Trains tracks…

Years ago I would drive by a large billboard each day that said “even if you’re on the right track, you’ll get run over if you just sit there”. A colleague recently shared a story about an enterprise company that had tried introducing agile practices into it’s organization on several occasions yet failed each time to successfully gain adoption and acceptance.

After inspecting the situation a bit more, the underlying driver for this failure was due to the company’s ongoing success in generating cash and positive financial results. The financial situation of the company was contributing to an apathy within parts of the organization and in this case it was largely IT that was not really moving forward. IT wasn’t really pressured to innovate or change and although they wanted to introduce new ways of working, the sense of urgency was minimal and the risk of failure was low in their minds since there were really no major reasons to do something much different or much better.

This organization was on the right track in their respective industry yet they were just sitting there, basking in the sunlight of their success with little to no attention of taking a leap forward in the market, separating themselves from the rising competition and introducing innovation across the organization.

Today that company is one of several in a fiercely competitive market and while they are still experiencing levels of success but there is no doubt that their competitors of old and some new and rising stars have caught up. When companies talk about change there isn’t always a recognition that it requires mainly a mind-shift in how things are done. Tools, processes, practices are all ways to improve things and help change along it’s path but the acceleration, adoption and results most organizations seek from a change program comes from the passion of the people involved, which must include it’s leaders.

As with most things, the lack of planning and preparation to initiate change is often one major reason for it’s failure. Failing fast is a good agile principle but not a great Change Management one. Change is incremental, iterative and actually represents many of the practices and values you would find in very well run agile program or project.

Evaluating change is ongoing and requires the courage to “change” the people that don’t want to change. Change is also a constant and not a point in time “plan” that is started and ended like a project. The trap of success is the plateau phase that many organizations get to at some point in their lifecycle and what breaks through that effectively is a mindset of change that has existed along the way to continuously innovate and challenge the current environment.

The train track quote above was also stated another way that perhaps says it even better.

Neither a wise man nor a brave man lies down on the tracks of history to wait for the train of the future to run over him.  ~Dwight D. Eisenhower

Company values and principles…

I often sit in customer conference and boardrooms where the company’s corporate values are etched in the glass, on posters along the walls or framed like fine artwork. This is a great practice and it is commendable that companies take the time and spend the money to ensure their values are visually displayed in the work environment.

The challenge, however, is that few employees within a company can articulate the values themselves not to mention what the principles for each value are and how they are practically lived out, measured and continuously improved upon.

Values are things that are worth doing. Communication has intrinsic value, as a company you might see this as having significant worth to how your business runs therefore it is called out as such. The rules, conduct and methods by which we communicate are the underlying principles that support the value, e.g. a principle of communication would be that, as an employee, I will actively share knowledge and information with customers leaving no room for ambiguity.

Taking the time to define values and principles for an organisation is done as an effort to publish guidelines and explanations on how a company and it’s respective employees should operate and behave. They set the standards to follow, the benchmark to measure and the ultimately shape the core of how the business lives and works in the community, whether locally or globally.

When Demming challenged the Japanese after World War II to look at their existing quality standards and completely redesign them, he was challenging not only their existing process but also the values and principles they lived by. When many took Demming’s counsel and built quality into the process beginning at the design phase vs. inspecting only at the end of production, they discovered that they equally had just established new values of accountability and transparency. This is one reason why we see Toyota highlighted often as the poster child for lean manufacturing.

In fact, this leads to the key point of this post. A company’s values and principles need to tie directly back to how the business is run. The values we publish must also be translated into tangible measures. These measures are checkpoints along the path that lead to company goals and objectives. For example, if the company has stated that it needs to reduce cost by 20% for the current fiscal year then one of the values impacted would be integrity. This means that not only employees need to ensure they are spending only what is necessary to achieve desired results but that the company’s commercial models with vendors and suppliers are also inspected to ensure they are delivering on desired business value and results that are completely aligned with corporate goals and objectives.

Yes, this is easier to write about than to do in practice but that is the point. The fact that aligning values we’ve published with corporate goals is work, often delays us in doing it. It is easier to make a poster than to push for change.

Inspecting our values and principles frequently and identifying how they align to the business is a necessary task to ensure we are doing the rights in the right order and in the right way…

Customer Value Analysis

I’m a bit cynical about “marketing-speak”, meaning the buzz words and phrases many of us use in business to communicate our company’s services and offerings. There are only so many words and phrases you can use to describe something and the skill is in describing it without sounding like your pushing it on someone.

At first, the phrase “Customer Value Analysis” can seem like another nicely packaged, over-valued service. The three words that make up this phrase are indeed important in and of themselves since they communicate the exact topics any firm would want to address.

So let’s take our marketing view off the phrase for a moment since the underlying concepts are powerful. Customer Value Analysis, or CVA, is a critical step in the life-cycle of any effort at the portfolio, program or project level in any organisation. CVA is the thing we all wish we did when we started the project, it is the thing we should have done all through the project and it is typically the one thing we neglect to do at the end.

In traditional change management systems and delivery methodologies you will always find boxes on the diagram that reference vision, feasibility, validation, test, measure and benefits. The gateways, checkpoints and stages in these processes were originally designed to quantify and ensure that there were some controls in place to move from phase to phase. These phases are all supported by specific artifacts, sign-offs and approvals.

