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The Resilience Milestone

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At first sight, resilience appears to be about: the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties; toughness the ability of a substance or object to spring back into shape; elasticity To use a boxing analogy, the definition of resilience appears to suggest that the organization gets hit, goes down for the count, then manages to get up at the count of eight and get back into the fight. Is it just that?  From all literature, it appears that this is the most common understanding. It is also most visible in IT strategy where a lot of investment dollars are spent in securing business continuity in case of a disaster. We live in an era where complexity and ambiguity is the norm. Globalization, new technologies, and greater transparency have combined to upend the business environment and give many CEOs a deep sense of unease. Since 1980 the volatility of business operating margins, largely static since the 1950s, has more than doubled, as has the size of the gap between winn
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The operating model

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An "operating model" is how a company organizes and manages its resources to achieve its strategic vision. It is the bridge between strategy and execution. So the manner in which a company creates or updates its operating model to match changes in strategy is a crucial question for transformation programs. A sample operating model blueprint Source: PWC Strategy& Operating model serves as a bridge connecting strategy and execution Source: bain.com Structure - the company's organization chart, if you will - is primarily about accountabilities. Especially as companies transition to agile, they must learn to balance this accountability with increased autonomy. The new operating model also requires a governance structure and leadership model so leaders know how they will exercise operational control and inspire employees. Ikea anchors its cost leadership position on several differentiated capabilities Source: bain.com Operating models involve everyt
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Leadership in Agile Organizations

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To many, leadership in organizations is associated with position, role, hierarchy, and the task-authority relationships vested in them. This is the traditional view and where are statutory, regulatory and governance requirements this view holds true even in organizations that have transitioned to Agile. Hierarchical organizations took a matrix organization structure to deal with differing line and function management requirements, typical of projects. As hierarchies flattened and the need to collaborate outside of functional silos became imperative, network organization structures evolved. However, most of these retained their bureaucratic hierarchical nature with frequent turf wars. True network organization structures are dynamic in that they are in a constant state of flux. A network organization is a result of a transformation that is necessarily enterprise wide. The nature of leadership in a true network organization is diffused, very different from traditional hi
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The Collaboration Milestone

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The collaboration milestone is the first of a series of three critical milestones in an Agile Transformation. The collaboration milestone is an operating team level objective that transitions the team to agile and focuses on delivering two primary objectives - time to market and customer value. The collaboration milestone is delivered in three stages - Explore, Adapt and Engage. The Explore stage is an introductory stage to familiarize team members with Agile concepts. It starts at where they are and builds out the advantages of agile over any of the practices in vogue in the organization at that point in time. And it is instructive to start all agile journeys with Kanban and the premise "start with what you know". In the Adapt stage, the teams adopt a suitable agile methodology. This may well be Kanban itself, or it could be Scrum. Some teams with extremely short and integrated development cycles per requirement - like in the case of mobile app development -
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Resilience Practice

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This series is part of developing our Resilience practice. What is Resilience? Many consider resilience as the organizations capacity to dynamically (as opposed to running a structured change program) adapt to change, or the ability to 'bounce back' from a crisis. While this is true, a change that is significant or even a crisis is not a single event, it is a chain of events that an organization that is adequately sensitized can sense and adapt to, continuously. That capacity is organizational resilience. Where does Resilience fit in an agile transition? We view agile transitions as a three phase transition - team agile, business resilience and business sustainability - with each phase having different objectives and milestones as shown below. How do we develop Organizational Resilience? That is the subject matter of this blog. What tools/techniques are available to develop organizational resilience? At its core, Resilience is an attribute of both awareness
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