Agility requires a radical change in the way we work today. It is not just some practices and tools to be implemented. Rather it is a cultural change that affects the whole organization at a large scale.
Business Agility Accelerator - Workshop Deck
Running the workshop:
- Set the event for at least 2 hours. Print attribute cards (1 deck for 4-6 people).
- Print Business Agility Poster (1 poster for 4-6 people). Lots of stickies, colorful pens, tape, etc.
Quick Look at Agility
- Delivering business value.
- Minimizing handovers and bureaucracy.
- Enabling bottom up intelligence and empowerment .
- Creating a transparent ground for frequent inspection.
- Establishing experimental culture.
- Enhancing KAIZEN reflex.
- Leading a strong value and goal oriented, team based, learning organization.
- Delivering the right solutions and value fast & frequently to the customers.
You may use this slide and/or create your own to talk around agility according to your audience.
Mindset Over Tools & Processes
You may use this slide and/or create your own to talk around agility according to your audience.
Business Agility Accelerator
The purpose of this tool is not to audit/evaluate the maturity of an organization. We believe that agility is a journey (and not a goal) and every organization has its own way of being agile. Thus, in our opinion, agility cannot be assessed but instead, organizations can be supported for growth.
Therefore, this tool aims to allow an organization to oversee its own state and discover potential improvement points to enhance themselves.
*Remark: This tool is not for use of individual agile teams/squads but rather for tribes/product groups like organizational units.
Exploring Current State - 30 min
Within your group;
- read and discuss the cards in detail.
- select the cards that you think represent your current organization.
*It is ok to choose multiple cards for a specific sub area. The organization may be in between for some areas.
Defining Current State - 20 min
Within your group;
- place the cards that you picked in the previous exercise on the related areas on the poster.
- discuss the resulting picture as the whole audience.
*It is ok to choose multiple cards for a specific sub area. The organization may be in between for some areas.
Setting Target State - 30 min
Think about your targets for each sub-area;
- For the next 12 months? Mark your target on the poster.
- Create focus for the next 3 months. Pick 2-3 areas to focus first and mark them on the poster.
Try to lead the conversation and help your audience to come up with realistic but challenging targets.
Defining Next Steps - 20 min
What do you need to be able to reach your near term target?
- Who will work on these?
- How will you be tracking the progress?
- How will you be able to understand whether you are there or not?
- …define a working model…
It is recommended to run several additional sessions to create roadmap-like actions that would enable the attendees to own and reach short term goals. Optionally, you may extend the discovery session to 4 hours and continue with road-mapping activities during the discovery session. At this point you may ask the audience to decide on how they wish to proceed.
Here, at least ask your audience to define how to proceed next.
Special thanks to the main contributors to the development of this tool:
Joern Kolodzey, Ashwini Devdhar, Ulrich Schmidt, Guido Doumen, Luis De Carvalho.
Please do not forget to share your experiences and feedback with us! We would like to improve the tool accordingly.