Category: organisation

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.

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.

  1. In order for an organisation to compete it needs to establish (or reaffirm) a clear market differentiator that appeals to their customers/clients.
  2. The market is changing rapidly. There’s plenty of emerging threats and opportunities, some are known, some are unknown(able).
  3. 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.
  4. They also need to retire operations & services that no longer drive revenue or are no longer a strategic fit.
  5. 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.
  6. 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
  7. 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.
  8. 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.
  9. 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.

Further Reading

Thanks to Luca Minudel for helping me strengthen this article.

Beyond traditional organisational resilience

In business, organisational resilience often relates to ensuring services and operations are maintained, or return to their current state after a period of instability.

However, there is an extension of resilience that organisations can utilise to continuously evolve, find new stable states and rapidly seek novel opportunities.

These benefits can result from intended low exposure to instability that would otherwise be too brand damaging in high degrees.

Examples of types of organisational resilience

Barclays: Resilience testing used to ensure existing service & operations are maintained

Netflix: Increases resilience from purposeful disruption of infrastructure – Chaos Monkey

Domino’s (USA): In 2010, recovered brand image through a self-critical ad campaign

Walmart: During Hurricane Katrina crisis, Walmart used their logistics capability to provide disaster relief to local communities; thus capitalising on this Black Swan event

Stabilise rapidly and exploit new learning

Whether instability is intentional or a result of external factors, organisations should be structured to rapidly respond, and capitalise on new understanding

References

Barclays: Reference on request

Netflix: Chaos Monkey

Domino’s (USA): How Domino’s Pizza Reinvented Itself

Walmart: How Wal-Mart used Hurricane Katrina to repair its image

Find out more

Resilient Organizations: How to Survive, Thrive and Create Opportunities Through Crisis and Change – Erica Seville (2016)

Antifragile – Nassim Taleb (2012)

My mini-series of articles on organisational resilience (2018)

I’m available to deliver a talk on Agile and Organisational Resilience.

Contact Dean Latchana to learn more about how organisations can benefit from intentional disruption and crises.
(dean@latchana.co.uk)