OCTOBER 2018 From tactical to strategic: Four Ways to Become a Purpose-Driven Agile Organization Shannon Mason Val Zolyak
Over the past 20 years, agile has changed the business world. Through it, organizations have unclogged their development pipes to deliver faster, higher-quality products. Now, it s time to move beyond adherence to agile methodologies and program management to achieving business outcomes. Leading the way will be next-gen application lifecycle management (ALM) solutions that integrate predictive analytics and the proper metrics to ensure businesses are aligned and on track to achieve the outcomes they desire. Agile work management processes have transformed organizations over the last two decades by adding process to highly complicated scenarios of human interaction. Widespread success across all industries has made businesses leaner and more nimble than ever. Yet despite operating like well-oiled machines, many are underwhelmed by the outcomes. They aren t seeing the top- and bottom-line results they d anticipated, and many can t even determine the real value of their agile transitions. The initial goal of agile was to build better products by creating a deeper connection between the people developing the products and those using them. But along the way, organizations became bogged down in a sea of methods and processes. Time box cadences and ceremonies took precedence over discovering the meaning and value of the work. A break-fix mentality arose, where solutions to quiet the squeaky wheel were provided without considering the issues creating the problem, nor the opportunity cost of quick fix implementations. The good news is, agile methods and processes are now in place and the agile mindset has been adopted. The next step forward will come with new challenges: Connecting developers to end users to deliver more relevant products Broadcasting a corporate strategy and ensuring everyone understands how their work supports it Leveraging metrics to ensure everyone is strategically oriented towards the right work; the entire company is aligned and executing against company goals Addressing these challenges while continuing to employ proven agile business processes will help organizations achieve outcomes that move the needle. The next iteration of ALM software must move beyond simple work management and actually help customers to achieve outcomes.
FROM TACTICAL TO STRATEGIC: FOUR WAYS TO BECOME A PURPOSE-DRIVEN AGILE ORGANIZATION Stop Responding to Disruptors Become One If you re delivering at agile speed and still scrambling to respond to disruptors, you re not delivering what your customers want. Successful disruptors share similar traits. They tend to be highly purpose driven and have a very clear understanding of the meaning of the work they re doing: Who it s going to serve How it will benefit them What specific outcomes they re looking to achieve How success will be measured Disable disruptors by beating them at their own game: become a purpose-driven organization that leaves no opening for potential competitors to disrupt your business.
Four Ways to Become a Purpose-Driven Organization That Achieves Positive Business Outcomes 1. Implement a continuous and adaptive approach to planning A time box mentality of agile principles keeps organizations operationally static. Planning on any set schedule and this includes funding planning isn t sufficient to ensure the business is continuously optimizing to reach goals. Decisions need to be made dynamically. To successfully achieve business outcomes, implement a continuous feedback loop that tells you where your organization stands with regard to objectives at all times. This, combined with a highly adaptive funding process will help you respond to developments quickly. The objective is not to infinitely pivot from one direction to another. Only when organizations recognize they re not tracking to reach a goal should funding or direction shift to an alternative that will bring more value to customers. The key is to pivot when the data indicates you should or when market conditions point to a necessary change. Increased visibility and predictive analytics will support continuous planning Organizations must be able to visualize the entire state of the business in realtime. That includes visibility into objectives and outcomes from multiple different perspectives: business, opportunity, funding, people, etc. Those involved in planning must be closely attuned to the work that s getting done, where it stands, and how it contributes to overall corporate goals. Today, agile software collects terabytes of data illustrating how businesses are planning and executing against plans. Future ALM tools must leverage machine learning technologies that use this data to identify repetitive behavior patterns that can be used throughout the planning process. Historical data will help predict what the business can actually achieve, highlight potential issues and create large scale, highly complex dependency management schemes. For example, many businesses experience events that materially impact delivery at the same time each quarter. Whether unplanned increases in scope or the last minute removal of features, behavior patterns that have resulted in missteps in the past can be avoided with predictive technologies. Predictive analytics will enable businesses to create better, more continuous plans, set more appropriate expectations and avoid overburdening teams with excessive work.
