Introduction to " Agile Ways of Working "
Four Enterprise Architects were using separate one hour-long weekly meeting to report on their initiative to transform the organisation using digital footprints to the Executive General Manager.
• While traditional reports provided a comprehensive view of the individual work, there was:
• Little transparency of all the work across the enterprise.
• Obscurity and vague description of the offering
• Lack of transparency of dependencies across various streams.
• Inadequate description of the deliverables and goals.
The meetings were scheduled by architects reporting on their own initiatives without looking at what value was being delivered as a whole.
My challenge was to implement a faster and easier way for the General Manager to qualify and quantify, the value delivered by combined initiatives, rather than just looking at individual initiatives.The quantification will help make informed decisions on business priorities from an organisation perspective.
The Solution
I conducted value stream exercises, a lean management technique to help visualize the steps needed from product vision to delivering the product to the end-customer.
I further conducted, gap analysis assessment against the As-Is and target state and identified areas of improvement and remediation.The improvements initiatives were bundled in a road map for implementation. Hypothesis and user stories were created across all the four streams with dependencies highlighted.
Prioritisation techniques were applied to sequence jobs to produce maximum economic benefits. Four initiatives were implemented in parallel for 2 weeks, followed by a demo and retrospective session, over a span of 6 months.
Outcome
Conversations between the executive and the enterprise architects were now more targeted and tangible with clear visibility of the delivered value proposition across the board. This led to change in thinking and mindset in measuring outcomes as opposed to producing deliverables.
The weekly meetings were more constructive, focus and value driven which led to reduction in time by 30 minutes. The approach was endorsed by senior management and suggested to use scrum concepts for initiatives in the organisation.