There are a couple of different states and quadrants that an organisation can be in at any given time on their transformation journey: Emergent, Predictive, Convergent and Adaptive. These four quadrants can help you understand some of the challenges organisations face and help them to establish where they are now, and where they want to get to, to help move the organisation forward together as a whole.
Quadrant One: The Predictive / Emergent - Chaotic
These organisations are trying to be predictable, and run agile ceremonies across teams but they are never able to fully understand what their customers needs are, and spend a lot of time, money and resources having to do long term planning that quickly becomes obsolete as soon as the project is complete as the market or the needs of the customer has changed. These environments tend to be highly chaotic, with teams having to be spun up in an unpredictable way to deliver a new highest priority piece of work and team morale, team stability and the overall delivery and impact on other teams tends to suffer.
Quadrant Two: The Predictive / Convergent - Becoming Predictable
These organisations are usually understand their customers needs, but struggle to meet commitments due to lack of clarity around requirements, poor practices despite having highly structured Portfolio Management. Organisations are usually in this quadrant, due to business needs, dependancies which cause impediments, the way work is approved across teams, the over-arching organisational design or the way that technology is built, which will not allow the full application of Agile methodologies. There tends to be a coordination layer in order to manage dependancies and heavy portfolio management using Lean / Agile methodologies.
Quadrant Three: The Adaptive / Emergent - Fully Decouple
These organisations are built to be adaptive, they are likely using Scrum, XP, or SAFe and value change, but are still striving for a relatively predictable delivery cadence. The understand how to make commitments in smaller batches and can usually release regularly during a two week sprint. They have clear roadmap visibility, but realise that change is inventible so they plan in smaller chunks.
Quadrant Four: The Adaptive / Convergent - Reduce Batch Sizes
These organisations work in a Lean Startup or R&D model. They are invested in learning about their customers needs and can run experiments, and release a product into market early and often and quickly learn and gather feedback from their customers and target audience. These companies may have to make and meet commitments too, but failure to deliver is rarely fatal. These organisations are set up with small teams, that operate completely independently from one another but often have loosely defined requirements, and are measured more on goals, or specific business outcomes.
Challenges most organisations face whilst implementing Agile.
Most organisations operate in Quadrant Two: Predictive / Emergent, but given the needs of their customers emerging requirements, decide to move into the Quadrant Three Adaptive / Emergent area where they can create loosely coupled and cross-functional teams that are sufficient with all of the skills that they need to deliver often and can regularly meet commitments from the organisation with the wider organisational constraints simplified and removed from the equation, where they can then become successful.
The challenge is that sometimes, the rest of the organisation gets left behind, as new teams are spun up and resources, people and skill sets are often lost which can create a gap in the teams that have not yet made that transition.
How organisations can take leaps forward towards their Transformation?
The best approach to help the entire organisation on its change and transformation journey is to progressively start to decouple the organisation and it's underlying architecture and technologies, whilst learning how to operate in smaller batches at a team level and across other areas of the business. For this, new teams need to be formed, a new agile governance model identified, metrics for baselining and measuring change and improvements over time established and a foundation set that focuses on solid technical practices and DevOps and CI/CD. You can then start to focus on laying other foundations such as how projects across the organisation are funded, and focus on outcome focused business goals over requirements and allowing teams and the rest of the organisation to be able to deliver and adapt to the market changes, and deliver value which meets their customers needs.
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