With uncertainty at an all time high, the response of many organisations in those early days was to batten down the hatches and the impact may be felt for many months to come. To survive through this, big up front planning will be out and pivoting to respond to change will be the new normal.
Rapidly pivoting to new priorities and understanding what can be done now to solve immediate impediments to work are the new normal for executives. Their need to be more responsive has led to rapid acceleration of digital transformation plans and business agility.
Every executive is familiar with the hours long weekly meetings where senior leaders report to the CIO. When the world is rapidly changing and whole divisions work remotely, comprehensive formal reports are good but outdated by the time they’re written.
There’s a temptation in times of crisis for leadership to feel the need to redeploy people. The idea is that urgent priorities are best handled by moving people around, creating tiger teams, and putting them on the urgent work. Are long lived agile teams a luxury we can no longer afford?
Now more than ever, the ability to respond to change over ‘following a plan’ couldn’t ring truer. Now we are working from home, readjusting to a new ‘norm’, but all the while living in a state of chaos whilst still ‘keeping the lights on’ in the space of not months or years but in weeks, days and even hours. How do executives ensure their agile teams remain productive when working remotely?
How can you rapidly scale the ability to pivot to disruptive change? Agile transformations can take 3-5 years. While the bigger the system of work the longer it takes, there are some key activities you can do to lead the change, make it more effective, and make it stick.
The Scrum Master doesn’t remove impediments from the team. Their job encompasses 22 wider stances for supporting the team to self-organise to remove impediments themselves, coaching the Product Owner and coaching the wider organisation.
Better executive decision making comes from transparency and effective metrics. In agile, what does this look like?
How to look beyond the post-it notes and measure the impact of your Agile Coaches
How to use OKRs within the scaled agile framework and make it work? Use Evidence Based Management (EBM).
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