Consider culture..

case:
1.recognize unique characteristics of employees outside US, is critical for adoption of agile
implementation success
Culture script: phenomenon used to describe behaviors
a) In china: One person’s favor is eventually repaid; individuals aware of social context and
preserve it; avoid of confrontation
b) In south korea: tendency to value quick and quality task completion; emotional bonding through
repeated social interaction
c) In india: Jugaad, apne log and social hierarchy
Areas where culture script can create challenges:
Maintaining flexibility and speed, creating communicating channels, building effective agile team
 Solutions:
1. Maintaining flexibility and speed: streamline improvisation, bring organizational legitimacy to
them; Contract to decide the scope and schedule of project to prevent it from being extra
aggressive
2. Building effective team: Disperse authority across multiple individuals, encourage individual
decision making
3. Communication channels: Informal meetings, communicate difficulty of adopting agile
 
ING Vyasa case- What to expect from agile:
1.Adoption of TANGO and RIO initiatives to transform organization
2.Lokking into agile methodology to improve employee engagement and customer orientation
3.Issues: bureaucracy, silos, cultural problems
4.reorganized teams into squads(9 members each)- handle customer related activity
Lessons from ING vyasa:
a) Decide how much authority senior management is willing to let go of to customers
b) Assuring stakeholders  of finance, legal and compliance functions
c) Experience tribes: attract new customers; service tribes: take care of existing customers
d) Pop up squads : manage one off short term projects

Architect your company for agility

 Great strategy is valuable only if a company is capable of executing that strategy  and it depends
on business architecture — the way a company’s people, processes, systems, and data interact to
deliver goods and services to customers.

Strategies are difficult to deliver as

·  Elements must be synchronized to deliver an integrated solution.

·  Speed matters

·  pre-digital economy→focus →operational efficiency

·  digital economy→Agility

·  Agility requires empowering and supporting problem-solvers

·  Small teamsàown objectives→define their metrics for success and as a whole delivery is done

·  The concept of continuous release and knowledge sharing is essential to the effectiveness of
empowered teams

·  Rapid innovation depends on teams learning quickly what does and doesn’t work

·  when experiments fail→managers → act as coaches, posing questions and eliciting hypotheses
and expected outcomes

·  Three mechanisms for achieving alignment:

o   (1) clear missions –

1.     clarifying the objectives of the company’s investments in resources.

2.     Team mission guides towards enterprise mission

3. To respond to changes in customer needs, companies can redefine missions at the

enterprise or individual team level.

o   (2) common business components, 

companies need to embrace Reuse- New business capabilities build on existing

capabilities and provide consistency across offerings.

o   (3) fruitful knowledge sharing.

·      Knowledge sharing- Discuss issues, new discovery, stand up meetings,collaborative toolsà away
from command-and-control approaches 
 What the miltary can teach oragnisation about agility

·  Organisation are being forced to adapt at a speed for which they simply are not built. 

·  four decision cycles of observe, orient, decide, and act in order to respond quickly to sudden external
threats.

·      Practice 1- Leaders should focus on decisions only they can make. 

·  Individuals and teams closest to the problem→offer the best ability to decide and act decisively

·  Leaders should be absolutely clear about what decisions only they can make and push all other decisions
as far down the organization as possible.

·  decisions by committee – No →decisions by the individuals and teams who are closest to a particular
issue- yes

·      Practice 2- Leaders should establish “commander’s intent.”

·  It means focusing on the “why” and “what,” while leaving the “how” to those closer to the front line

·  The vision was to develop a leadership doctrine which is  principles-based, rather than rules-based.

·  build cohesive teams through mutual trust;

·  create shared understanding;

·  exercise disciplined initiative;

·  use mission orders;

·  accept prudent risk

·  culture of disciplined initiative and risk-taking

·      Practice 3-  Leaders should find a “directed telescope.”

·  Leaders should Keep in close contact with the outside world

·  Leaders being actively receptive and responsive to new and changing external conditions

Challenge- Managers who recognize the need for organizational change usually fail to see themselves as
one of the things that needs changing.
A new Approach to Designing work

It talks about trade off b/w efficiency and flexibility. We learn