Transformation some assembly required - 05-21-2017

Editor's Notes

• #2: CH: Hello! Today we would like to share a few stories with you… stories about applying agile practices, at pursuing a transformation to agility throughout a medium-large business… so at a scale of 1000’s. I’ve worked with a few large transformations in the past few years, and I’m lucky to be joined by Eric Willeke, who has led a number of these transformations in the last decade. Today, we are both with CA Technologies through the Rally Software acquisition. And if you’re local, listen on, because I bet you’re wondering – will I be happy when CA buys my startup? We think you’ll be happily surprised to learn that CA is no longer where startups go to die, but instead is walking the walk, doing the hard work of transforming the business to an agile business. We want to share some of our learnings on that journey (next slide)   Abstract    Transformation: Some Assembly Required  Lean, Agile, Digital, Two-speed, DevOps, DevSecOps, Enterprise Accelerators, and Lean Startup… where's a change leader to start? Company leadership around the world recognizes the opportunities, and the urgency, in driving effective change and create room for rapid innovation in their organization, and the market landscape in transformation is becoming increasingly cluttered as the market moves to try and fill that need.   We've learned that it's unwise to "pick" a single model to follow, and that's especially true when you're tackling business-wide transformation, across the multiple operational value streams that comprise your modern enterprise. (The only thing that seems to be true is calling it by one of these specific things tends to be too narrow and cause multiple transformation programs with potentially overlapping or duplicative work to develop).  From leveraging lean (hoshin kanri) strategy deployment to create organizational catch-ball of corporate strategy to agile departments and “traditional” agile teams and back, to facilitating full operational value stream collaboration in large-group agile steering and working sessions, we focus on the fallacy of believing that any one “departmental” or  transformation can be sustainably successful without the operational value stream increasing agility as well. In fact, creating a successful sustainable business-wide agile transformation requires bouncing back and forth between "systemic fix" and "deep value steam fix" perspectives.   In this session, we use CA's internal "agile" transformation as a backdrop to share the key mindsets of effective transformation we've learned supporting hundreds of companies in their change journeys.    —— We will discuss the motivation behind transformation and how to communicate those outcomes with clarity to your organization, explore how transformation is experienced different at different levels of an organization while needing to be tightly aligned, how to manage and execute your transformation as an integral part of your business, and share a handful of the most useful tools and models we've applied. 
• #3: EW: Transformation is a messy, (yucky!) human process… … yet we try to extend it to enterprise scale! At the team level, this is hard enough. New collaborative behaviors, often new means of conflict, of risk taking and transparency… But we take this human change process that’s hard for people, and take it to enterprise scale When we look at trying to get a decades old, 10,000+ people companies to change quickly… We need thousands of people to change, to behave differently. It’s no small task, here or anywhere.
• #4: EW: To do this, we create models… lots of models, and lots of ideas… We’re trying to make sense of a very chaotic messy environment. Unfortunately, as transformation leaders we tend to get stuck in our models… trapped by the very things we try to use for making sense of the world. This talk is about those models… the ones we’ve used in our own transformations to help simplify while striving to avoid losing the nuance that can make the difference between excellence and mediocrity We would like to talk about the relatively simple models that have helped us
• #5: CH: Handful of things we’ll talk about today: Every transformation has it’s own business context, it’s “WHY”. We’ll share enough that to have what we tackled to have our story make sense to you, and then we will share what we’ve found to work here, in that business context. Leveraged 3 main frames or lenses to drive the change needed for this business transformation Focusing on improving the end to end values streams one at a time Focusing on removing the crosscutting barriers, the things that slow EVERYBODY down Focusing on our people, how do we support them in their personal growth, plant the seeds for self-replicating agility Finally, there are a few mindsets that didn’t quite fit into the 3 frames, but we think important enough that we want to share them with you. [Tone: This is what was successful for us. Use “we’ve found” “we’ve seen”]
• #6: CH Company context: CA is a 40 year old software company. We make products that help our customers create, deploy, monitor, and secure the applications they need to run their business. A good chunk of our business is software products for the mainframe, and you may or may not know that X% of the world’s critical business transactions still run on mainframe…) It’s a huge, gradually declining market. We’ve been entering the enterprise software (non-mainframe) business over the last couple of decades, almost exclusively by acquisition – that’s been our primary source of enterprise software growth. Although we grow primarily through acquisition, we haven’t always done a great job of making sure our acquisitions have a good home in our company, in our portfolio.... So.. like any good change effort, we can turn that around, we can turn something negative into something amazing, a real turnaround. And we think CA is on that path. In the past couple of years, we’ve adopted a believable, customer-centric mission, and articulated our aspirational values that are in line with lean-agile thinking... And begun to eliminate some of our own barriers, too... Let’s talk about this large scale transformation with that backdrop.  I’d love to hand it off to Eric who led this from the beginning...
