When you find yourself coaching an Enterprise to help them with their desire for improved Business Agility, people must have an Enterprise Awareness. This article is intended to help you leverage the Enterprise Awareness principle of DA and provide context for your coaching as part of creating a Disciplined Agile Enterprise. #DisciplinedAgile #EnterpriseAwareness #BusinessAgility
The Disciplined Agile Toolkit is a tremendous resource to be used in every Lean-Agile adoption/transformation effort, from team-level to enterprise-level. The Disciplined Agile Toolkit, now with more clarity on choosing your way of working (WoW), offers new and established teams an opportunity to evolve further through consideration of their context and the many goals, factors, and options available to them.
The ‘original’ Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) layer of toolkit, with its focus on delivery, has provided a solid foundation for building high-performing delivery teams. As enterprises come to value the benefit of these team-level improvements, the desire to leverage these improvements throughout the enterprise, scale these improvements, and improve agility at a business level is a common enterprise transformation goal today. DAD Teams should be Enterprise Aware (Principle #7) and share the enterprise desire to reduce overall delivery time and cost by Optimizing Flow (Principle #6) as well as Delighting Customers (Principle #1) so that they can Be Awesome (Principle #2)
There are many transformation factors to consider as an enterprise seeks Agility at Scale at the Enterprise Level. Beyond the team focus of DAD the Disciplined Agile (DA) Toolkit provides straightforward guidance for scaling into Disciplined DevOps and then into Disciplined Agile IT (DAIT). Finally, the DA toolkit provides guidance for a Disciplined Agile Enterprise (DAE). It is here that I want to focus and present the importance of Principle 7, Enterprise Awareness.
The Disciplined Agile Toolkit recognizes that enterprises are complex adaptive systems (CAS). We also recognize that complex adaptive systems can be unpredictable with many interacting and interdependent elements with diverse ideas not only in the outcomes they seek, but also in the manner to which those outcomes are pursued.
To consider the CAS enterprise we need to find vantage points and be able to focus those vantage points on parts of the system. Disciplined Agile identifies five vantage points / five levels of awareness: individual, team, department, enterprise, and community.
Agile and Lean have matured our collective Individual- and Team-Level Awareness during the last two decades. We know that individuals need to evaluate their personal skills and be continuous learners. We’ve learned that individuals need to sometimes sacrifice personal productivity or efficiency for the benefit of their agile team. Scrum Masters or Team Leads are expected to coach their teams in their never-ending journey to becoming a high, and then higher, performing team.
For Departmental Awareness, or what I’d like to refer to as Organizational Awareness; because it is a more generic reference to the way in which a group of people are organized / identified within the enterprise. While a team is an organization, I look beyond those teams and consider the organization to be those next few views of the enterprise in which a team might identify themselves. These organizational views don’t necessarily have to be based on a traditional org chart. People and teams may be organized using several different models. For example, the classic line hierarchy, the functional organization, project-based, and the matrix models. Today we’re leaning toward virtual organizations and moving people into customer-, market-, or product-teams. In SAFe the model of a product-team is a team-of-teams called an Agile Release Train (ART). SAFe ARTs are organized along development value streams (see my Optimizing Flow article). The ART’s ‘products’ are their outputs of value. These products can be business capabilities, solutions, systems, or applications… context maters! Organizational Awareness in SAFe is at the core of the framework where a shared ART vision and single Feature-level backlog along with emphasis on DevOps and Release on Demand as well as Team and Technical Agility competencies move everyone to have Organizational Awareness.
Having individual, team, and organizational awareness positions everyone to be part of a Disciplined Agile Enterprise (DAE). Yet, to transform an enterprise toward Business Agility we need an even broader level of awareness, we need Enterprise Awareness. The Enterprise Awareness Principle of Disciplined Agile enables doing what’s right for your customers. Decisions to pivot or pursue efforts to Delight Customers have to made more frequently than in the past. Everyone in the enterprise has to be aligned with somewhat dynamic strategic business and technology choices. This alignment is best achieved by way of Enterprise Awareness. The capability to maintain enterprise-wide alignment enables business agility.
Enterprise Awareness is an important aspect of self-discipline because as a professional you should strive to do what’s right for your enterprise and not just what’s right for you. For you, for your team, and perhaps even your organization the right thing may seem like finishing your work as fast as possible, spending exactly ‘the right amount of time’ to finish all the work, and using familiar technology when implementing the solution. But this may not be the right thing for the enterprise!
To do what’s right for the enterprise we need connections to the enterprise that inform us to changes in strategic direction. We need lean funding practices and an appropriate governance approach that enables people to do what is right for the enterprise. Appropriate governance is based on trust and collaboration. Additionally, we need agile operations management to provide for coordination of organizations within an enterprise when the enterprise is large and has a need for alignment across multiple value streams.
Strategic Direction
To be informed of changes in strategic direction we need connections to business experts and enterprise architects. Business experts can share their insights and forecasts as strategic themes that guide localized investments and decisions. Enterprise architects can provide guidance to organizations to promote adaptive design and facilitate the reuse of ideas, components, services, and proven patterns across various solutions. When people are enterprise aware, they reach out to be in alignment with enterprise business and technology strategy.
Lean Funding Practices
With lean funding practices we avoid traditional project-based start/stop friction that impedes directional changes that are important to the enterprise. With lean funding enterprise fiduciaries can establish guardrails and enable decentralized decisions to empower local context-based investments. Lean funding, lean budget allocation, to organizations rather than to projects allows the organization to follow changes in strategic themes and enterprise-level investment decisions without the appearance of failure when less valuable projects should be ended. When people are enterprise aware, they understand that finishing a project may not be in the best interest of the enterprise and use a funding practice aligned with that understanding.
Governance
Appropriate governance should enable dynamic forecasting and budgeting and not lock in long-range commitments and fixed-scope expectations. Governance should enable people to do what is right for the enterprise. As enterprise needs change over time governance needs to allow for self-organizing and self-managing people to adapt to those changes. Governance should be performance-based using expected outcomes of implementations rather than estimates and plans as constraints. Performance-based governance works within agreed-upon boundaries using metrics that show if desired benefits are being realized. Ideally these metrics are based on leading indicators to provide the enterprise with fast feedback on how well they are doing in progressing the enterprise toward its strategic objectives. When people are enterprise aware, they provide visibility into performance using leading indicators and can be trusted to work in the best interest of the enterprise.
Agile Operations Management
Staying aligned with enterprise direction requires management – coordinating efforts to accomplish objectives through the application of available resources (financial, technological, human). The breadth and complexity of today’s solutions tends to require coordination of multiple organizations within an enterprise. Roadmaps provide a mechanism for coordination. Roadmaps can be used for alignment of business objectives, technology runways, and staffing adjustments. To achieve business agility, it’s important to use roadmaps as a forecasting and planning tool, not as a commitment to future work. A fully committed roadmap impedes agility. An enterprise needs both short-term and long-term roadmaps. Short-term roadmaps help communicate and coordinate tactical efforts to realize the strategic efforts expressed by the long-term roadmaps. When people are enterprise aware, they leverage roadmaps to help manage and coordinate their own objectives in alignment with the execution outcome objectives of the enterprise.
BOTTOM LINE
When you find yourself coaching an enterprise transformation with the goal to become a more agile enterprise, I propose that you expand upon the principle of the Disciplined Agile Toolkit for Enterprise Awareness. The principle of Enterprise Awareness applies to everyone in the enterprise. In the spirit of Community Awareness, I hope this article has helped you map the Enterprise Awareness principle into your transformation strategy when you consider the transformation/adoption needed for a Disciplined Agile Enterprise.