Data roll-ups Most ALM solutions support today s teams when everyone s following the same processes. But most organizations have multiple teams, using different methodologies, at different maturity levels, and this can present challenges, particularly when it comes to managing dependencies and rolling up data. Organizations must implement solutions that provide the feedback teams need to improve with each development cycle, regardless of methodology or maturity. These solutions must roll up all relevant data to provide metrics that illustrate progress, dependencies and risks, and indicate how plans should be adjusted to reach organizational objectives within a given timeframe. 2. Align focus on business outcomes Leaders set objectives they believe will impact the business. But as they re translated across organizational layers, communication falters and tradeoffs are made until alignment is lost. Objectives that were clear at the executive level become diluted, and by the time work is planned across teams, members can t see how it plays into company strategy; they don t know if they re developing customer value and have no concept of the relevance of the work they re doing. Engagement suffers which reduces the potential of a positive outcome and helps to explain why $97 million of every $1 billion invested by organizations is wasted, 1 78 percent of organizations feel their business is out of sync with project requirements. 2 Because many teams have become overly focused on optimizing for delivery, only half of the work they do is directly tied to company strategy. While delivering quickly and predictably is important, it can t be done at the expense of losing focus on the ultimate goal: delivering customer value. Today s business climate requires a platform that does more than speed delivery and illustrate who s working on what. It must ensure the delivery of meaningful, valuable product to customers.
Refocus DevOps from program management to outcome management ALM solutions should help define the planning phase, ensure alignment in the execution phase, and help manage risks and dependencies throughout. At each level, it should give visibility into the outcome you re trying to achieve so that alignment can be maintained through trade-off decisions, and provide top-tobottom visibility to identify where and when alignment breaks down. To be clear, this is not a construct that can be layered into an existing tool. It s a pervasive change to every aspect of the solution. A rebuilding from the foundation up so that every screen at the executive, team and individual levels illustrates progress, highlights risks and identifies dependencies, all in the context of outcomes. It s no longer about features, deliverables or sprints; it s about outcomes and ultimately, value. Vendors must therefore shift from an execution-oriented agile, focused on delivering specific pieces of work, to a new form of ALM that drives business outcomes by wrapping all work activities and all visualizations into outcomes. Future ALM tools will improve DevOps with data-based scenario modeling Teams have trouble pushing back when it comes to changes in delivery plans. By illustrating overall program capacity and how work aligns to business priorities, the impact on objectives will be immediately visible when decision makers implement changes. Modeling various scenarios like refocusing teams or pushing work out within the context of risks, dependencies and key business objectives can help executives decide how changes can be made with the minimal amount of disruption or provide evidence for why changes shouldn t be made at all. 3. Implement outcomes-based metrics Businesses must continuously renew commitments to customer engagement and value or they ll simply speed the delivery of products customers don t want. This means establishing a roadmap at the program level, assigning work to trains and then breaking it down into teams, and ensuring across-the-board transparency for everyone to see the big picture: the vision, roadmap and objectives they re trying to reach, as well as how their work is impacting those objectives. Maintaining a thread that allows teams to understand the value they re delivering can also help them identify how altering their approach could be beneficial. Most agile organizations have enough information to make data-driven decisions that improve their ability to meet objectives. The key is being aware of what s being released and the response to it at all times. While agile ceremonies provide critical customer feedback, they happen too infrequently. Real-time data is required to support continuous planning and ensure businesses are tracking to meet objectives.
