Enterprise Transparency through Agile for Executives

ZXM helps a team of executives move away from siloed reporting and towards understanding enterprise-wide delivery of value.

The Situation

The executive group were using a separate hour-long weekly meeting to report on each of their own branches to the CIO.

While traditional reports provided a comprehensive view of the individual branches work, there was:

Little transparency of all the work across the enterprise.
No transparency of dependencies across the enterprise.
No visibility of the outcome of value – just “busy-ness” and activity-based reporting.

The meeting was run with each General Manager reporting on their own branch outputs without looking at what value was being delivered as a whole. ZXM’s challenge was to implement a faster and easier way for the CIO to be updated on what value was being delivered by the Division rather than just looking at the branches individually so that the Executive could make informed decisions on business priorities from a whole of organisation value perspective.

The Solution

ZXM focused the group on the value that was being sought by the division and how this value required the combined efforts of multiple branches to truly be realised. With this in mind the focus was shifted from Branch level outputs to value delivered by the entire division. ZXM established an ‘outcome wall’ outside the CIO’s office to help focus the meeting and set the following guidelines for the meeting:

Executives have an agreed on a way to rank outcomes in terms of their value to the enterprise.
Discuss outcomes rather than outputs (“deliverables” focused).
Progress of outcomes is discussed with all those (from across the Division) involved in its delivery.
If a conversation becomes too detailed, it is called out and participants who need to be in that discussion further stay back after the meeting to discuss
If a question is raised without being answered, a note is put on the outcome so that it can be revisited and worked on prior to the next meeting.
The meeting is time boxed to 30 minutes.

The Results

Conversations between the executive team are now more targeted and address the CIO’s concerns about what value is being delivered from the whole division. The focus is on value and outcomes rather than outputs – is highlighting issues they can resolve from a whole-of-division perspective instead of just within their own branches. The meeting time is also dramatically reduced from 4 hours to 30 mins. This is the first time the organisation has transparency of all the work within the enterprise and this visibility is enabling executives to make strategic decisions on where effort, resources and people should be focused to deliver more value to the organisation.

Testament to the success of these meetings, the COO is now also attending the meeting as a succinct and effective way of ensuring value is delivered through agile.

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