Five clear steps for CIOs to achieve business agility

No matter where a company is on its agility journey, it can transform into a customer-centric, even customer-obsessed organisation that produces inspired, sustained innovation and value.

These five steps will guide CIOs to an agile end result:

Deliver value faster. Start by building a strong yet nimble core of delivery. Again, it doesn’t matter how good the strategy is if you can’t execute it. This first step is all about executing and delivering rapidly on the strategy. Get software and IT teams to finish quality applications as quickly as possible. Build stable agile teams and delivery groups. Get people thinking about delivering to shared outcomes. Repeatedly encourage limiting work-in-progress (WIP) at all levels.

Use three metrics to measure success: adoption, operational and impact. Your adoption metrics need to be focused on value streams and percent of investment, plus behavioural metrics on the specifics of what teams are doing. Note that measuring adoption should disappear in time. As part of this, always evaluate employee engagement.

Use agile management software that gives all teams visibility into all WIP, not just their own.

Choose the most valuable, smallest pieces of work to deliver rapidly to customers. Think carefully about planning the sequence of work and deploying that work more consistently. Demonstrate limiting WIP across development and operations teams. Account for, and buffer, unplanned work.

Get a feel for exploiting new opportunities in the digital age by expecting innovation from everyone.

Provide software support to show the flow of work from application/product and architectural decisions all the way through to deployment in production in various stages in planned as well as unplanned work for all teams. Include operations, architecture, security, compliance and analytics team members in delivery groups and in big room agile release planning sessions. Give all teams visibility into each other’s WIP, as well as feedback from each stakeholder and customer session.

Within a value stream, consider the end-to-end cycle: from the moment you think about doing something, to the decision to proceed, to funding and allocating the right teams, to moving it through the development organisation, deploying it to customers and implementing it throughout the business.

Respect and leverage the very tight connection between the implementation organisation and the business need. Encourage the flow of incomplete data. Eliminate the expectation of exact requirements combined with a set budget to deliver the whole set of exact requirements, and of individual resources among multiple projects.

Support portfolio agility with software that allows you to look at potential allocations of work to stable teams based on real capacity and expertise. In this way you can compare which ones are likely to deliver the most customer value to market and in the quickest time possible.

Initially, consider measuring the ratio of funding decisions based on market and customer value outcomes compared to those based on traditional and specific requirements and plans.

Dynamically and intentionally change or amplify the opportunities invested in, quarter after quarter, through big room quarterly steering and release planning and a strategy deployment process. But make sure you’re getting the full value out of what you’ve delivered; that you’re giving the business and customers what they want, when and where they want it.

Optimise what you build for the greatest impact. Support this step by emphasising mindsets and skills of disciplined opportunity exploration and by limiting organisational WIP. Provide supporting software that clearly shows organisational initiatives for the quarter and ties each of them to every person’s daily work to make all of the organisation’s work visible.

Additionally, choose software that connects initiatives to enterprise funding sources, incorporates agile costs into financial governance, and handles agile capitalisation. Optimise for sustainable shortest lead time: the time from when you first identify an opportunity to when you start realising benefits. Sense and respond to change as a matter of everyday business.

Sense and return clearly articulated shared outcomes; demonstrate high-trust leadership and adopt a lean-thinking mindset throughout the business.

Cultivate organisational health by articulating these goals, establishing trust-based teams through regular communication, and by collaborating across value streams as well as up and down management stacks.

Create what will feel like threatening levels of transparency and delegated decision-making, all the way down. Establish structural flexibility with adaptable funding models and understand how to flow work and flex the business shape on demand, including governance, auditing and even key suppliers. Get a feel for exploiting new opportunities in the digital age by expecting innovation from everyone.

Support this step with software that provides visibility into how you vet opportunities at each horizon, showing horizon-based metrics and continuation criteria. Choose software that supports organisational health by making strategy visible to all. Use financial management software to show how investments are represented in work flowing across the business.

Measure market share leadership position.

By now you are possibly thinking: this is a huge organisational change. Yes it is, but it is a proven path to the delivery of more customer value, faster.