4. Transforming Ways of Working
Managing & Measuring Your Transformation Success!
A ReBoot Co. blog series that helps you & your teams discover a better way of working.
"Being the most Agile" is not a good metric to measure your Agile Transformation with, and can distract you from your company’s core purpose. You'll invest time in measuring Agile maturity and amounts of Agile training completed, rather than increasing the generation of value.
I’ve noticed in my career, the bigger the company the greater the amount of Transformation is claimed to be happening. “Digital” Transformations and “Agile” Transformations are the main flavour of the day, a quick look around will show you other big change and transformation programs are running all the time, competing with each other for attention.
Some examples
Cloud Transformation - putting everything in the cloud is a struggle worthy of the word Transformation
Diversity - a move to increase the diversity of your membership and leadership, and the programs to achieve it.
Continuous Delivery / Dev Ops - sometimes grouped under “Digital” Transformation, the change from large batch delivery of value, to small and continuous flow of value.
Product Engineering - moving to more collaborative models where Product Ownership is embedded with Engineering, and is a long running partnership of those disciplines.
Data Literacy - Analytics, Insights, Scientists and the Storytelling of Data.
Re-platforming Legacy systems - the uncomfortable long journey of replacing all the core parts of systems that run your business.
AI
Robots,
the list can go on and on…
How do you keep Transformation work on track & how can you know “Transformations” deliver value?
Transformation is its own class of work, but it should also be put to the rigour of value generation like all other work. Transformation activities that don’t yield results are wasteful and detract from value creation work and therefore should be stopped, considerable change management comes with Transformation efforts. How can we see the wood for the trees? How can we FOCUS our Transformation work so that it enables value creation for the company?
The following steps are a good basis for a “Ways of Working” or “Agile” Transformation and I propose that you can apply them to all of your big improvement and change programs that carry the label Transformation.
1. CLARIFY A PURPOSE - DEFINE A VISION
Like any new initiative, a clear purpose will enable everyone to unify, and achieve the all important FOCUS that we mentioned in the first blog. The fewer the goals the easier they are to communicate.
An example for Ways of Working could be…
CONTEXT: Our Current Ways of Working have long and delayed deliveries of value to the customer
Customer voices are missing from the product development process so we might deliver the wrong thing
It takes a long time to get back on track for Customers
Customer dissatisfaction makes competitor products more appealing
GOAL: We understand that the time to deliver will be greatly reduced by implementing more contemporary, collaborative and data driven approaches to delivery.
With this efficient statement of WHY we are transforming the Ways of Working we can flesh out our Transformation program scope and get started quickly.
2. PROPOSE A METRIC
Instead of scrabbling for proof of improvements during your Transformation to justify continued spending, it’s powerful to design your measuring approach up front.
Tying back the measure to a benefit and making it a leading not lagging metric, can help you expedite important conversations with supporters.
A measure of a percentage improvement in revenue is powerful but hard to prove if other initiatives are also being delivered in the company at the same time, and the lagging nature of measuring revenue could have you asking for lots of ‘faith based’ investment which never feels good.
For our example above, a good metric could be Lead time it takes for your teams to deliver value to the customer. You can baseline this metric easily, if we take, say, the last 12 months of deliveries and ask how long they took to get from We had the Idea to We Delivered Value to the customer.
If delivery of value takes on average 9 months, imagine the increased value you can attain by achieving a monthly delivery? Now you have a clarified purpose and a good way of proving you’ve achieved an outcome.
WHEN LESS IS MORE…
A pitfall we continually see in Transformations is heaping too many benefits into a business case to make it sound compelling. If you can keep to one overriding benefit it’s cleaner and less corruptible. If stakeholders don’t value the outcome of one overriding benefit, well then that’s a good conversation to have before you invest in Transformation! It could also lead you to being more conservative and start with a one team pilot rather than an expensive Big Bang approach to Transformation. One of our great advocates and friend who is a CTO states you must “Pay for your own Transformation” - there must be a clear benefit for the change.
