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MIT researcher: 3 ways to make your workplace more

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The shift to agile requires leaders to rethink the employee

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experience. MIT research scientist Kristine Dery shares the
three areas that must change
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By Kristine Dery Privacy Statement

May 10, 2018 | 4 min read 607 readers like this.

Organizations are building new digital capabilities, designing new customer

experiences, and transforming to meet the emerging needs of the digital world. To
do this with the speed and creativity required to be successful, they are
increasingly favoring the principles of agile methodology.

While this way of working was originally designed for software development, agile
is being deployed across the organization. Some companies call it Agile@Scale,
Scaled Agile, New Ways of Working, or some other branding – all clearly
communicate to employees that there is a significant shift in how projects will be
run. Other terminologies such as Tribes, Scrums, Stand-ups, Scrum-masters, etc
refocus employees around structures that are team-based and deploy both
specialized expertise together with domain knowledge to iterate in cycles of test
and learn to develop new solutions.

[ Want to get people more comfortable with agile processes? Start to talk
about it differently. See our related article, Why agile leaders must move
beyond talking about "failure" ]

Regardless of the way in which Agile@Scale is implemented, new challenges are

emerging as companies redesign for this way of working. Workspaces are being
redesigned, new technologies are being deployed, and people are learning to work
in ways that require very different skills and capabilities. While digitally-born
companies like Spotify and Atlassian have lead the way in deploying Agile across
the organization, larger more established companies like ANZ Bank are following
suit.

In the case of ANZ Bank, it was recently reported that “It will scale its current use
of agile up from 20 percent, mostly in the IT and digital teams, and split the bank's
entire workforce up into autonomous, multi-disciplinary teams of about 10
employees to remove bureaucracy and hierarchies and deliver new products at
speed.”

Our findings show that companies that invest in making it easier for people to
excel at their work deliver better customer experiences, more innovation, at
lower costs.

At the MIT Sloan Center for Information Systems Research, we have been studying
the ways large organizations are redesigning the employee experience as they
transform their business models for digital. Our findings show that companies that
invest in making it easier for people to excel at their work deliver better customer
experiences, more innovation, at lower costs.
These companies focus on building work environments (technologies, spaces, and
social networks) that constantly adapt to the way people work rather than the
other way around. They also focus on supporting their people to develop new
habits to enable them to work more effectively in more innovative, collaborative
work environments. Never has this been as important as it is in the world of scaled
agile practices.

"We are not going agile for agile's sake. What we are trying to do is grow our speed
to market, our value proposition for customers and create a more engaging
environment for employees," said Katherine Bray, managing director products for
ANZ Bank, in a recent interview.

[Former Department of Homeland Security CTO shares how he paved the

way for agile in his recent article, When process thwarts agile
development, turn the ship ]

3 ways to rethink the employee experience for Agile

Our early discussions with organizations suggest the following three challenges are
occupying the minds of the leaders of Agile@Scale as they redesign the employee
experience for new ways of working:

1. Workspaces to empower problem-solvers : Many companies have made

substantial investments in new workspaces designed to support more
collaborative ways of working. However, we found in our earlier work that
unless workspaces are designed as part of an integrated employee
experience strategy, they provide little long-term business value. Agile brings
space more to the fore of the employee experience strategy with many small
agile teams (known as squads) forming around the delivery of new offerings
and capabilities. Co-locating squads can be challenging both in more
traditional spaces, but also in newly renovated spaces not designed for this
degree of flexibility. Adaptive workspaces with more mobile workspace
components are becoming increasingly important to meet the rapidly
changing needs of squads and tribes.
 2. Virtual technologies to support speed and agility: While agile ways of
working are by definition more co-located with stand-ups, transparent and
displayed processes, and increased requirements for constant collaboration,
many large organizations are not designed this way. Team members are often
in multiple locations, have flexible work arrangements to enable people to
work from anywhere, and work across multiple time zones. Designing for
virtual communication is required to support coaching of squads, knowledge
sharing across and within tribes, the visualization of all aspects of the product
development process, and complex discussions as squads fail and pivot ideas
through multiple iterations. Technologies set up simply for verbal and simple
visual exchange are falling short of the more nuanced communication
requirements for Agile@Scale.
3. Leading the direction, not the course: Leaders in companies working in
more agile ways find that the company is constantly evolving as they learn
more about balancing the increased autonomy of tribes and squads with the
strategic mission of the business. In other words, leaders need to set the
vision and then let their people get on with it. Leaders of large traditional
companies have to trade the familiar world of command and control of pre-
agreed deadlines, for one much less predictable where problem solvers are
empowered to deliver a solution with no clear agreement on what the
outcome might even look like. This more creative, iterative process is very
challenging for traditional corporate leaders. As large organizations scale,
agile workplaces have to support very different leadership work habits – data
is more freely shared, work is more transparent, and a wider range of people
participate in decision-making in very non-traditional ways.

More on Agile

Agile success: Don't settle for metrics that tell half the story

Anthem CIO: How agile helped us drive value

Ellucian CIO: Cross-functional teams need shared accountability to

succeed

Kristine Dery will be speaking on this topic “Redesigning the Digital Workplace for
Agile@Scale” at the 2018 MIT CIO Symposium in Cambridge, Massachusetts on
May 23. For more information or to register to attend the Symposium, please click
here.

[ See our top book recommendations from MIT Press and MIT CIO
Symposium speakers, then enter our contest for a chance to win a book ]

Topics: IT STRATEGY AGILE

Kristine Dery, based in Sydney, Australia, is a Research

Scientist with MIT CISR. Her research in technology and
the workplace has resulted in a range of both academic
and industry publications with particular emphasis on
mobile connectivity.

More about me

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