A real-world focus on business outcomes A large financial institution has a well-established development cycle. The company s ATM systems are regularly upgraded and each time, telemetry technologies collect customer use data that allows the bank to monitor how customers use new features. A new button incorporated into the ATM screen, for example, might be tracked to count how many customers click on it, and how often that click leads to purchases. That information can be calculated and tied back to the project ROI. Results are instantaneous, and are immediately provided to the development team, illustrating the real-time response to that project, its impact and its ROI. This means teams know immediately and continuously how they re tracking to meet the organization s objectives. An effective metrics framework should take a top-to-bottom approach that starts with planning the desired outcome, breaks it down into streams of work to be delivered, helps the teams understand what outcomes the work they re doing is directly contributing to and ensures that every aspect of the work underway is aligned to achieving the desired goal. The key here is to move beyond measuring the number of releases and focusing on metrics that promote outcome-driven behaviors: Have we improved customer satisfaction? Are we solving new problems? and Have we moved the needle? ALM software automation The scale of agile implementations has grown significantly and today they often involve thousands of people. Solutions must adapt to facilitate planning across large populations. This can be achieved through the automation of processes. Integrating agile software with a source code management tool, for example, would automatically change status as code is completed without anyone having to manually track it. This kind of process automation would save time, minimize frustration and ensure work status is always up to date.
4. Remove all bottlenecks to achieve crossorganizational flow The most successful DevOps programs typically follow three rules of delivery: It must be incremental. Annual upgrades have given way to more frequent improvement releases. It must be strategic. Development is driven by corporate strategy. It must involve a continuous process of improvement. Participation in a process of continuous delivery renders the entire development organization in flow. But what if your entire organization participated in a lean or Kanban process from the top all the way to delivery? What if the entire enterprise participated and achieved in flow product development and collectively overcame bottlenecks? Future ALM tools will extend across the organization ALM tool vendors must strive to support customers at every stage in their agile journey, but at the same time help them visualize their organizations as highly effective, well-tuned engines across the entire organization not just within product development. Bottlenecks must be removed across all areas, from product or program ideation to development and finance. Once all systems are synced, continuous flow is achieved across the organization. To mature their agile implementations, approaches like the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) or Large Scale Scrum (LeSS) must be adopted and projected across the enterprise. Building a purpose-driven organization In order to transform into an outcomes-oriented, purpose-driven organization that handily reaches its goals and wards off predatory disruptors, businesses must master the ability to: Visualize how trade-offs and adjustments will impact the overarching objectives. Leverage leading and lagging indicators to evaluate and execute pivot decisions. Decentralize funding and shift funds in real-time rather than on a quarterly or annual basis.
CA Agile Central Leading the Way As an early pioneer, CA Agile Central has been a core player in defining agile, delivering functionality and achieving market acceptance. Today, mainstream and agile software vendors must push the next phase in the evolution of the work happening inside businesses toward an approach that empowers teams to contribute, challenge and improve on the plan. The further down organizations promote the focus on outcomes and provide visibility into objectives, the more likely they ll be achieved, and the more meaningful they ll be. The change required is pervasive. It s not just a new construct or artifact to be layered in. It must be integrated into the entire flow, including executive and team planning, tracking, dependency management and progress analytics. Future ALM tools must now revolve around the outcome the organization is trying to achieve. For more information, please visit /ca-agile-central Connect with CA Technologies CA Technologies (NASDAQ: CA) creates software that fuels transformation for companies and enables them to seize the opportunities of the application economy. Software is at the heart of every business, in every industry. From planning to development to management and security, CA is working with companies worldwide to change the way we live, transact and communicate across mobile, private and public cloud, distributed and mainframe environments. Learn more at. 1 Project Management Institute, Pulse of the Profession 2017, 2017, https://www.pmi.org/learning/thought-leadership/pulse/pulse-of-theprofession-2017 2 Geneca, Why Up To 75% of Software Projects Will Fail, 2017, https://www.gene/75-business-executives-anticipate-softwareprojects-fail/ Copyright 2018 CA. All rights reserved. All trademarks, trade names, service marks and logos referenced herein belong to their respective companies. This document is for your informational purposes only. CA assumes no responsibility for the accuracy or completeness of the information. To the extent permitted by applicable law, CA provides this document as is without warranty of any kind, including, without limitation, any implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, or noninfringement. In no event will CA be liable for any loss or damage, direct or indirect, from the use of this document, including, without limitation, lost profits, business interruption, goodwill or lost data, even if CA is expressly advised in advance of the possibility of such damages. CS200-395619