This document discusses how organizations can transform disruptions into competitive advantage through business agility. It advocates developing agile capabilities like cross-functional teams, continuous learning and feedback loops, adaptive funding models, and the ability to quickly start, stop, or pivot initiatives based on validating business value hypotheses. Organizing around value streams, developing a learning culture, and building trust at scale are identified as important elements of building business agility and resilience to cope with disruptions.
Business Agility - Transforming Disruptions into Competitive Advantage
1. Agility & Disciplined Agile
BUSINESS AGILITY
TRASFORMARE LE DISCONTINUITÀ DEI MERCATI
IN VANTAGGIO COMPETITIVO
Emiliano Soldi
https://www.EmilianoSoldi.it
@AgileTriathlete
2. FREQUENCY OF WORD DISRUPTION
Sources printed: 1900-2019, American-English
Sources printed: 1900-2019, Italian
8. And you start measuring life in a different manner
Before Corona After Corona
9. Never Normal
A reality where
change is
constantly
triggered by
'seismic shocks'
Peter Hinssen
10. Super Fluidity
Current reality is such that continuous systemic shifts
- social, ecological, biological, geopolitical, technological -
influence and compenetrate each other in ways
that we cannot even remotely predict
11. To cope with disruptions, organizations need
to develop new capabilities
12. Ability to keep
operating even
when things go bad
(up to the breaking point)
Starting from
Robustness
13. By Seng P. Merrill
Developing Resiliency
Ability to recover quickly from difficult conditions
14. …to finally becoming Antifragile
Ability to search for, go through and exploit, adverse events
to become more robust and resilient (leveraging on breaking points)
16. FREQUENCY OF WORD AGILITY
Sources printed: 1900-2019, American-English
Sources printed: 1900-2019, Italian
17. FREQUENCY OF WORD DISRUPTION VS AGILITY
DISRUPTION - Sources printed: 1900-2019, Italian
AGILITY - Sources printed: 1900-2019, Italian
18. Ability to move quickly and easily
Agility
Ability to think and understand quickly
Oxford Dictionary
19. The Agile Revolution and Evolution
Agile was born in the 2000s as a
product development approach,
mainly for IT small projects
Over time, it is understood that
Agile and its benefits could be
applied to the entire company
Business Agility was born
From 2010 onwards, first scaled
frameworks for large projects
are invented
http://agilemanifesto.org/
SAFe 5.0
LeSS
DAD
Nexus
Business Agility Domains
Business Agility Institute
20. Customer Satisfaction and Speed to market
Motivation and employee satisfaction
Collaboration & communication,
and better ways of working
Source: Business Agility Report – Business Agility Institute
Business Agility Benefits
Faster adaptation to COVID-19
21. Cool! And so…how can we transform
disruptions into competitive advantage?!
23. By designing flexible work processes that
are both efficient and customer-centric,
value streams allow organizations to
tightly integrate teams from across the
organization in service of maximizing
value creation for the customer
23
Value Stream Based Organizations
24. Organizing Around Value Brings Several Benefits
Fewer hand-offs
Faster delivery of value
Quality increasing
Closer alignment between
business and delivery teams
Whole system is optimized
not single components
24
25. ✓ The constituent modules must
be simple in their structure and
self-consistent in their behavior
✓ Each module has traits in
common with others, but it
specializes in terms of behavior
✓ It has homogeneous but
reconfigurable communication
interfaces allowing to intercept
the outside world
A resilient system has
a modular internal structure,
which allows for quick
and intelligent reconfiguration
in case of urgent need
26. Generalist
Capable in various areas but not really
expert in anyone
I-Shaped
Expertise mainly and deep focused
in one area
T-Shaped
Expert in one area but capable
in several others
Working in agile, cross-functional teams, allow people to
collaborate and communicate more, sharing
knowledge and letting the organization to accelerate
delivery of value and becoming more resilient
Create transparency of
targets and performance
Clarify the roles that leaders
play in development and
evaluation
Focus on continuous
feedback and ongoing
development
conversations
Frequently collect input
from multiple sources when
evaluating performance
Team Objectives
Individual Growth
Peer-Feedback 360°
Performance Evaluation
Competence Development +
Agile stimulates People Resiliency and Performance
27. Cross-functional teams
break silos and are able to
deliver a product/service
end-to-end.
Thanks to cross-functionality,
they are faster in deliverying
value and better in decision
making
According to their expertise,
Agile teams are self-
managing and self-
organizing on how to do the
work
The Product Owner is
responsible for maximizing
the value of the products
created by an Agile team
Product
Owner
Agile
Team 1
Product
Owner
Agile
Team 2
Product
Owner
Agile
Team N
Product
Owner
Chapter
Lead
Chapter
Lead
Tribe
Lead
The Chapter Lead
has line management
responsibilities and
takes care of
employees’
development,
objectives, etc.
