An Agile enterprise has Agile occurring end-to-end and top-to-bottom.
—Mario Moreira
Imagine an enterprise where everyone focuses on the highest customer value, an enterprise that methodically yet quickly adapts toward high value and cuts the tail of lower-value work.
Imagine a company where employees are trusted to use 100% of their brain power to self-organize around the work and think of better ways to work, a company where employee satisfaction comes from within the employees themselves for a job well done.
Imagine an organization where ideas—from strategies to tasks—are transparent so everyone knows if their work is aligned with strategy and high-priority ideas, an organization where budgeting is given to the highest-value ideas.
Imagine an enterprise where a discovery mindset wins over certainty thinking, an enterprise where experimentation with increments and feedback helps define the way toward customer value.
Imagine a company where managers are coaches, mentors, and leaders who encourage people with inspiration, vision, and trust; a company where there is a singular focus on putting the enterprise first instead of individual egos.
Imagine an enterprise where customers embrace the ideas being built because they are engaged in the building of the work all along the way, an enterprise where customers become your partners providing continuous feedback.
If you can imagine this type of enterprise, then this book can help you realize it. This book provides insightful and pragmatic knowledge and activities to help you visualize what an effectively running Agile enterprise looks like. You will learn more about the importance of engaging customers and gaining their feedback. Fully embrace the importance of engaging employees, ensuring they have ownership and can self-organize around the work. Embrace the idea of leading your Agile transformation with education and focusing on the behavioral changes prior to the mechanical changes.
Have you realized that there is much more to Agile than following a process? Are you yearning to explore an effective culture where the discovery mindset brings you closer to customer value? Have you come to the conclusion that Agile is about building a holistic enterprise culture that is optimized for being agile and delivering customer value?
This book will share many cutting-edge concepts, mindsets, and practices to answer these questions. It will help you adapt to the culture, roles, and practices that you will need to be a customer-value-driven enterprise. If you are committed to customer success and realize that it does take a whole enterprise to achieve it, then this is the book for you.
Agile should not be done for the sake of Agile. Instead, Agile helps you deliver more value to customers and achieve better business outcomes. This is why, every step of the way, every activity should be viewed as how it is optimizing for customer success. This book will lead you down this path.
Innovations of This Book
As this book helps you apply Agile values and principles in the form of concepts, mindsets, practices, and techniques across an enterprise to be the most effective and successful that you can be, it introduces you to three innovations in the way Agile is approached.
The first innovation this book provides you is a holistic top-to-bottom and end-to-end view of an Agile enterprise where everyone is engaged. Get introduced to the Agile Galaxy in your customer universe shown in Figure 1-1. It is designed to help you better understand your Agile landscape of today and what you want your future to look like.
Figure 1-1. Your Agile Galaxy in your customer universe
The second innovation this book provides you is the customer-value-driven (CVD) enterprise, the CVD framework, and its corresponding engine of customer value that emphasizes the importance of customer feedback. An Agile CVD framework is a business and delivery system that is driven by customer value, where you capture and prioritize ideas based on customer value, continuously validate customer value throughout with customer feedback, and deliver customer value in a timely manner, all for the purpose of optimizing the delivery of what the customer finds as value. This includes engaging employees in the pursuit of customer value.
The third innovation of this book is a packaging of many cutting-edge Agile concepts, mindsets, practices, and techniques that it will reveal regarding the adoption of Agile throughout an enterprise, from idea to delivery and from the team level to the executive level. In a sense, this is the iPod of Agile books (in other words, your iAgile) as shown in Figure 1-2. The iPod wasn’t innovative because it was yet another mp3 player. Instead it was innovative by how it brought together many cutting-edge concepts, technologies, and processes that enabled the highest value to the customer. (See Figure 1-2.)
Figure 1-2. This book is your iAgile, packed with cutting-edge Agile elements in one place
While there are many Agile processes, frameworks, and practices out on the market, not all of them may fit perfectly into your environment and cover all of your needs. The goal of this book is to provide you with insight into the many Agile elements that can be applied in and across the end-to-end and top-to-bottom enterprise landscape so that you may more intelligently and adaptively determine what works better for your context.
This book is your guide to adapting to an Agile and CVD culture that starts the moment an idea gets recognized to the moment it gets delivered and only ends when you receive market feedback of what was learned (in other words, how successful the idea is).
