This is the Engineering Culture Podcast, from the people behind InfoQ.com and the QCon conferences.
In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Larry Cooper about the Agility Series – a collection of books and other resources which explore what agility means in many different dimensions.
Key Takeaways
- Value management is about doing the right thing, rather than doing lots of stuff, right
- The reason for doing something should always trace back to an organisational strategic goal, and if it doesn’t then we’re wasting the organisation’s money
- Introducing the ideas of cultural agility - the ability to understand multiple local contexts and work within them to obtain business results
- A strategic intent is not a statement of fact, it is a current direction which can change
- Sustainability and resilience are enhanced through agility
- Everything changes – the practices we are using now won’t be the ones we will use in the future, be adaptive to changing everything about how we do work
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0:15 Introductions
1:15 Value management is about doing the right thing, rather than doing lots of stuff, right
1:43 The need for benefits realization
2:07 Work backwards from the intended outcome to identify what is needed to achieve that outcome
3:05 The ideas around iterative and incremental delivery of value predate the agile movement
3:30 Value is perceptual and value shapes perception
3:55 You can shape perception of value based on how it is positioned
4:20 A limitation of agile software development is the assumption that the product needs to be built, rather than assessing if it is really needed
4:55 A common problem with big software development projects has been the tendency to focus only on the software and not on the broader ecosystem the software exists within
6:03 The reason for doing something should always trace back to an organisational strategic goal, and if it doesn’t then we’re wasting the organisation’s money
6:35 Exploring what constitutes a “product” for organisations today – they always involve more than just software
6:55 Misunderstanding the bigger picture needs and constraints by focusing just on the software part of a product often reduces the perception of the value in the product
8:05 The need for more adaptability in the organisation and drawing on ideas from software development to influence agility in other areas of the business
8:35 Describing how the Agility Series came about
9:55 The collaborative approach to producing the books in the series – the Wisdom Council
11:30 The books in the series – Organisational Agility, Leadership Agility,
11:55 The way the ideas in the book are identified
12:35 The goal to provide some clarity around the different types of agility
13:15 Aiming to create a coherent story around the different types of agility
14:55 Introducing the ideas of cultural agility
14:20 One aspect of agile culture is related to the values and principles of the Agile Manifesto, but there is more to it than that
15:03 The risks of creating a homogeneous organisational culture
15:40 The value of diversity and inclusiveness
16:25 Cultural agility is the ability to understand multiple local contexts and work within them to obtain business results
16:40 Cultural agility is a competitive advantage in today’s global environment
17:10 The need for global organisations to try and make the local look and behave like where they came from – embrace the local differences
18:40 The adaptability code – changing the stories holding back people and organisations, overcoming
19:20 Examples of the stories which define our concepts and context – what is “expensive”, “more hurry, less speed”
21:20 Overcoming the desire to “get started” and consider where we want to go and why we want to get there
21:50 Organisations have stories too – “that’s the way it’s done around here”, “that’ll never work here …”
22:15 Creating new stories and rewriting the existing stories is a key part of cultural agility
21:12 The difference between organisational agility and business agility
23:35 Organisational agility is the result of having all the other types of agility in place
24:02 Business agility is the operational view – how do we become more responsive in the day to day activities of running the business
24:30 Business agility should cause us to revisit our strategic intent when we receive feedback that the current strategic intent is no longer valid
24:45 A strategic intent is not a statement of fact, it is a current direction which can change
25:30 Apply these ideas in the government sector in the USA and Canada
26:15 Describing the goals of the National Forum for Public Private Collaboration (NFPPC)
27:10 Creating a line of sight from strategic intent and operational activities, including aspects such as cyber-resilience
27:40 The importance of organisational resilience, and how that is achieved through organisational agility
28:00 Sustainability and resilience are enhanced through agility
29:10 Service management (ITIL) is not contradictory to agility, DevOps bridges the gaps and improve service management
29:49 The idea of “SecOps” for security resilience in the same way that DevOps gives service resilience
30:15 The vast array of competing standards in IT cause great confusion in the industry
31:05 Trying to tell the holistic story that goes from strategic intent to operational implementation
31:24 What needs to be done can be fairly consistent – how it is done will change constantly
31:54 Working with the Government of Canada to achieve organisational agility – The Institute on Governance
33:10 Everything changes – if our organisations don’t change fast enough they will not survive
33:30 Everything changes – the practices we are using now won’t be the ones we will use in the future, be adaptive to changing everything about how we do work
33:50 The danger of becoming attached to specific frameworks and practices
35:10 Make sure that whatever we do delivers the maximum value for our organisation
35:40 It’s not good enough to make great products – we need to make great products that people want and that deliver value for our organisations
