Agility Strategy Workshop

Are you looking at going Agile but not sure what’s the right approach?

For organizations looking to use agile techniques to improve their business agility, my Agility Strategy Management/Leadership Workshop is an interactive deep-dive approach to creating or re-aligning a strategy for scaling agility in your organization. Going beyond training, this workshop starts with the organization’s specific pains, context, and improvement goals and focuses on how to implement the learning and drive the change. 

This workshop has been used in dozens of enterprises to help guide an agile journey. It combines field-proven best practices, applied in an interactive and expertly facilitated manner, to provide the organization’s leadership with a context-specific road map to improvement. 

When to use this workshop

The workshop suits organizations in different stages of their agility journey – those new to agile altogether, considering scaling, practicing some aspects of agile, or looking to take their agile from theater to agility by identifying and addressing challenges. 

It can be used in the context of a 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. 

Let's discuss how the Agility Strategy Workshop can work for you

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. 

Audience

Leadership Teams, Change Agents, Lean Agile Centers of Excellence (LACE) / Communities of Practice. 

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. 

Delivery

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. 

Let's discuss how the Agility Strategy Workshop can work for you

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
Let's discuss how the Agility Strategy Workshop can work for you