On the one hand, this book will provide you a vision of where you can go. On the other hand, this book is a pragmatic guide to help you through your journey. This book is neither exhaustive nor prescriptive, but it will hopefully inspire you to think out-of-the-box and beyond the more traditional and common Agile elements and processes. The guidelines in this book can be applied equally to whether you are just starting your Agile journey or continuing to improve your Agile universe.
What You Will Learn
This book provides a landscape of options designed to help you consider, understand, deploy, and adapt an Agile culture, mindset, methods, and practices throughout an enterprise, from executives to Agile teams, and everyone in between. More importantly, it will help you narrow the gap between what the customer really wants and what you deliver. It is not surprising, given the mediocre success of many products and services, that those who claim to be customer-focused are optimizing less for the customer and more for the organization’s bureaucracy, sub-optimizing for a division or personal goals.
What you will learn is that it does take an enterprise from as early as ideation through reflection after delivery (left to right) and executives to team (top to bottom) to make an Agile value-driven enterprise work.
What you will also learn is many of the latest modern concepts, mindsets, practices, and techniques that can help you on your journey so that you can run your enterprise in a customer value-driven manner.
This book maps the bottom-to-top and idea-to-delivery ways to operate in an enterprise Agile manner and gain the benefits that you desire from an Agile transformation. The topics that this book focuses on include the following:
Becoming a customer-value-driven enterprise that optimizes its culture and processes for customer value
Approaching Agile from an outcome perspective to gain better business results
Establishing a top-to-bottom view of the roles in an Agile enterprise including the executive role for sponsoring your Agile galaxy
Evolving into an Agile culture where the mindset embraces Agile values and principles and the pluralistic-green and evolutionary-teal paradigms
Constructing an end-to-end view that visualizes an idea pipeline of the work following the six R model from recording the idea to reflecting on the results
Building high-performing teams (for example, lightning-bolt shaped teams, collaboration, teamocide avoidance)
Evolving management, HR, finance, portfolio, PMO, and other roles to work effectively in an Agile enterprise
Building an enterprise where customers matter; personas are used to help with user stories, testing, and demos; right customer for right feedback; and customer feedback vision
Building an enterprise where employees matter, self-organizing teams are applied, Agile roles are established, motivations are understood, and bounded authority is defined
Building an Agile discovery mindset focused on hypothesis thinking, feedback loops, innovation, divergent thinking, and incremental thinking
Seeing uncertainty as a smart starting point and removing pretend and arrogant certainty
Establishing a prioritization framework to identify high-value work at the idea level via cost of delay and other prioritization methods
Building a culture of challenging assumptions to increase confidence in decisions and reduce risks of releasing something the customer doesn’t want
Establishing work-based Agile education on a learn-apply-share model focused on Agile values and principles led with value, flow, and quality
Powering your employees through self-organizing teams, an Agile education vision, and gamification while supporting an Agile community
Understanding the importance of Agile budgeting and its benefit to supply and demand
Constructing Agile success measures and dashboard focused on the value of the work, lead times, delivery pace, and quality
Applying a lagging to leading metric path where leading indicators help you get to the (lagging) outcomes you are looking for
Establishing a requirements tree to understand the hierarchy of how strategy, ideas, increments, epics, user stories, and tasks work together
Connecting idea pipeline to team backlogs while managing dependencies and utilizing velocity, WIP, and pull systems to manage the flow of work
Learning ideation with Lean Canvas, for capturing ideas and their assumptions, value, target audience, and to better understand the idea
Applying an incremental mindset by introducing decomposition techniques such as story mapping to thin-slice ideas into increments and epics
Writing effective user stories and the importance of collaboration, acceptance criteria, and how they relate to progress
Reinventing HR as promoters of Agile, supporting Agileroles, focusing on employee motivation, adaptingreward systems, obtaining continuous employee feedback, meeting team-based goals, and exploringself-management
Adventuring through an Agile enterprise story that shows you how an enterprise may transform to Agile in an incremental manner using the materials in this book
Who This Book Is For
The primary readers for this book are
executives and senior management
sponsors of Agile transformations
Agile coaches, consultants, and champions
portfolio management teams
project management offices (PMOs)
product owners, product managers, and business analysts
business and finance departments
human resources (HR) departments
marketing and sales departments
investors and entrepreneurs
ScrumMasters and Agile project managers
cross-functional engineering/Scrum teams including developers, quality assurance (QA) analysts and testers, technical writers, user experience (UX) engineers, configuration management (CM) engineers, and more
How to Navigate This Book
You can read this book in various ways depending on your purpose and prior knowledge. You are welcome to read the book from beginning to end. Since chapters are relatively short, it is feasible to read a chapter in one sitting. You can also customize your path through the book to suit your knowledge level, specific challenge, or theme of interest.
