Unlocking Agility: An Insider's Guide to Agile Enterprise Transformation by Hesselberg Jorgen
On a fateful day early in 2007, the IT leadership team at Borders came and spent a day with me, exploring the agility that we had developed in our company. They had just announced the end of their marketing relationship with Amazon and were intent on building their own online bookstore. My wife, Carol, asked me how the day went with Borders. “They’re doomed.” I said emphatically. “They will be out of business in five years.” She was surprised and dubious. At the time they had more than 1,000 stores and almost 20,000 employees and revenues well in excess of $ 1B. She asked me why I was so certain? “They are so afraid, they don’t know what to do next. They will never be able to compete with that level of fear at work in their organization.” - Page xxii · Location 301
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As an analogy, this book is meant to prepare you to become a chef, not a cook. A cook is able to follow instructions from a recipe and repeat a process that has already been done many times before. This works well when the outcome is known and the process (cooking, in this case) is simple. Chefs, however, can follow procedures and processes in an expert manner (and often do so, when appropriate), but they also understand the fundamental reasoning behind the instructions and can adjust the process to create their own recipes when the context changes. Chefs ultimately write their own cookbooks. - Goals and Methods > Page xxvi · Location 362
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Building your organization’s Agile Working Group (AWG)—the engine of your Agile enterprise transformation efforts—is a nontrivial task. - Chapter 8: Building Your Organization’s Agile Working Group > Page 211 · Location 4712
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Although it’s understandable that change management efforts often originate in these areas, being too focused on any one functional area limits the overall impact on the organization. Instead, aim to find a home for the AWG that naturally covers an end-to-end perspective and is perceived as such. - Whole System View > Page 222 · Location 4945
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“It’s fascinating how our agile transformation picked up momentum when the AWG was no longer perceived as “coming from IT,” but instead was approached from a strategic and holistic perspective.” - Whole System View > Page 223 · Location 4953
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Agile Program Manager - Temporary Lifespan > Page 223 · Location 4963
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This approach to “planned obsolescence” mirrors that of the ScrumMaster at the team level. Although it may take several years, a high-performing team that lives a continuous improvement mind-set should eventually outlive the need for a dedicated ScrumMaster. The ScrumMaster either moves on to another team that could use assistance or takes on another critical role in the organization, leveraging the important collaboration and communication skills that have been fine-tuned as ScrumMaster. - Temporary Lifespan > Page 223 · Location 4963
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When I approach candidates to join the AWG, I ask them the following question: “What are you going to do in five years? And before you answer, think back five years ago—are you doing anything remotely related today to what you thought you would be doing back then?” For these candidates, this question helps them understand that they have no way of knowing what the future holds—and this is a liberating notion. I then point out that the AWG will prepare them for what’s next in their careers. It will give them a tour-de-force experience in building high-performing, nimble organizations—skill sets and experience that will always be valuable, regardless of where they end up. - Hesitation from Potential Candidates > Page 226 · Location 5019
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Lack of faith in the transformation effort: If you listen closely, your organization continuously gives you clues that help you gauge how you’re progressing toward your transformation efforts. If you get the sense that potential candidates are hesitant to join the AWG because they do not have faith in the transformation, this is an important signal that should not be taken lightly. As noted earlier, the AWG is the very manifestation of executive support: it is funded and paid for by executives. The AWG is their message to the entire organization that changing how we currently operate is vital to the organization’s longevity. None of this matters if the organization’s employees do not believe that you’re serious about making significant changes, however. If “unlocking agility” is merely viewed as a buzzword on a poster and a soon-to-be-passed fad, the effort is doomed. - Hesitation from Potential Candidates > Page 227 · Location 5031
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The CEO at the time, Larry Kaplan, was clear in his enthusiasm and agreed to attend quarterly town hall meetings to demonstrate to the rest of the organization (and to potentially doubting direct reports) his unwavering executive support for the efforts. Having Kaplan demonstrate support and showing his commitment through actions and words played an important part in sustaining momentum when organizational change fatigue set in.- Hesitation from Potential Candidates > Page 227 · Location 5040
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The AWG is the engine that helps your organization remove impediments. It is critical to your organizational change efforts. Make sure to look for the following characteristics in team members when establishing the AWG: Complementary, Dedicated, Knowledgeable, Credible, Humble and Champion. External consultants can play an important role in forming and being part of the team, but make sure you don’t simply outsource the effort—the transformation has to be owned by the organization and that feeling of shared ownership must permeate the organization. - Summary > Page 228 · Location 5063
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As I went through the materials with him, it became clear that we were in sync right away. He loved our focus on optimizing for the organization as a whole over local suboptimization. He had already experienced the gains we were making in our ability to adapt faster, and he could see that our focus on quality was starting to bear fruit. Feedback from our customers and our key performance metrics told a compelling story—things were going in the right direction. - Chapter 9: An Operating Model for Business Agility > Page 233 · Location 5136
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When larger organizations aim to transform to a more agile way of working, it’s critical to recognize that the context within which the organization operates matters. There are parts of the business that operate in extreme levels of uncertainty, where continuous validation of ideas, concepts, and business models need to happen. This is what Snowden, in his Cynefin model, categorizes as the Complex and Chaotic domains. Yet, the core of the business—the part that actually makes money and funds the innovation efforts—lies mostly in the Complicated and Obvious domains. The business models have been validated and proven; the customers find the company’s value proposition attractive, and now it’s a matter of delivering on this promise. - Chapter 9: An Operating Model for Business Agility > Page 234 · Location 5150
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