#ElevateAgile2021

2021 Talks

Establishing a Reliable System You Can Delegate Into

Melissa Oberg

1 of 18

About The Talk

For years, the Agile community has taken the approach that an Agile Transformation was about teaching people the principles, practices, and mindset of an Agile organization. While principles, practices, and mindset are incredibly important, they are insufficient for successfully orchestrating a transformation at scale. Everything about agile assumes that you have complete cross-functional teams, clearly articulated and strategically aligned backlogs, and the ability to produce a working, tested increment of software at the end of every sprint. This begs the question; what do you do if you don’t?

Over the past 10 years of helping orchestrate some of the largest Agile Transformations in the world, we’ve come to learn that the real work of an Agile Transformation is about creating the conditions for Agile principles, practices, and mindset to take hold. In the small, it’s about how you form teams, how you build backlogs, and how you produce working tested software. In large, it’s about creating a team-based organizational structure, an Agile governance framework, and metrics that support, enable, and reward delivering with Agility. It’s about having a plan for what to do with dependencies, and more importantly, how we are going to break them.

Creating the conditions for Agile to thrive is as much about refactoring the organizational architecture as it is about refactoring the technical architecture. What compensating controls do we put in place while dealing with dependencies, and how to dismantle those controls once we’ve broken the dependencies. It’s about having a clearly articulated end-state and a tightly orchestrated and funded plan for how you are going to get there. It’s about It’s about enlisting key stakeholders, aligning the enterprise, defining an end-state vision, a roadmap, and a credible plan that will move the organization forward with a high degree of certainty.

This talk will explore several models for how to think about defining your organizational end-state. How to break big organizations into smaller groupings of teams and put together a credible and accountable plan for stewarding the organization as it moves ever closer to greater Business Agility.

Topic Areas:

Four quadrants
Expeditions
Basecamps
Journeys

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