour and some of our tech experts highlighted how ‘Mexican standoff’ style conversations are not unusual – with business leaders saying, ‘we’ve heard there are benefits to be gained from AI, so make it happen’, to which tech leaders respond ‘OK, where would you like us to start?’

Doing AI for AI’s sake isn’t ideal, so prioritising impactful AI use cases that deliver the most direct value for the business should be everyone’s priority. To this end, tech leaders will need to work alongside business leaders to identify the best candidate projects for investment. Ultimately, the consensus in the room was that ‘doing’ AI in a meaningful way is all about starting small and building an AI strategy iteratively as deployments go live and real-world outcomes can be evaluated.

Finally, our contributors highlighted the importance of ensuring that boards and business leaders don’t overlook governance and understand the ethical, compliance and legal guard rails that will be needed when deploying AI.

**AI Is An Organisation-wide Endeavour**

In addition to identifying business opportunities, our tech leaders highlighted the importance of taking the lead when it came to ensuring that a strong framework is in place for organisation-wide data management.

Similarly, AI projects should feature cross-functional teams that include members from the organisation’s compliance, risk, legal, security and data teams. A top consideration here will be to ensure that AI tools and solutions being considered will not put the business at risk and that long term and lasting value is the outcome of any implementation.

As part of this assessment, consideration needs to be given to how much time it will take to train AI models so these perform as expected – and how this could affect the business case for investment. Similarly, discussions need to be had around whether switching to AI driven logic will endanger existing value chains. For example, exploring if there is a risk of divestment in relation to access to data that is subsequently captured and managed by an external AI tool.

**It’s All About The Data – Becoming A Data Driven Organisation**

Tech leaders know that creating a strong data foundation is essential for AI success. That means that data needs to be consolidated, centrally managed, cleansed and accessible – which is by no means a trivial task. Problem is that in many organisations, senior decision-makers aren’t always on board with what it takes to marshal internal data capacity and initiate the data pipelines needed to power AI.

The good news is that everyone in the room felt that the current focus on AI at board level is helping to re-frame organisational attitudes in relation to data. As a result, recognition of data as an active resource that needs to be appropriately managed is growing. And that’s unlocking access to funding tech leaders need to undertake the vital data enablement activities required to underpin new AI-related capabilities.

Indeed, some of our tech leaders drew parallels between the current AI hype to what happened when Cloud first appeared on the scene. For them, it’s providing a much needed conversation opener for wider discussions around initiating data enablement/hygiene programmes as part of wider AI investigation projects.

**Who’s Accountable?**

One interesting discussion point that came up on the day is who ultimately holds the risk in relation to AI projects.

Aside from the importance of ensuring that LLMs are unbiased, transparent and accountable, our tech leaders highlighted the question of accountability in the widest possible sense. For example, who owns the risk when it comes to adopting more data and AI – is it the business or the tech team. And what happens when AI goes wrong?

A key concern discussed was whether the tech team is responsible for testing out the extent to which the board is right. And who determines if the value generated is commensurate with the initial investment made? Importantly, our experts felt it was important for tech leaders not to over promise and to engage in regular dialogue that keeps everyone updated on day-to-day deployments.

With this in mind, the feeling in the room was that it’s important to have open and transparent conversations with business leaders around what problems we want to use AI to solve and who takes ownership of risk as the organisation drives to become a more data driven.

**The AI Hype Wave – Driving Progress And Pragmatic Thinking**

Everyone in the room agreed that the current AI hype wave is encouraging organisations to look at the potential value contained within their data and ask important questions like ‘what is our data strategy – and how does it need to change?’

In terms of moving ahead with an AI strategy, our experts offered these top tips:

The starting point for AI is data – and conversations around potential AI use cases will open the door to getting the budget to drive and catalyse the long data journey that is critical to success.

Build a business case – your starting point should always be ‘why are we doing this?’ and ‘what problems are we trying to solve?’ IT leaders need to work with stakeholders to identify use cases where AI initiatives will deliver against strategic objectives that are important to the business.

Start small and adopt an experimental mindset – while keeping the investment cost vs. potential outcomes breakpoint in mind. With so much to play for, focus on pragmatic pilots and test first approaches vigorously so learnings can be built upon. Each project will mark a step forward in terms of getting data sets into a much better state overall.

Focus on governance and compliance – ensuring that you implement a structured approach that features best practices for AI project development.

Set realistic expectations – help business leaders make the journey from AI hype to AI reality and the importance of viewing everything through the lens of ‘how can we get new/better value from our data’. The aim of the game is to think about tomorrow, while investing in today.

Has this article piqued your interest? Speak to us.

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15/07/2024 12:44 – Users of the fourth kind

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Users of the fourth kind・The Jolly Teapot***USERS OF THE FOURTH KIND***

The following is a general observation on how we can categorise tech users into a few categories and the topic of the Digital Markets Act, of which I can’t say I have very good knowledge. Its recent implementation made me realise the decade-old existence of a new type of technology user.

