EDGE: Value-Driven Digital Transformation

“Bet” and “speculate” force us to face the reality that the future will bring changes that we didn’t anticipate. If we admit that the future will be variable, then we have to put better practices and measures of success in place that enable us to adapt to the future that occurs.

When outcomes are uncertain, answers hard to devise, that’s the time to form a team, tap dreams, and improvise…. Putting lipstick on a bulldog won’t transform enough. Makeup can’t hide everything; change takes deeper stuff.1 1. Kanter, Rosabeth Moss. e-Volve!: Succeeding in the Digital Culture of Tomorrow.Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2001

Being on schedule, budget variance, velocity, and defect count are all examples of measures of activity that provide no directional guidance to the delivery team, and have a tenuous relationship with value. Measures of activity should be used within teams only to enable learning and continuous improvement. Measurements of activity should never be u

Think of traditional organizations in which business analysts, developers, testers, and operations staff operate in separate functional teams. These teams are dependent on each other at a very low level. Even though they may be working toward the same goal, they will inevitably have different priorities. They will also have different processes and

For example, if you had a solitary MoS, such as customer satisfaction, it might drive satisfaction at the expense of profitability. You can avoid this undesirable outcome by adding the “guardrail” measure of profitability (a benefit), which provides the guidance that solutions should optimize customer satisfaction and profitability. Then, when your

Thin slicing starts with understanding the end-to-end customer journey, defining clear customer goals, mapping outcomes or features at each step in the journey, and then relatively prioritizing thin slices that can be released to the customer for validation and feedback. This creates the “build, measure, learn” loop in agile delivery. During the fi

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

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

Having an LVT aligned around outcomes and an organization aligned around functions is a misalignment of people to desired outcomes.

the technology transition has been moving from cost and efficiency to speed and adaptability (of course, customer value is everyone’s primary fitness function). This transition is illustrated by an article and a book published 10 years apart. In 2003, Nicholas Carr wrote a controversial article in the Harvard Business Review titled “IT Doesn’t Matt