Author: Dean Latchana

Implementing Governance talk

Implementing Governance

Implement means to execute. Governance means to rule and control. This suggests implementing governance is a top-down deterministic approach to management. Such approaches are no longer fit-for-purpose.

Leaders and delivery teams should co-create approaches to ensure alignment and synchronisation. This talk is about collaborative approaches which support teams to deliver value.

Slidedeck

Watch a previous presentation

Watch the 45-minute video of this talk presented at the 2020 Aginext conference.

Business Agility

Increasing your organisation’s competitiveness

Business Agility is a competitive capability to rapidly sense and respond to change with the right business initiatives that will benefit the organisation and its customers.

The following are prerequisite to enabling business agility:

  • Gain an awareness of the threats and opportunities from market, social, technological changes
  • Use the Envisioning workshop to close the gap between vision and execution.
  • Create an ambidextrous organisation. Create a flow of initiatives which balances these focuses: 1) continuously improve current offerings 2) retire non-viable offerings 3) innovate new offerings
  • Determine which initiatives provide a strategic fit with the vision
  • Mindset and ways of working. Push authority to individuals by encouraging them to demonstrate greater strategic clarity and competency
  • Co-evolve ways of working to reduce the delay between alignment effort, execution and ROI
  • Create light-weight governance which removes non-value add activities and reimagines the role of the PMO, HR, finance and the role of sponsors

Resource to download, print and share

Presentation slides

Contact me (dean@latchana.co.uk) if you’d like this presented in your organisation or business community.

Inter-team qualities for Business Agility

Business Agility is an enterprise-wide mechanism to rapidly sense, respond and deliver the right business initiatives that will benefit an organisation and its customers.

To increase business agility, an organisation needs to promote the qualities of collaboration, alignment and synchronisation amongst its teams and departments. This creates cohesion to the organisations strategic goals.

Governance processes should be built around these qualities since it affords individuals and teams a great degree of freedom to pursue the organisation’s goals and outcomes. It will also help close the gap between strategic direction and day-to-day team execution.

Consider scaling team frameworks such as Scrum to create ways of working that promote these qualities.

Collaboration

Regardless of background, seniority or specialism, teams and individuals from across the business should have the freedom to collaborate. Collaboration can extend beyond the business to include business partners and clients.

Managers should help the business to reorganise so that cross-functional teams of specialists, regardless of department, can work as single teams to rapidly experiment and deliver business outcomes.

Alignment

All individuals should understand and be aligned to the organisation’s mission, vision and strategic direction. Each team and department should have clarity of the business outcomes that are currently being sought.

Leaders should enthuse and align their colleagues; managers should create the environment and ways of working with their colleagues which reduces misalignment.

Synchronisation

Creating cross-functional and co-locate delivery teams can greatly improve business agility. However, despite this, often a single team cannot deliver products and services on their own. Often many teams need to be involved, which necessitates the synchronisation of effort across many teams.

To illustrate this Klaus Leopold gives a useful analogy which I’ve expressed as the following:

A customer wanting to have a letter written, where each team works independently by controlling a row of keys on a keyboard. Typing the letter would be uncoordinated, slow and frustrating.

To improve time to market, it’s inevitable that teams need to interact. So, rather than teams independently hitting their keys at speed, it’s better if each team slows down, coordinate and collectively hit the keys at the right time and sequence.

How I can help

This one-pager summarises how I can help organisations increase their effectiveness through better business alignment and outcomes.

Read more about my approach, my experience and check out my CV.

1. Close the gap between strategic goals and execution

Where I’ve done this: FTSE 100 company transformation programme
What I did: With the leadership team, we co-created vision statements, which we mapped to strategies and KPIs. Set-up execution teams, with backlogs faithful to leaders’ direction. I helped ensure strategies were continuously assessed to deliver innovations and breakthrough ideas.

2. Create a high-level portfolio view of an organisation’s or department’s strategies and activities

Where I’ve done this: UK Newspaper department
What I did: I facilitated a quarterly portfolio process which prioritised goals and dependencies. I used this as a mechanism to update the leadership team (including CIO), and involved them in guiding the execution teams’ alignment and trade-off decisions.

3. Evolve mindsets and ways of working to help deliver business outcomes

Where I’ve done this: FTSE 100 senior managers and teams
What I did: Often starting with training, I described the impediments typical of a traditional organisation which hampers innovation and competitiveness. I coached individuals to develop a business outcome focus. I introduced principles and ways of working based on agility.

4. Reduce the delay between alignment effort, execution and return-on-investment

Where I’ve done this: FTSE 100 senior managers and team leads
What I did: I highlighted where the lack of buy-in resulted in delayed execution and delayed ROI. I created forums which allowed stakeholders to understand where they could remove impediments to increase execution and competitiveness.