But there is always a looming question, “what problem are we trying to solve?” The answer to that question is what drives CVA. It is the use of agile practices in a stakeholder forum that gets to the heart of answering the very questions that will determine the best course of action; questions like;

• What are the goals and objectives of this effort?
• Why are these the goals and objectives?
• How do we know that we are working on the right things in the right order?
• How will we know that we were successful?
• Who is accountable to drive any of this?

In recent months Lean Six Sigma has become another buzz phrase. The idea of taking the traditional DMAIC methodology from 3-5 months down to 3-5 weeks is predicated on the lean practices, which are nearly identical to the agile ones, in order to get to the root of the issues and objectives at the forefront and establish a heartbeat for the effort and the organisation that will allow monitoring across its lifecycle.

At emergn, CVA is in our DNA (acronym overkill…) and while the acronym and phrase appear marketing oriented, they represent the core reasons why it flows within everything we do for ourselves and clients.

• Customer – that is who we are here to serve
• Value -  the right currencies (time, money, share) that can be measured for the right reasons
• Analysis – the knowledge and validation to know why we are doing what we set out to do

The approach can be applied at any point in the life-cycle and not just the beginning, that is power of it and that is the thinking behind it. Lots to think about if you’re not able to answer the simplest questions.

Filed away…

In the last 6 months I’ve had various conversations with heads of sourcing, procurement and vendor management on the topic on contract and commercial models. Although the discussions were intended to be more about making risk/reward contracts less of a risk and more of a mutual reward, almost in every case the dialogue shifted to how these organisations have historically dealt with contracts and how after the initial negotiation period the contract became extinct.

The common denominator was that after these companies finalised terms with the vendor, the contract was signed and filed away and rarely referenced to again, if at all. Why does this happen? One reason is because the process of negotiation seems to be more important than the outcome itself. There are contributing factors as to why contracts are not left on the table to be reviewed, assessed and measured periodically.

Some of these factors include; lack of contract skills on the part of many procurement and sourcing personnel, too great of a dependency on a given supplier to risk pushing for more, limited follow through to keep the supplier accountable to the negotiated terms (once you’re in the thick of it very little attention is paid to the document that was supposed to govern the engagement), bloated or heavy process that makes the measurement of the contract more tedious than necessary and perhaps the most glaring contributor, lack of understanding on how risk/reward contracts can or should work.

In general the concept of risk/reward and managed service that is driven by a set of SLAs (Service Level Agreements) are fine on paper but don’t necessarily map well to how companies run their organisations. The guiding principles of agile and lean support the very reasons why commercial models based on risk/reward or managed service can actually be successful. The inferred premise is that any organisation, IT or Business, that is employing these practices is actually shaping “how they work” from the onset of any relationship and therefore they are “building quality in” from the beginning to identify, define, follow and measure a core set of indicators that make sense to the business.

The emergnContract, for example that was announced this past week is based on the very premise that every commercial model between a company and it’s respective vendor can be shaped in a more lean fashion with more specific sets of criteria to measure and used along the lifecycle of a project as a tool rather than a document to ensure that the initial ideals for success have been realised.

Before you file that next contract, take a moment to assess what you really are expecting from the contract itself and whether you are really certain of the intended outcome.

Executive agile

One of the more frequent questions I get is how the practices that make up a good agile leader or team can be applied to an executive and his/her direct management team. I believe it is important to step outside the “agile” circle for a moment and recognize that the practices, principles, methods, techniques and most importantly, the values that shape a successful agile leader, team or project are more important that the “agile” brand themselves.

Using the proven disciplines of agile, executives can improve themselves and their organizations dramatically.

• The idea of running stand-ups vs. sit downs improves focus, effectiveness and decision making because the technique teaches leaders how to operate more efficiently and with more rigor in working through their respective areas of responsibility.
• Running the business with visual tools, i.e. value stream maps and Kanban boards brings lean thinking into the equation and simplifies the views of information, removes the waste of large documents, endless slide-ware and reports that no one really ever reads in complete detail. The use of lean/agile tools also lend themselves to visualizing accountability of stakeholders, showcasing results but also identifying failures or risks much earlier in the process.
• Adopting more common agile practices, i.e. user stories actually bring more definition and purpose to what an organization needs to get done. A user story approach in defining business goals and objectives allows for clarity and simplification of major initiatives but it also helps teach leaders how to hone their communication

The last point is really about the idea of agile in the realm of executive coaching. As an industry, executive coaching uses more traditional techniques to train leaders how to be more effective but these techniques, like most that are traditional, can benefit greatly from becoming more lean and agile in their approach. As an individual and as a company, executive coaching is something we do and the application of common lean and agile practices has proven more effective than the traditional techniques employed to grow leaders.

Some of the practices and methods mentioned in the bullets above are common ways to accelerate growth in an executive team and when you consider that organizations can align these same sets of practices throughout middle management and in several major areas of the business you then begin to see agile at scale within an enterprise.

I’m passionate about 1-to-1 executive agile coaching, or as we call it here; emergnEXEC. As a leader in your company it is worth the time to understand how it all applies.