Continual improvement at scale
Written by Fred Figueiredo, Agility Director
Recently, I finished the book on “Leading Change”, by John P. Kotter. Even though it was first published in 1996, I felt like I was reading a narrative on the complexities of our organizations today. Either John was a visionary or we have really failed in our ability to improve. I would argue that both are true.
Just like two decades ago, today we face huge complexity and uncertainty from our “ever-faster-moving world.” Technological and market disruption, together with a dramatical change in our own human behaviors, places colossal pressure on organizations and their leadership. However, nowadays, the speed of change is greater than ever. As John rightly says:
We know more today than we did sixteen years ago. (…) Speed of change is the driving force. Leading change competently is the only answer.
For effective change, organizations need to be highly skilled at continually improving their way of thinking and working — across all levels, while ensuring business alignment and creation of high-quality value to their customers. This “ideal” state of alignment is symbolized by the well-known Agile Planning Onion, while the reality is often very contrasting.
Sage is not different from other organizations. We too face challenges from complexity and uncertainty. To make Sage better, we designed a vision of how we could scale continual improvement efforts across all levels, with the help of some simple process tweaking & tools — depicted below.
Explaining it requires another post, so a quick overview: from the day-to-day work of our development teams to their product areas, program activities, and portfolio management, there are inspect & adapt events occurring, at least, every quarter — powered by self-assessment tools.
For each event and level, a single person is accountable for driving the improvements forward. These flow up or down in the organization depending on the autonomy of the group assessing it.
For example, a development team wants to increase the number of automated tests but they do not have enough licenses available. The team by itself cannot drive this improvement and needs management support. The issue flows up to the area or program level, where actions can be taken.
To validate it, we selected a project to pilot — with 300 people in 8 countries. We started in a product area of 60 and, after 9 months, the data shows:
- Higher engagement and understanding of the critical roles, in Agile
- Improved collaboration across different functions
- Increased effectiveness on delivery of high value and quality
Next step is to roll it out to other teams and measure the impact. We will continue sharing our learnings and the tools we have “built”, like:
- Self-Assessments for all Scrum Events
- Self-Assessments for Product Teams, Program, and Portfolio
- 360º Assessment for Product Owners, Scrum Masters, and other roles
How about you, what approaches are you using to align your business and continual improvement efforts at scale?
Editor: Julia Commons
Illustrator: Michelle Hird