The first four chapters set the conceptual groundwork for an effective customer-value-driven enterprise. The remaining chapters provide you with concepts, mindsets, practices, and techniques to help you make a value-driven Agile enterprise real. There are specific ways to navigate this book via theme, topic, or challenge. The following list shows chapter clusters that pertain to certain themes to help you focus on particular topics per your current need.
Agile as it relates to the customer: Chapter 2 (Envisioning a Customer-Value-Driven Enterprise), Chapter 3 (Achieving Better Business Outcomes), Chapter 6 (Embracing Customers), Chapter 13 (Capturing Ideas with Lean Canvas), Chapter 14 (Incorporating Customer Feedback), and Chapter 18 (Collaborating on User Stories)
Agile as it relates to the employee: Chapter 3 (Achieving Better Business Outcomes), Chapter 4 (Building Your Agile Galaxy), Chapter 7 (Embracing Employees), Chapter 8 (Evolving Roles in an Agile Enterprise), Chapter 9 (Building a Learning Enterprise), Chapter 10 (Applying a Discovery Mindset), and Chapter 21 (Reinventing HR for Agile)
Building a customer-value-driven Agile enterprise: Chapter 2 (Envisioning a Customer-Value-Driven Enterprise), Chapter 6 (Embracing Customers), Chapter 10 (Applying a Discovery Mindset), Chapter 11 (Visualizing the Enterprise Idea Pipeline), Chapter 12 (Prioritizing with Cost of Delay), Chapter 13 (Capturing Ideas with Lean Canvas), Chapter 14 (Incorporating Customer Feedback), Chapter 15 (Establishing Your Requirements Tree), Chapter 18 (Collaborating on User Stories), Chapter 19 (Promoting Agile Budgeting), and Chapter 20 (Applying Agile Success Measures)
Agile culture and mindset: Chapter 4 (Building Your Agile Galaxy), Chapter 5 (Activating an Agile Culture), Chapter 6 (Embracing Customers), Chapter 7 (Embracing Employees), Chapter 9 (Building a Learning Enterprise), Chapter 10 (Applying a Discovery Mindset), and Chapter 21 (Reinventing HR for Agile)
Running an Agile enterprise: Chapter 5 (Activating an Agile Culture), Chapter 8 (Evolving Roles in Your Agile Enterprise), Chapter 9 (Building a Learning Enterprise), Chapter 10 (Applying a Discovery Mindset), Chapter 11 (Visualizing the Enterprise Idea Pipeline), Chapter 12 (Prioritizing with Cost of Delay), Chapter 13 (Capturing Ideas with Lean Canvas), Chapter 15 (Establishing Your Requirements Tree), Chapter 17 (Connecting the Idea Pipeline to Backlogs), Chapter 19 (Promoting Agile Budgeting), Chapter 20 (Applying Agile Success Measures), Chapter 21 (Reinventing HR for Agile), and Chapter 22 (Sharing an Agile Enterprise Story)
Establishing your requirements relationships and decomposing requirements from idea to task: Chapter 11 (Visualizing the Enterprise Idea Pipeline), Chapter 13 (Capturing Ideas with Lean Canvas), Chapter 15 (Establishing Your Requirements Tree), Chapter 16 (Decomposing Ideas with Story Mapping), Chapter 17 (Connecting the Idea Pipeline to Backlogs), and Chapter 18 (Collaborating on User Stories)
Pit Stops, Exercises, and References
Sprinkled throughout the book are what I call “Agile pit stops.” These pit stops are meant to provide you with insights in a chapter if you are browsing. They also act as anchors to let you know what topic that part of the book is currently covering. Figure 1-3 is an example of an Agile pit stop.
Figure 1-3. Example of an Agile pit stop
This book also provides you with exercises that you may try or mentally ponder to get you to more deeply experience a topic. Sprinkled throughout each chapter, you will find these exercises.
Finally, at the end of some of the chapters, a reference section is included to provide you with more material about some of the topics discussed in that chapter. I hope you have a great Agile journey and hope you gain beneficial information from this book leading to a more effective Agile transformation and greater business success!