Other benefit categories for Transformation we see are:
Risk reduction of removing an ageing technology platform
Reduced cost of running an ageing platform
Increase employee engagement score for more modern ways of working
Reduce delivery complexity and timeframe with the surfacing and management of cross team dependencies
Being able to prioritise by creating transparency around the amount of work in play*
*De-prioritising low value work is a cost avoidance strategy, however more powerfully, Transparency enables the limiting of Work In Progress that also reduces your Lead time - double benefits!
With so many potential benefits to choose from it’s tempting to pick them all. DON’T! Instead focus on one, ensure it is compelling enough to start, and until the outcome is achieved resist the urge to claim all the benefits will be delivered.
The other positive side effect of clearly articulated measures of value is that ALL the work of the Transformation can be held to that metric for prioritisation and decision making.
3. PRIORITISE SOME MID-TERM GOALS & DEFINE INITIATIVES TO ACHIEVE THEM
Like any type of work, having mid term goals to attain for Transformation are useful stepping stones to achieve the final vision. Breaking out some mid term goals that move us in the right direction is time well invested to keep your Transformation on track. Mid term could be 2 or 3 months.
For the example of reducing Delivery Lead time, Mid Term Goal examples could be:
Squads are formed and able to engage in their own delivery of value, owning the activities of planning, breaking work down and deploying solutions.
Initiatives = Train and Coach Squads, Start the Continuous Delivery Guild
OR
Deployment is automated and can be repeated multiple times a week without extensive release planning and approval.
Initiatives = Choose and pilot deployment automation tools, Implement Deployment pipeline steps.
OR
Our regression tests are automated and remove 2 weeks of manual testing duration from our delivery process.
Initiatives = Choose and pilot test automation tools, Automate regression tests.
Not all goals may be achievable in one quarter, but it’s good to know what you are aiming to achieve to stop you from trying to hit ALL your possible Transformation goals at once, and accidentally achieving none of them. You can even farm out different goals to different squads, effectively running several experiments at the same time. Just like any work type, having a ‘test and learn’ mindset will help you accelerate to success faster!
4. DRINK YOUR OWN CHAMPAGNE!
In our previous blog we covered how to bring your ways of working transformation to life with ceremonies and feedback loops, let's go a bit ‘meta’ for a moment and consider how you can get a feedback loop into the program of Transformation itself.
A cycle of Plan Do Check Act popularised by W Edwards Deming is a great way to manage your transformation to a successful outcome.
Plan - Set our Purpose, Define our Goals
Do - Commence the work, and use a cadenced ceremony to keep it on track (a less frequent standup can work well for this - try weekly)
Check - Hold yourself to account with a regular measurement of Metrics, e.g. How is Lead time going after a few weeks? Are we getting better or worse?
Act - If we are moving in the right direction, can we turn the dials to improve more next cycle or do we need to change something? Using a Retrospective as a ceremony here works well to implement adjustments.
Transformation cadences are usually not as fast as a team normally iterates, we have found that a quarterly cadence works very well for most cases.
A pitfall with Transformation work is falling into a Plan>Do>Plan>Do cycle and taking too long to realise that you’re not making things better. It’s vital to include Check and Act, this will keep you on track, and honest to the original purpose of Transformation.
Savvy readers will see that I have just applied the same techniques to the topic of Transformation that we would recommend for any program of work. That is, being “Agile about your Agile Transformation”, or “Drinking your own Champagne” as we like to call it. These approaches work for delivering work, and work for delivering Transformation work too, so you’re well advised to apply them here too.
***
We’ve outlined some better ways to measure and manage your Transformation work and particularly Ways of Working / Agile Transformations, but before we move onto our next topic, a reminder:
“Being the most Agile" is not a good metric to measure your Agile Transformation with, and can distract you from your companies core purpose. You'll invest time in measuring Agile maturity and amounts of Agile training completed, rather than increasing the generation of value.
Agility as a purpose is not a justified raison d'être for Agile Transformation… and that’s a great segue to our next blog in this series…. Why do we even need Transformation?
Looking to Take Your Teams to The Next Level?
Book a preliminary chat or even a coaching session with ReBoot Co. co-founder Alex Stokes to learn how we can help with your transformation needs. There are 30 minute slots for a chat, or 60 minute slots for a coaching session.