Are you looking at going Agile but unsure what the right approach is?
The Agility Strategy Workshop helps leaders create or re-align their strategy for pursuing agility at scale in their organization, emphasizing intent, principles, context, and a dialogic agile approach for pursuing agility
When to use this workshop
Are you leading an organization? Are you considering or already pursuing agility? This workshop will help you chart an initial path towards agility, repair/recover from agile theater, or scale up to the next level.
You can use it in the context of a whole company, an initiative/program, a product, or a portfolio of products.
The shared goal relevant for all starting points is the focus on real understanding and applying agility principles and practices at scale and aligning on a concrete blueprint for moving forward.
Typical participants are senior leaders in Technology/IT, Product, Transformation, Operations, or Program Management organizations.
Key Objectives/Deliverables
The goal of the workshop is to establish and align on:
- The need and objective for agility in your context by exploring pains/opportunities in the current way of working.
- A high-level blueprint for improving agility in your context.
- An Outcome-oriented, agile roadmap for improving agility.
Workshop Approach
The workshop is highly interactive. We insist on a small, intimate forum where everyone participates and affects the outcome. Innovation Games, Gamestorming, and other techniques are used, and as an important side effect, the participants also learn how to effectively think and collaborate to solve tough system-level problems in the future.
As the purpose of the workshop is to outline high-level improvement strategies together, the bulk of the thinking is done together in real-time, with us helping you apply relevant thinking approaches and tools. To get the most out of the workshop, we typically spend some time getting acquainted with your context and expectations, using a few focused empathy interviews.
In true agile fashion, we aim to deliver value rather than follow a predefined plan/syllabus. While a backlog is prepared based on initial preparation/interviews to learn the general context and aims, we continuously seek feedback and adjust direction driving at maximum impact and return on the time of participants based on the discussions and directions that emerge.
Duration
1-2 days of interviews and preparation.
The main workshop is typically held for 2-3 days, depending on the organization’s size and complexity, and is preferably held in an offsite location.
About Your Guide
Yuval Yeret, a SAFe Fellow/SPCT/Scrum.org PST with more than 15 years of experience applying agility at scale with dozens of world-class companies, will facilitate the workshop and guide your dialogue and exploration of your agility strategy.
Agility Strategy Workshop Engagement Options
The options build upon each other.
Appendix – Workshop Agenda Sample (Will be customized per context)
Opening (30min)
- Intro+Purpose
- Working Agreements
- Expectations Setting/Collection
Why we’re here (1-2h)
- Identify current state
- Pains session – choose what to improve
What Agile means here (3-5h)
- What will be our Portfolios? Value Streams? Products? Teams?
- Do we need an Agile framework? Which should we use?
- What artifacts will we use? How will they map to our current world? How would they change it?
- What should be our Release Cadence?
- How do we fit Agile ways of working into our current governance context? The bigger organization? Partners? Customers? (Dealing with waterfall/phase gate/CMMI/etc.)
Review and learn from applicable case studies for agility at scale
- Case Studies from my experience (Gillette, Idemia, Siemens, CME Group, etc.)
- Industry Case Studies
Follow-up Context-specific Education/Learning (3-5h including exercises)
e.g.
- Leveraging Kanban/Flow effectively at all levels
- Team/Value Stream topologies to support descaling
- Integrating OKRs and Agile
- Leveraging Evidence-based Management (EBM) to connect your Agile implementation on outcomes/value.
- Technical Safety
- Sustainable Pace
- Lean/Agile Discovery in a world of uncertainty – Minimum Viable Products (MVPs), Minimum Marketable Features (MMFs), Requirement slicing techniques, Lean Startup thinking.
- Agile Testing Approaches
- Invitations approach to change – Be agile about your agile journey – treat the agility change as a product
Is Agile going to work here? (2-3h)
- Create and review a draft blueprint
- Confidence Vote
- Dealing with Risks/confidence gaps
Closing (30min-1h)
- Takeaways, Epiphanies, Feedback, commitment to next steps