5. Co-evolve governance process that promotes innovation and execution

Where I’ve done this: FTSE 100 transformation department
What I did: I co-created a governance structure that ensured individuals were constantly aligned, with collaboration and synchronisation across the department. Teams had the necessary authority to make decisions that promoted learning and execution.

6. Kick-start aligned and autonomous product teams

Where I’ve done this: FTSE 100 transformation department
What I did: I worked with leaders to set-up cross-functional teams. Teams had the right skills and autonomy to ensure the least amount of delay. Other disciplines and processes were re-orientated to support the teams, such as governance for small frequent budget cycles.

Some of the organisations I’ve supported.

Elevator Pitch

In today’s rapidly changing world, organisations face increasing uncertainty, and greater potential to excel. In this context, to ensure organisations outlearn and out-compete the competition, I advise and support leaders to execute potentially fundamental improvements to their organisation.

As a Business Agility Consultant and Agile Coach, I support leaders and departments to ensure the right investments help their organisation continuously adapt to changing customer demand.

In order to capitalise on market changes, I help leaders and teams determine and implement the right balance of activities, strategies and the best ways of executing. This enables new innovations, and it enables improvements to current operations, products & services.

Business Agility is an enterprise-wide approach to rapidly sense and respond with the right business initiatives to benefit the organisation and its customers.

Dean Latchana

My ideal client

  • Household name organisation
  • In a competitive market
  • The leadership team has recognised the need to change, are willing to explore new opportunities and ways of working, and need my support to execute them
  • Opportunity to support business agility across the organisation, not exclusively technology
  • UK or global engagements
  • Competitive contract position or consultancy engagement

Prerequisites for change – The 4As

For an individual to develop the desire and willingness for a difficult change, I’ve found it helpful to consider these four stages as prerequisites: Acknowledge, Awareness, Appetite and Action.

Together I’ve called them The 4As of Change.

Stage 1: Acknowledge impact of issue, personally

The individual needs to acknowledge how an issue is impacting them personally. They need to grasp the implications of how the issue is affecting their perception amongst their peers, how it’s hindering their goals and impacting the wider organisation.

This step ensures a proposed change starts with why it’s personally necessary.

For example, suppose someone is managing a globally distributed team. The team is consistently delayed with their deliverables. For the manager to truly appreciate the issue and have a desire to address it, the manager needs to acknowledge how this issue is impacting them personally.

Stage 2: Have awareness of a solution

The individual needs to have an awareness that solutions may exist.

For example, a manager would need to be aware that co-locating the team in one location, to enable face-to-face communication, could reduce misunderstanding and delays amongst the team.

Stage 3: Develop an appetite for the change

They then need to develop a sufficient appetite to advocate for the change and its solution.

Supporting the change may be challenging because it may involve a personal, then a public, admission that a change is needed.

An individual needs to become an advocate to gain the backing of others who may express varying degrees of support. Trials may need to be carried out to validate and convince others the solution is right.

Using the previous example, although a manager may believe co-locating could be right, they may need to gain enough backing to carry out a trial. Others may be sceptical if, for example, it means other managers would lose influence over individuals moving from their location; or individuals in the team may not be able to accommodate the change.

Through trials and discussions, the solution may need many alterations. If protracted it’s likely to reduce appetite and possibly prevent the change from happening.

If the manager has maintained sufficient appetite, and gained enough backing, then they are ready to take action.

Stage 4: Take action to trial the change

Now, finally, the individual is ready for action.

This is the final stage where success criteria are affirmed collectively, and the change is planned, executed and then reviewed collectively.

Coaching or line managing others through the stages

If you are a coach or line manager, the following considerations may support others progress through each of the prerequisite stages of change.

  1. As a coach or line manager, be aware of the particular stage an individual is at. Provide support that’s contextual to that stage.
  2. Know that the way to think differently is to act differently. When you encourage others to act differently, they’ll start to see and experience the world differently, impacting their mindset as a result.
  3. Since change can be challenging, suggest breaking the change into small rapid experiments. This can bring much-needed evidence and insights, which can be particularly powerful when assessing a change’s appropriateness and when developing an appetite for the change.
  4. Facts and data are often not as convincing as a compelling story, so use stories where such a change has been previously successful. Consider asking someone external to share a story of such a change from their experience.
  5. Gain peer-level support for the change. Change is more likely when others independently state its benefits, or show keenness for the change.
  6. Consider the BJ Fogg’s maxims:
    1. Help people do what they already want to do
    2. Help people feel successful