Evan Leybourn - Agile2017

BUSINESS AGILITY: Evan Leybourn, founder of
the Business Agility Institute and Conference, has been screaming
into the void about Business Agility, and the void is finally
screaming back.  Evan is building a strong community around
business agility across diverse industries, and plans to reclaim
business agility from the consultants and marketing folks that
keep using the buzzword.


Evan sat down with Bob Payne of the Agile Toolkit podcast to
discuss.


How do you define Business Agility?  How do we
de-buzzword it?


Hearing so many stories, I came to the position that we don't
want a definition.  In this formative stage of Business
Agility around the world, whatever definition we put on it is
going to limit its ability to be more things to more people, and
right now I think that's more important.


What we did is we actually put together a Model of Business
Agility, about 60 of us working with the community on all the
different domains and dimensions that make up Business
Agility.  I think that is a better way of visualizing the
totality of what it is rather than a sound byte.


Outcomes: In the context of software delivery, Agile has
been only about the build for a long time and misses the mark of
real outcomes for customers, stakeholders, etc...


I like to talk about changing the questions. It's not about
what something costs, it's about what something is worth. 
It's about putting the customer at the center of what you
do.  If your KPIs are about earning money, about revenue,
you're missing the point. The intent behind why we're in
business is often forgotten.


An Agile organization is one that has clear measures and KPIs
around why they are in business and customer intent.  If you
address the customer's need effectively and efficiently, and the
customer likes what you're doing, and your reason for existing is
sound, customers and profits will come.  Traditional
organizations measure the wrong thing.  Agile organizations
measure the business-customer outcome.  That's a very clear
distinction.


What does Business Agility look like?


I've been working with industries from banking to mining to
retail to IT.  Business Agility is relevant to everyone, it
is the next generation of company models.  We talk about
matrix organizations, that's the 1980s mindset.  We now that
these Agile organizations, dynamic and structured in a way that
teams own outcomes.  In fact, in the Business Agility model,
one of the key domains is structural agility, and that's
incredibly important. If an organization doesn't have the right
structure, it's actually going to lose its ability to be
Agile.  Every time there's a handoff, every time that a team
is created around a function, it loses its ability to be
agile.  An Agile organization is one that aligns work and
teams to outcomes.  If you have clear organizational
outcomes, broken down into achievable outcomes by teams, once you
have these ideas of "We're going to change the world of work" or
"We're going to get rid of diabetes," whatever your vision is, we
can break that down into outcomes.  You might have very
tangible ones like "We want to be a great place to work" - how do
you measure that?  Retention, staff satisfaction.. and once
we have the measures and a proper outcome profile, measures,
KPIs, cadence of the measures, feedback loop.. let's create a
team that fundamentally works on that outcome.  Literally
cross-functional.  I can bring accountants, BAs, developers,
and engineers, into a single team if they have the right skills
to achieve that business outcome.  Once you have that team,
and the team is owning and accountable, I don't care what they
do.  The work and projects that they build are
irrelevant.  (That's not strictly speaking true...it's
actually very important)  But, at an organizational level,
that's not my responsibility anymore.  As an organization,
it's that team who owns that outcome and that feedback cycle of
continuously doing all that is necessary to achieve that business
outcome.


What big changes have you seen in your client base as you
support more companies from a non-IT background?  Where is
Business Agility taking root for your clients? 


There's a continuous change that's occurring, the evolution of a
continuous culture that has emerged around the world.  This
idea of continuous change, continuous feedback, continuous
delivery, continuous everything.  Companies that are able to
work in this model are fundamentally able to be Agile, to be an
Agile company.  Traditional companies that have not had that
mindset are being disrupted by this continuous culture and
change.  They are the ones who are most likely, most in need
of making this transition toward business agility.  So from
an industry perspective, Banking and Finance is huge right now.
When we do their organizational strategy and we help them define
their key business outcomes, and we look at "Who are your
competitors?"  They don't say other banks. their competitors
are Google, Apple, Alibaba.  These are not even secondary
competitors, these are their primary fear-based "we are terrified
of these companies."


Software is eating the world, and every company is becoming a
digital company.  There are banks out there saying we want
to be a digital bank, or an agile bank.  I've worked with
companies, financial institutions, where the traditional
functional structure of IT and Business has gone.  They have
gotten rid of the IT team- because all of the developers now sit
in the business.  So, I own a credit card function, the
credit card product, and have 20 developers and BAs and testers
working in my team, because technology is now the business. 
There's still an IT thin slice around the infrastructure, because
that does tend to be common, but everything else, pass that into
the business and own that in.  Even if you don't fully
restructure towards fully agile outcome teams, this reducing the
amount of handoff, this idea of i'm a business function I shall
write my requirements and pass it off to you, dear IT please
build this for me, those days are gone.  It is now this
continuous change of value and value creation.  The closer
you can make those lines of communication, and it doesn't get
much closer than the same team, the better.


 


LitheSpeed is a corporate member of the Business Agility
Institute.  Explore the Business Agility
Institute to get involved with the global community and
visit lithespeed.com for Agile training & coaching.