business agility

The Cone-shaped Backlog

Here’s an approach I’ve found successful when helping teams ensure their backlog supports optionality, handles uncertainty and continuously adjusts so their goals and strategies are aligned to their vision.

A backlog should have these qualities

The backlog is made-up of backlog items. Each item represents a business goal, which when delivered by the team, will provide a beneficial outcome to the business and its customers/stakeholders.

Qualities of the backlog:

Easy to update by the product owner
Should be available to everyone in the business
Shows the backlog items for the next sprint
Conveys a vision of the future with a tangible path to the present
Reflects vagueness and options
- If a distant backlog item is too vague to describe in words, consider drawing a picture, as shown in the photo below
Self-explanatory to anyone in the business

The cone-shaped

I often encourage teams to visualise the backlog in a cone-shape in this manner:

The neck of the cone shows the current sprint goals
The widest point of the cone shows the furthest goals which may be months or years from now.
The centre of the cone shows the goals for the intervening time periods. This area can be divided into sprints, months, quarters and half-year intervals.

Backlog visualised as a cone, like the cone-of-uncertainty

Reason for the cone-shape

It reflects the cone of uncertainty, where the further out the team considers, the less certain they are of the future environment.
The narrow neck of the cone reflects the fact the team can only sustainably deliver a small number of goals. Invariably there is more demand than the team can supply, so the team should gradually constrain the number of goals as the time nears the current sprint.
The further into the future, the more the team can consider a wide number of options. This optionality allows the team to consider many possibilities and scenarios without having to commit earlier than necessary. However, as time draws nearer, and as the cone gets narrower, the team will need to reduce the number of options based on the insights they have gathered.

Additional information which supports the backlog

As shown in the photo above, to enable continuous alignment across the business, there is additional information I advise teams to use:

Vision Statement: This is a short easy-to-understand statement which describes what the team intends to achieve. It’s written by the team, with their sponsor and stakeholders. The vision statement ensures alignment for the team with those they serve and with those whom the team may rely upon.
Strategies: These are the current set of approaches the team have reasonable confidence in that, if delivered successfully, will help fulfil the vision statement.
KPIs: These Key Performance Indicators are a small selection of measures which indicate whether the team’s strategies and sprint goals are achieving the team’s vision.
Epics start and end dates: Epics are goals which span more than one sprint. On the backlog, the likely start time of an epic is positioned with a blue post-it note; the likely end time is positioned with a pink post-it note.

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.

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.

An Approach to Organisation Change

When working with organisations and clients, this is my reasoning and a suggested approach for examining where and how organisational change should occur.

For the sake of brevity, I won’t dive into detail here. Neither am I suggesting this a one-size-fits-all approach; this is a generic approach that should be customised to the client.

In order for an organisation to compete it needs to establish (or reaffirm) a clear market differentiator that appeals to their customers/clients.
The market is changing rapidly. There’s plenty of emerging threats and opportunities, some are known, some are unknown(able).
The organisation needs to identify the cash cow operations & services that need to be maintained and improved; these drive revenue. This creates one side of what’s termed the Ambidextrous Organisation.
They also need to retire operations & services that no longer drive revenue or are no longer a strategic fit.
Critically the organisation needs to seek new operations & services for new or existing customers/clients. This creates the other side of the ambidextrous organisation. In reality, only a few ideas are credible to scale to become the new cash cows.
Points 3, 4 & 5 should establish a continuous balanced flow of initiatives. This enables the organisation to continuously sense & respond to ensure ongoing market fitness. This creates a Lean Enterprise
Especially for Point 5, since there’s a huge amount of uncertainty, the ways of working, organisational structure, success criteria and leadership style is different from what’s needed for Point 3.
- See S.I.L.L.Y Organisations
To seek new viable operations and services, the organisation needs to be especially outcome driven, with flexible ways of working, an experimental approach supported by leaders, close co-discovery with stakeholders, close collaboration with customers/clients, where potentially many strategies and solutions are vetted.
This ability for the organisation to sense and respond is in keeping with The Agile Business Consortium’s definition of Business Agility.

Agile Business Consortium’s definition of Business Agility

Where to start

To develop and carryout changes of such significance and depth requires the direct involvement of the leadership team. The following slides provides a high-level view of what such an engagement is likely to cover.