#ElevateAgile2021

2021 Talks

Engaging the Enterprise at Scale: How to Get Everyone Else to Change

Chris Beale

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About The Talk

One of the challenges of introducing Agile into an organizational ecosystem is that the principles, practices, mindsets, organizational structure, governance, and metrics are orthogonal to how most corporations do business. Agile gets installed in the small and is instantly at odds with the current operating model. It is incongruent with how work is funded and approved and how it handles compliance and corporate governance. To even have a chance, agile is granted exceptions to these control frameworks. Still, in the end, these frameworks will limit our ability to make progress and achieve true business agility.

The goal of an early-stage Transformation is to organize our systems and structures around markets and customers. It is to use Agile to create a reliable system of delivery, a system of delivery that executives can reliably delegate into to achieve their goals. Once we have teams, workgroups, and departments that can reliably, predictably, and economically solve problems for their clients, a world of options opens up for refactoring the organizational operating system to align it with the delivery organization and to make it an enabler of Agility rather than an impediment to Agility. Once the system is trustworthy, how do we begin to trust?

This talk will explore how to deal with annual cycle planning and move it to a more frequent exercise. We will deal with issues of batch size at enterprise scale and how to pivot the organization from project or business capability-based funding to funding value streams. Finally, we’ll discuss how to move closer to continuous planning and continuous delivery and closer to an organization that is inspecting and adapting in real-time so that it can sense and disrupt, and ultimately dominate its marketplace.

Topic Areas:

Trustworthy Systems
Better Bets
Align to Value Streams
Drive Continuous Feedback
Sense and Disrupt

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