• #7: EW: Beginning of the current wave… So let’s talk about what Started with the CPO organization and some of the immediate value stream neighbors About 300 people working on about X products, some in active development, many in maintenance. We’re a 40 year old company! Once you get these things started, you kind of lose track of the details, and that’s ok. We started with teams that knew how to do agile software development. Stats: 22+ release trains, ~3k people, Scrum wave a few years ago, Renewed focus two years ago with acquisition of Rally. After leading our east coast services I was asked to participate and later lead this effort, and now serve as the initiative leader and essentially as the day to day executive sponsor Initially product manager, now initiative owner
• #8: EW: Most agilists are good at the value stream focus. It’s a critical lens. You don’t get impact unless you focus on that. We invested to accelerate, improve, and automate each individual value stream, respecting the business imperatives of each. (This hits process and technology – how do you work, and how do you automate that work in ways specific to the specific business or product) We have a lot of activities that are OUTSIDE the value streams, some of which need to be adjusted or removed for progress to be made in all our value streams. Examples include your infrastructure automation, Agile Central, HR systems, etc. Thigs that agilists have been bitching about for years… And of course, we have pursued a very intentional strategy of investing in people who could be our change leaders. Invest deeply in people, enabling successful navigation of change through training such as SPC, leading safe, large group facilitation of lean-agile strategy deployment, and of course, clarity of intent, communications.   EW: Address all three pillars, flowing to the current constraint 
• #9: EW: Only change, to obfuscate the names of the business units End to end customer delivery focused Roles & responsibilities for agile roles How do we make our work visible, what tooling do we use, how do we make that visible?
• #10: EW
• #11: CH
• #12: CH: SAFe, Lean, "devops", ToC - they're all about the horseshoe – a customer centric, SSLT horseshoe.
• #13: EW Must be owned by the teams/trains/VS doing it Requires real growth by the leadership teams Requires intense clarity and careful listening Aggressively pursue the "they" and close siloes
• #14: CH
• #15: EW Purpose/intent is per value stream - be sure to understand it, because it varies with the market and customer in each value stream
• #16: EW
• #17: CH
• #18: CH Not activities: One of biggest battles I’ve had to fight EW: Story: Surprised by security and CDBU
• #19: EW: We’re going to talk about a bunch of ideas in this section, but any one of them could be a talk in itself. We want to give you some ideas of the kinds of things that have been useful for us to tackle.
• #20: EW
• #21: CHCommon language, a common way of representing our work to break down silos. For example, one of the cross-cutting support efforts was to make sure we had a common understanding of what a story, feature, capability is, and that they’re all stored in Agile Central. Have you ever traveled to another country and learned some of the language? You break down silos, quickly. Our common language leveraged SAFe, did company training, so everyone had some common language. We don’t just mean our product teams. Our leaders, our global customer success and support team members, even our legal team members…
• #22: EW
• #23: CHHoshin Kanri, catchball…. We need to create clarity of language: It’s strategy definition, strategy articulation, and strategy deployment. It’s really all about what you’re NOT going, and helping people understand the connection between their work and the company goals CH e.g. strategy deployment of corporate intiatives in manageable small experiements and chunks, limited wip, corporate clarity from corporate, CEO initiatives all the way down to my daily work… And we’re starting to see some of those lagging indicators, quality, response time, time to market. I think if you find Eric after this, he can tell you about a mainframe BU case study that’s about to be made public….
• #24: EW
• #25: EW
• #26: EW
• #28: CH: Here’s the thing.You do invest in your people by having an attainable, relatable, clear mission. This isn’t just a corporate mission, it’s something we can feel as individuals… as any good “why” is – as any good mission is. AND enabling this – requires a certain set of knowledge
• #29: CH: Need to add talk track The "how" is adult learning application training, experimentation, sharing, learning
• #30: CH
• #31: EW: Success is anecdotes and behaviors e.g. Self-organizing customer-education group aligning to delivery group e.g. Two different offices spontaneously forming facilitation CoP and creating opportunities for intentional practice of their members e.g. Mike, our CEO, standing in front of the entire SLT and stating “as CEO, I only get three initiatives this year”
• #33: EW: Story – When we started we had four business units. We now have 6, plus two significant horizontals. Not to mention two significant and several small acquisitions. Our plans changed continually, but the models we’ve shared help hold things together as a vision, while allowing fast sense and respond internally.
• #34: EWWe talked about this earlier in the context of helping form value stream leadership teams. It’s important to remember this goes for leadership teams of all sorts… initiative leadership teams, and most importantly for me to remember, for Transformation leadership teams
• #35: CH Credit dilemma and Changing to Sustaining EW Lack of feedback