Each engagement is unique. We structure the engagement to meet your needs; there is no one-size-fits-all framework. So our priority is to understand your context before making any recommendations.
We follow a simple model to identify the challenges and opportunities ‘hiding in plain sight’, so we are always focusing on the highest-impact change: assess, prioritize, execute, measure, repeat.
Assess
You cannot change what you cannot see, so we start by understanding how things are on the ground. At this stage we are looking for patterns of symptoms to identify underlying themes.
This often takes the form of an Initial Assessment, where we interview a cross-section of people over two days and play back our observations and recommendations. This helps when you ‘don’t know what you don’t know’. We can learn a lot in a short time from talking to different groups of people with different perspectives.
This is a good time to validate assumptions. When someone says ‘We are slow to ship new features’ or ‘Product development is too expensive’, we might do some work to measure these.
How quickly do we ship a new feature, and where is the time spent? How does the cost map to the value delivered? Often these exercises produce surprises, especially about where the delays or costs are happening.
Prioritize
These initial investigations will surface a variety of challenges, some interrelated, some independent. It can be tempting to tackle all of these now we can see them! Instead we prioritize based on several factors:
-
What is the risk of not addressing this issue right now, compared to other things we can see? What are we trading off if we defer it?
-
How can we structure the work so we can get some quick wins and establish trust and credibility in the process?
-
How quickly can we make this initiative self-funding, or at least reduce value at risk (VAR), and demonstrate early return on investment? No one wants a change programme that rumbles on for a year without achieving anything.
-
Where should we start from a PR perspective? The early stages of any change initiative are about winning hearts and minds.
Execute
This is where the work happens! We choose an experiment that is substantial enough to make an impact but focused enough to demonstrate value quickly. The objective is to work in small increments towards a larger goal, holding ourselves accountable and adapting as we learn.
This happens across multiple dimensions:
- organization design and programme structure
- leadership and executive coaching
- vision and strategy development
- implementing flow metrics and lightweight governance
- introducing new ways of working
- addressing technical debt
- reviewing architecture and design choices
- assessing and validating product strategy
- coaching and mentoring managers
- recruiting and on-boarding new staff
- streamlining business processes
- automating compliance and other controls
The network has expertise in all these areas so we can assemble exactly the team we need at each stage, and only for as long as we need them.
Measure
Accountability is key! Before we start, we baseline where things are. As we go along, we measure operational and behavioural change. This provides the feedback we need to ensure we are on track, and to course-correct if we are not.
Sometimes the goal changes as a result of the work we are doing. We may set out to ‘reduce time to develop a new feature’, and along the way discover that feature development is fine, but the path to live is a bureaucratic nightmare. So we pivot towards release engineering and simplifying deployment processes.
Having a baseline and measuring regularly means we can identify and track trends over time. This lets us know that things are working and tells us when we hit a diminishing return.
Repeat
Adaptability is a learnable skill. With each step, not only are we making progress, but we are practising, and getting better at, change. Over time we develop the skills, the techniques, the tools, the metrics, the structures that make change easier and more deterministic.
Working iteratively and incrementally—improving things in small, deliberate steps—builds a resilience that remains once the team steps away, so your organization can continue on its business agility journey.