As far as I know, we’ve always had three big kinds of personal technology users:

“don’t know anything about it, know they don’t, indifferent”

“know a lot about it, know they do, partisan”

“know a lot about it, know they do, indifferent”

Of course, the “don’t know anything about it, indifferent” kind is the one we tend to associate with our parents. The differences between a web browser, a website, a bookmark, a Google search, and an app are not only hard for them to grasp, but they just don’t seem to care at all.

These users only know how to use their tech in the most basic ways, without knowing how it works or how to optimise it to make it more useful. For instance, I belong to this category of users for refrigerators: whatever works is fine by me, and if I’m using my refrigerator wrong, I frankly couldn’t care less.

In short: clueless, but discreet.

The “know a lot about it, partisan” kind is more diverse. This group includes annoying fanboys, apologists, and uberfans of companies or technologies. They can lose their objectivity; they will twist any narrative to make sure that their favorite tech shines, wins, or is perceived as the one made only for the ones who can truly appreciate it. Historically, these users have been very vocal on topics such as Nintendo vs. Sega, PlayStation vs. Xbox, Apple vs. Microsoft, Google vs. Apple, and so on.

They’re the kind of users who reply “You should use Ubuntu” every time you complain about Windows. This kind of power user buys with their heart, regardless of the problems their favourite tech has. I think I belong to this group when it comes to the Mac.

In short: annoying but savvy.

The third kind are power users, users who know how things work, with their informed preferences, but they won’t get into an argument with anyone. For video games, this can be someone who thinks in terms of games, and not platforms. For operating systems, they can switch if they have to, have their preference and their habits, and maintain an objective point of view.

This type of user accepts the flaws and limitations of their technology and make informed decisions. This is where I see myself with iPhone vs. Android, for instance.

In short: savvy but discreet.

Everything was pretty much the same for years, until a fourth kind emerged:

“don’t know anything about it, think they do, partisan”

They are the ones I called the nouveau-geeks. Initially from the “don’t know anything about it, indifferent” category, they had their epiphany in the late 2000s with the beginning of the iPhone era.

From that moment, anyone could pretend to be tech-savvy. “I have an iPhone, I install apps, and I browse the web while I ride the bus, I’m a geek!” They certainly have the passion, but not much knowledge of how things work, but certainly an opinion on how they should work.

This group is not even a fan of a particular technology but a fan of what they get from it, including social status, and from the habits formed around it. I am probably such a user when it comes to remote working from home: I practise it all the time, I have plenty of strong opinions about it that I happily share, but I am basically clueless about the impact it has on companies, workers, and society.

In short: annoying but clueless.

This fourth kind of tech user may even be the most popular now. So many times at work, I’ve seen friends — who confidently refer to themselves as “Mac and iPhone people” — share the screen of their Mac and still have Launchpad in the dock while using Chrome with its icon only appearing in the “Recent apps” section. The kind of tech enthusiasts who can sometimes call a blog article a “blog.” [intense shivering]

Everything would be fine if these users didn’t end up working in the European Commission on the DMA legislation, with the confidence of true technology erudites. Most parts of the legislation I applaud and understand: clearly, some of the “gatekeepers” need to be regulated, and these companies had it coming, after cashing in billions on top of at-best questionable practices and at the expense of users.

While most of the DMA makes sense, some parts are just weird, and I think the fact that many legislators belong to the fourth kind of tech user explains it.

In brief, they would like, in the case of iPhone, for iOS to be more like Android, but they will never want to even consider buying an Android phone for themselves.

Will they one day go to the extent of accusing Apple of being anti-competitive because they sell iPhones with iOS pre-installed? No. Instead, they want their iPhone to have most of the benefits of Android without the hassle of switching platforms. And yes, I understand that Apple makes it somewhat difficult to switch, and that “lock-ins” and many features of iOS can be seen as anti-competitive. However, we can also argue that Apple has achieved its current position despite all of these “bad for the consumer” issues, not because of them.

In a free and competitive market, if we were unhappy with iPhones, we would no longer buy them; we would choose Android phones instead. And when Apple sees that Android is capturing most of their valuable iOS market share, they would adapt. Or perhaps not and stick to their vision.

Once again, I believe that anti-competitive behaviour should be curbed, and regulations like the DMA need to be implemented. This type of legislation was inevitable, and I am pleased that it now exists. However, some aspects of the DMA seem a bit overkill and just weird, which diminishes its ideological impact and undermines its original purpose and justification.

It feels like it’s now easier to ask companies to change, rather than questioning ourselves and our own consumer behaviour.

The DMA should have been smarter from the start, more focused, more detailed, and in my opinion, it should not solely target “gatekeepers” if we do not want the “gatekeepers” of the future to operate outside the scrutiny of the DMA for years. Unless some company behaviour is fine unless they are market leaders? This is weird.

I also don’t like the white knight tone adopted by most of the EC public speakers, which makes them sound arrogant and not driven by the needs of users, but by their political ambitions.

Certain elements of the DMA feel like mandating that restaurants provide free tap water because it is a consumer right and restaurant companies have been unfair to consumers for too long by making them pay for it, while simultaneously requiring all restaurants to include pizza on their menus because consumers enjoy pizza and should have access to it everywhere.

The involvement of the fourth type of user in shaping this legislation partly explains some of its strangeness. Also, I may belong to this fourth kind when it comes to the DMA: annoying, but clueless.