Questions Answered: Following Up on The Adaptive Organization Webinar

To respond to some of the questions asked by attendees during our Adaptive Orgainization webinar in February (view the recording here if you missed it), I had to tap into the expertise of one of the SMEs who served on our panel of experts in formulating the survey questions. Brad Clark is  a Managing Consultant with PM Solutions whose current focus is applying lean and agility approaches in the transformation/optimization of PMOs to deliver improved value in the selection, execution and governance of initiatives. We caught up with him by email to get his input on the following attendee questions.

Question: What performance measurements / metrics would you recommend when applying Agile approach and during transition to Agile approach? 

Clark: Basic Agile metrics and measurements of burn up, burn down, velocity, defects, rework as a percentage of backlog.

Cabanis-Brewin: Yes to all those, and I would add that, as regards the adoption rate of new practices during a transformation, there are a number of change management measures a company might implement, for example: percentages of projects (or personnel) applying new tools or templates; success rates of adaptive vs. traditional projects (which could be measured by schedule compliance, budget compliance, customer satisfaction and/or other measures, depending on what is most meaningful to the organization). For some employee engagement measures that help the organization to gauge to what extent employees are embracing new work methods, check here.

Question: Can you be more specific on what kind of project should use the Hybrid approaches?

Clark: A project that requires all the business requirements and possibly high level design complete before giving it to an IT team to build and test.  This is prevalent in organizations that have not embraced Agile in the business, just IT.

Cabanis-Brewin: In our study, the majority of respondents were reporting on the enterprise, not just on the IT department. This is doubtless why we saw a lot of success with hybrid approaches in the survey population.

Question: Are you seeing a certain trend in organizations (especially manufacturing) adapting and adopting one methodology first and then blending slowly into a another? As an example: organizations adapt Lean Manufacturing first and then blending after 2-3 years into Agile methods such as SAFe? 

Clark: I separate specialities, especially manufacturing, from traditional IT methodologies. I have seen approaches such as Lean blended into the existing project lifecycle, especially tools and techniques.  Even SAP has moved to an agile/lean approach with Activitate, which is the replacement of ASAP.  Most manufacturing is based on quality and speed, and while methods such as Six Sigma and Lean have been blended into the project lifecycle, the opposite (such as SAFe) doesn’t happen unless it is clearly product development.

Question: What are the key enablers for Agile in the physicial product world?  Helpful to understand how Agile approaches best operate with physical product needs v. digital/software.

Clark: Enterprise Agile is a perfect fit because the entire organization aligns to the Agile approach. This includes strategy, product development, support business units and IT.  It requires very strong C-Level sponsorship and a complete change in portfolio management and strategy execution.  In Enterprise Agile, other methods can be blended but the focus is Agile.  I have seen it done successfully with product development. 

More questions for our SME? Leave your queries in the comments and we will endeavor to answer them either personally or via the blog.