MAKING AGILE WORK FOR BUSINESS
What is Agile Culture essentials (ACE)?
ACE is a bouquet of curated programs designed to make Agile work for your business. It unleashes the key goals that Agile was meant to accomplish – be successful as a business and be quick to adapt to changing market conditions and opportunities.
The programs focus on the culture in the technology teams and guides organizational leaders and teams energize their existing Agile frameworks.
Why Focus on Culture for Being Agile?
Agile frameworks like Scrum, Kanban, SAFe provide well defined templates for organizations to embrace business and organizational agility. New organizational roles, ceremonies and tools are prescribed that organizations adopt.
All Agile frameworks however make a fundamental assumption – that the organizations that adopt them have an underlying culture to adopt the frameworks – a culture of leadership that promotes business aligned decision making at the edges of the organization. Such a culture requires highly motivated and empowered, business aligned cross functional teams that self-organize to deliver business outcomes. These are explicitly called out in 5 of the 12 principles in the Agile Manifesto.
Agile transformations fail to achieve their stated objectives because organizations try to force fit Agile frameworks while continuing with a strong command and control culture. This comes in the way of team level ownership and decision making. Organization leaders, particularly founders and executive leadership need to understand their role in influencing this culture. Such influence comes in the form of goal clarity, information transparency, alignment of functions around business goals, etc.
ACE provides a vast collection of tried and tested practices that influence the cultural elements across all levels in the organization needed to make Agile Work for Business.
DOES MY ORGANIZATION NEED IT?
You need a dose of ACE in your Agile journey if you are experiencing one or more of these:
Departmental mindset and increased bureaucracy
Your organization is becoming slower as it grows in size
Lack of decision making ability in teams
Executives and senior leaders are busy resolving day to day dysfunctions.
Project v/s Product Mindset
Managers and team members are burnt out working hard but value to customers is still slow.
Low autonomy in teams
Managers have no time to look outwards to real business problems and are stuck within their own teams/departments.
Misalignment of goals
All management metrics indicate your departments are successful but growth feels stuck.
Lack of learning
General apathy and lack of motivation to deal with the problems that are slowing the organization down.
HOW DOES ACE ADDRESS THESE?
Survey, Observe and Listen
A simple anonymous survey combined with our consultants observing and listening to your teams go about their Agile ceremonies.
The survey provides an objective assessment around the 5 pillars – Trust, Alternate Controls, Self Management, Stakeholder Alignment and Creative Innovation.
Align and Enable
Engage with each layer of the leadership across the organizational value stream and the teams with a series of curated workshops. The workshops reinforce WHY Agile requires the culture and how lack of culture impedes Agility. This phase ends with the co-creation of an action plan around social contracts, governance, measurements, participation and engagement required to make Agile work.
Coach
Work with the teams on the ground to help teams and their leaders get their actions to work in each of the Agile ceremonies.
HOW WE CAN HELP
We offer several packaged options that you can choose depending on your unique organizational needs. You can even choose to run our programs in a part of your organization as pilots.
Curated Program Options:
- ACE Bootcamp – Leadership Bootcamp
- ACE Assess – Assessment and Roadmap
- ACE DIY – Certification Program for Leaders and Coaches
- ACE Starter – Pilot Program
- ACE Journeys – Comprehensive Program
Curated Strategic Options:
- ACE Pivot – From Services to Products
- ACE Global – for Agility in Global Capability Centers(GCCs)
MORE INSPIRATION
Shaping the future of work is what we aim for. One of the ways we do this is by offering free content in the form of e-books and blog articles. A selection of our free content that will get you started:
Contact
More information about ACE?.
Feel free to contact us via maverick@semcostyle.in or by filling out this form.