EDGE: Value-Driven Digital Transformation

The three principles on the outside loop—outcome-based strategy, value-based prioritization, and lightweight planning and governance— focus on answering the “how should we invest” question. The inner loop principles—autonomous teams; adaptive, learning culture; and self-sufficient, collaborative decisions—speak to working together and adapting fast

Governance teams need to navigate a paradox—ensuring adequate compliance to fiduciary, regulatory, and risk management needs while also moderating the burdensome overhead of traditional governance processes. When teams are asked to be flexible, adaptive, and agile, governance processes need to mirror those goals. This means changing the measurement

In a waterfall project, it is easier to cut refactoring, for example, because the impact is felt in the future, when engineers feel the pain of technical debt and customers feel the pain of lengthy delivery schedules. Cycle time measures are irrelevant when release cycles are too long. However, as agile teams reduce delivery cycles to months, weeks

You can’t plan away uncertainty; you need to experiment it away.

Characteristics of Autonomous Teams The best decisions and products result from teams with the following characteristics: Independent. Teams are self-directed with clear goals and boundaries they can play within. Empowered. Teams perceive that their decisions aren’t constantly questioned; they have a clear understanding of their decision rights. Ac

As some organizations move to more autonomous teams and agile practices, the link can be lost between executives’ desired customer value and the delivery of the work. The autonomous team relies heavily on the role of product as the “glue” that brings diverse perspectives together and aligns them with the portfolio team and customer expectations.

The third type of transition has been from project to capability, as organizations commit to outcome goals. This realignment includes both technology and business areas of the organization. This typically happens as organizations become customer driven from the outside in, rather than from the inside out. Desired customer value outcomes are then su

A goal describes how the organization intends to realize the vision. Goals are relatively stable views of the high-level business strategy and are expressed in terms of desired outcomes,

Agile practices encourage teams to deliver deployment-ready code every iteration and even deploy code if the team uses continuous deployment. One easy metric that provides an indication of how far away from that goal a team might be—essentially an indicator of how much friction is in the development process—is “the tail,” referring to the time betw

Can your organization adapt fast enough? This is a fundamental question today, for every organization, every enterprise. But it’s not enough to have agile delivery teams or continuous delivery: To be “fast enough,” your enterprise must have a responsive technology platform, an experimental and learning culture, and an executive team dedicated to fi