
Agile from a Lean Perspective
How would you think about decision-making and Lean by taking another look at the Agile Manifesto?
Agile IQ® Score: 165+
Companies at this stage of their transformation journey are in the Ri stage of Shu Ha Ri. Stage Five organisations have an Agile IQ greater than 165.
Stage Five suggests that your company has mastered its digital transformation and is engaged in continuous and relentless improvement at a whole ‘systems’ perspective over just teams.
Granting teams opportunities to lead is the key to sustaining this level of agility in an agile organisation.
Up to $30M+
Every day
< 1 week
Very high
Stage Five highlights that the company and its teams think about the "big picture' and optimising its parts rather than on optimising for outcomes for individual teams.
Teams optimise for its own outcomes | move to |
The team sacrifices its own needs over the needs of the whole value stream. |
Continuous improvement | move to |
Product management actively invests in capability improvement. |
Individual OKRs | move to |
Product based OKRs and KPIs with teams' goal aligned to contributing to those. |
While your Agile IQ® score is very high, there is always more to learn to optimise outcomes for customers.
Agile leadership | actions for growth |
Executives and managers should lead by example and work in executive agile teams. |
Agile capability management | actions for growth |
Invest in improving time to market and ability to innovate as part of the improvement of products and creating capavbility to enter new markets. |
Inspecting/adapting cycle for OKRs | actions for growth |
Employ Sprint Reviews and quarterly review cycles on inspecting progress toward OKRs and adapting initiatives to ensure these are reached. |
Data on the fastest path to sustainable growth, based on other companies' successes and lessons learned, is key to avoid the traps of transformation
Team level responsibilities | avoid |
Leaving teams as teams. Give high performing Stage Five teams more responsibilities to teach others how to be more agile. |
Issues most often occur in Stage Five when:
Support these teams to help optimise the value stream, create alignment in other teams
Support teams to mentor others and improve their agile capability maturity.
Product budgets must include investment in time to support improvements in Time to Market and Ability to Innovate.
A system is a set of related components, such as people, processes and tools, that work together in an organisation to perform a set of functions required to achieve the organisation’s objectives.
Systems thinking is a way that high performing teams make sense of the complexity of product management by looking at delivery in terms of:
Systems thinking draws on and contributes to systems theory and the system sciences to help teams consider how to solve problems from thuis big picture, rather than focusing exclusively on small details.
A chapter is a collection of people who share a similar skill set and work in the same tribe. The chapter is led by a line member, who is also a squad member. Spotify popularised the term, using chapters as a way to build capability across different teams and to discuss ways of improving their specialised area.
Chapters and improvement of specialised capability areas should be a key part of a manager’s responsibility under an organisation’s operating model. Talented individuals in Stage Five teams should have leadership responsibilities in Chapters.
Example Chapters:
A Guild is a wider community of people who share the same interest. While Chapters typically span multiple teams in a single Agile Release Train or Product stream and focus on capability development of a single skill area, a Guild often includes members from all over the organisation and focuses on knowledge areas outside of common skillsets.
Stage Five team members make excellent guild coordinators. Their responsibility is to help:
Example Chapters:
EBM metrics reinforce:
A Guild’s ability to quickly deliver new capabilities, services, or products is measured by “time to market”.
The reason for looking at T2M is to minimise the amount of time it takes for the organisation to deliver value. Without actively managing T2M, the ability to sustainably deliver value in the future is unknown.
Improving T2M helps improve the frequency at which an organisation can potentially change the current value of a product.
Use Lean metrics to understand:
A Guild’s The effectiveness of an organization to deliver new capabilities that might
better meet customer needs.
The goal of looking at the A2I is to maximise the organisation’s ability to deliver new capabilities and innovative solutions.
How would you think about decision-making and Lean by taking another look at the Agile Manifesto?
More than ever, organisations must focus on their investments and efforts. EBM is designed to drive
Learn to improve ‘overburdenning’ the team and its members to increase throughput of work.