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

Another reason why operational efficiency has taken priority over operational agility is the investment classification systems used in many enterprises. A number of classification schemes are used today, but they generally follow along the lines of that offered by MIT’s Computer Information Systems Research group: infrastructure, transactional,

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

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,

This cascading delegation, shown in Figure 4-4, with alignment to the level above, borrows heavily from the lean movement’s Hoshin Kanri.5 In particular, the concept of “catchball” emphasizes communication, accountability, and feedback between layers of responsibility in the organization.

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

One of the tasks you need to complete is to determine a strategy for your key technology assets or asset classes. This analysis includes three components, shown in Figure 2-6: (1) determining the asset classes’ impact on Lean Value Tree (LVT) goals, (2) speculating on the rate of change of this area of the business, and (3) determining the current

Autonomous teams should work toward assigned customer value outcomes, rather than being assigned tasks. What to work on is, generally, given to the team through the prioritization of initiatives in the LVT and the backlog. The team, which should include a product person, collaboratively prioritizes what it will work on during the next iteration to

The cultural mindset is one of exploration—that you can’t know everything in advance and that significant deviations are the norm. The cultural aspects of experimentation are covered in more depth in Chapter 10. The second requirement is an experimental process, which for the purposes of this book is an enhanced version of agile. The third