Chapter Lead
matches the right
people to the right
agile teams
The Tribe Lead is
responsible developing
the right tribe vision,
strategies and tactics to
deliver desired business,
through the work of
belonging teams
A Tribe is a
collection of
multiple agile
teams that work
together to
achieve a the
tribe mission
and relted
business KPI
Modular & Flatter Organization Structures
28. Oh yes, but we are already there.
We do have Agile cross-functional teams!
…Uhm…really?!
29. Photo: G. Diffidenti
During the Balkan War (1991-2001), both anti-tank
and anti-personnel landmines were used during
the conflict in Kosovo.
Mines were used by the Yugoslav Army, Serbian
police, Serbian paramilitaries, and by the Kosovo
Liberation Army.
Many of the antipersonnel mines had minimum
metal content, making detection more difficult.
Font: Cluster bombs and landmines in Kosovo (2000-2001)
Coping with invisible facts
Landmines has been a terrible danger for population health,
having also bad effects on pacification efforts
30. Listening to Weak Signals
NATO forces were not able to see where the mines had been placed
However, they devised a system able of detecting weak and indirect signals
Through their sonars, during nights, they "listened" very carefully
to the footsteps of minelayers, which allowed to deduce their position
31. Organizations need to further
develop their capacity to listen
to weak signals by collecting
and spreading timely, continuous
and punctual information
Weak Signals are:
✓ Fragmented
✓ Uncertain reliability
✓ Unpredictable
✓ Apparently no utility
✓ Unusual, singular
✓ Submerged
32. Peter Senge
“A learning organization is a dynamical
system always in a state of continuous
adaptation and improvement
Learning organizations build feedback
loops designed to maximize the
effectiveness of their learning processes”
Lean Coffee
World Café Open Space
COPs
Retrospectives
Reviews
33. Lean-Agile Portfolio Management
In order to quickly invest in new
products or services, as soon as
market opportunities arise,
organizations needs to adopt
adaptive funding models and build
them iteratively and incrementally
And, just as quickly, stopping or
changing work that isn't delivering
the expected business value
33
34. Next Near Now No More
Evaluating Emerging Investing Retiring
Extracting
Wide ranging
exploration of new
ideas, ventures,etc.
Confirm validity of
next generation
products
Enrich features
and push selling
Enhance
offering
Ideas
Experiments
Stop
Reject
Decomission
Decomission
Moving from Surviving to Thriving
Organizations need to
decide what percentage
of the budget must be
invested in new ideas,
ventures, developing new
products and what part to
invest in existing solutions
During early stages (Next
/ Near) Lean Startup
approaches must be used
to decided when to
persevere, pivot or stop
any initiatives
Investing money mainly
into Horizon Now means
Surviving, distribute it
through all four, paying
attention to Horizon Next,
means to Thrive
Horizons
35. Adaptive Development - Persevere, Pivot or Stop
Portfolio
Backlog
Initative Build MVP
Collection of
approved
initiatives
Once there
is some free
capacity the
top priority
initiative
is put under
development
Periodically
re-prioritized
Is the
benefit
hypothesis
still valid?
The initiative
is being tested
through the
development
of a Minimum
Viable Product
(MVP)
Prod
Increment
Build
PERSEVERE
Stop
Any
relevant
insights
emerged?
New
Initiative
Identified
YES
NO
NO
YES
Next Generation Products
Mature Products
Ideas / Experiments
Young Products
Initiative Types Legend
PIVOT
Budget is assigned
according to initiative
reference horizon
Budget is assigned
according to
initiative reference
horizon
Once the benefit
hypothesis is no more
valid, any emerging
insights deserve to be
evaluated and added
to the Portfolio Backlog
Accepted initiatives are
stored in the Portfolio
Backlog and periodically
prioritized
Once there’s available
capacity, the top priority
initiative is pulled, the
relative budget reserved
to the reference horizon is
assigned to build the MVP
Once the MVP or the next
Product Increment have
been built, the initial
benefit hypothesis is
verified to decide whether
to Persevere, to Pivot or
to Stop the initiative
Initiative
Evaluation
& Approval
New
Approved
Initiatives
36. Lean-Agile budgeting approach aims to shift
from traditional funding of projects over
assign budgets to value streams, avoiding to:
• creating detailed plans based on difficult-
to-make projections
• annual basis budget planning
• being mostly concentrated on checking if
projects are on time and on budget, instead
of focusing on steady release of value
• Move people from one project to the other
(move people to work), instead of creating
stable teams (move work to teams)
From being Reactive to Proactive with Lean-Agile Budgeting
VALUE
STREAM 1
VALUE
STREAM 2
VALUE
STREAM N
BUDGET QUARTERLY REVIEW
37. ✓ Commitment, you do what you promise
✓ Consistency, you walk the talk
✓ Competence, you act what you know
✓ Consideration, you support who you care
Agile@Scale needs Trust@Scale