Agile Strategy Management

Techniques for Continuous Alignment and Improvement

Soren Lyngso

• Publisher: Auerbach Publications
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351122818
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Informatique
• Subtopic: Technologies de l'information

Your strategic initiatives are constantly under fire due to the evolving nature of markets, technology, laws, and government. To ensure your strategy succeeds, it must remain flexible while confronting these shifting challenges. Agile Strategy Management: Techniques for Continuous Alignment and Improvement explains how to achieve this flexibility by building agility into the initiation, development, implementation, and governance of your strategic initiatives.The book details what it takes to initiate, develop, implement, and govern a healthy strategy that delivers the benefits expected by all stakeholders. It presents insights gained by the author's organization over the last 25 years helping their clients achieve success with their strategic initiatives. Filled with real-world examples and case studies, it illustrates wide-ranging situations where the author's company helped clients reach important business objectives.Readers can use the book to look up examples that describe the various ways to use agile methods and techniques for critical business functions, including:

• Scope definition of strategic initiatives
• Stakeholder identification
• Team building
• Project and program quality management
• Change management
• Procurement of resources
• Solution development, implementation, and quality management
• Strategy governance

In this book, you will find guidelines that explain how to establish internal organizations for change and how to ensure these intermediate organizations stay motivated until final solution delivery. Presenting success stories as well as major blunders, the book can help you avoid many of the pitfalls that other organizations have experienced while governing their strategic initiatives.

1

Strategy Quality and Strategy Success

This chapter explains why and how a strategy can be quality managed to deliver successful results.

The book does not wipe out the possibility to pursue a tacit strategy, i.e. a strategy living inside somebody’s head and not documented anywhere; on the contrary, it points out that anyone with a little luck can have a lot of success simply by doing what they believe is right. The problem with a strategy based on pure luck is that we cannot learn from it, there is no way we can repeat the process that leads to the high quality strategy.

In order to be able to quality manage a strategy; such a strategy must be established and implemented based on sound and visible processes that can be documented, evaluated, improved, and (re-)used.

The processes described in the book with their organization, standards, and results cover the full strategy lifecycle from establishment to successful implementation or abolition.

1.1 KNOWLEDGE SHARING

The initial knowledge in my companies was based on more than 10 years of practice in project and program management governing information system development and implementation in support of strategic business change and development initiatives.

We have never regarded our methods, techniques, and standards as proprietary or confidential. There are a few reasons for this attitude:

• Once an idea is born, it is the foundation for even better ideas—if you share it.

• We want to share our knowledge with our clients and other partners.

• We do not regard our methods as unique or the best, but we want them to be world class and at least as good as the best.

• We learn as much from clients and partners as they learn from us.

• We are here to have fun, not to live in fear that someone will steal our ideas.

In order to be able to transfer our knowledge, we had to document our methods and techniques in such a way that we could teach it.

All the employees in my companies were encouraged to teach even if they had not tried it before. After all, we were introducing new ways to improve business and manage change and quality in corporations, so without the capability to teach we were not able to transfer our knowledge fast enough to the clients and to new employees.

Based on this need for knowledge transfer and sharing, our methods of agile quality management and our agile principles in general were developed under the name of the Lyngso Model (Figure 1.1), which is a comprehensive collection of methods and techniques for the conduction of strategic initiatives.

FIGURE 1.1
Lyngso method and technique framework.

All our clients had a copy of the manual that explains how we use the methods, techniques, and standards free of charge. In this way, they could verify what the ideas were behind the work performed by our coaches and facilitators. It was our way to present our quality management system to the clients.

The development of our methods and techniques has never stopped.

Over time, many strategy management standards have been developed, for example, the IS0 9000 public family of standards, the continuous quality improvement with Six Sigma from Motorola, the Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) concerned with organizational method maturity from Carnegie Mellon’s Software Engineering Institute (SEI), COBIT, and ITIL.

We continually verify that our agile methods comply with these standards. This is not as difficult as one might think because of the following:

• Our standards are based on specific methods and techniques, which is basically never the case with the public standards that make reference to best practice, but do not show what this best practice is.

• The public standards advise you to establish methods and techniques for the type of work that your organization does, but not how to do this.

• We deliver services based on our specific standards that are continuously improved from working experience.

• We present why and how we have done something. The public standards present what to do and to some extent why, but only in rare cases how.

1.2 SYNCHRONIZATION

Enterprise Information Systems, Business Behavior, and Business Organization are continuously kept synchronized and adapted to the environmental conditions and opportunities in order for the enterprise to obtain the maximum benefits from technology, market opportunities, knowledge, and experience.

If this synchronization is not done, your enterprise will encounter serious problems such as the following:

• Competitive industry will squeeze you out of the market by better usage of technology to offer better products with better performance at the same or lower price.

• Your clients find other more attractive ways to obtain the benefits that you used to offer by replacing your products and services with new ones.

The industry examples are legion. Nokia has lost market share to Apple and Samsung, supermarkets are replaced with shopping centers, European production of basic products such as cloth has been moved to China and India, Novo Nordic has obtained a dominating position on the insulin market based on innovative products, etc.

The needed synchronization is a never-ending process of change. The change is managed in order to ensure that the most competent resources get involved at the right time to produce the solutions that are the best fit to the market conditions and the client needs and expectations, when these solutions are ready for the market.

The synchronization of enterprise Information Systems, Business Behavior, and Business Organization takes place within strategic initiatives (Figure 1.2).

FIGURE 1.2
Synchronized strategy framework.

Strategic initiatives most often comprise planning, development, and implementation of new Information Systems and adaptation to already implemented ones in support of:

• Establishment of new business

• Changes to organization structure

• Implementation of new technology

• Implementation of improved production methods

• Implementation of improved logistics

The information system makes it possible to obtain the required result of the strategic initiative, but the information system is worth nothing if it does not correspond to business processes that deliver real customer benefits.

In the case of the pharmaceutical factory implementation, the first information systems delivered had left quite a few industrial processes under human control, such as, for example, physical and geographical movement of important production elements. When the quality manager had inspected a great number of quality problems, it became clear that 90% of all problems originated in the manual processes. There were no room for such problems in the long run, so today all logistic movements are handled in an integrated process and the error percentage has been reduced to close to zero.

1.2.1 The Importance of Synchronization

Let me tell you about a failed strategic initiative of Information System improvement that ended up in a pure catastrophe because the synchronization of business behavior, organization, and information systems was not done.

A major distributor of big and small electrical household equipment decided to swap its Information System because the current system was getting very expensive to maintain and was very slow.

The IT installation comprised an old-fashioned mainframe with attached PC workstations that the distributor wanted to swap with state-of-the-art Microsoft-based servers with Windows workstations.

The employees and connected clients and partners were used to and very competent in the usage of their current Information System functionality that supported the business processes well nationwide.

The business owner had a friend who was developing and selling a contemporary COTS (Commodity Off The Shelf) system addressing the needs of major equipment distributors. On paper, this new system was based on contemporary IT technology fitting the needs of the major distributor.

As the new COTS application was built for equipment distribution, it was deemed not necessary to establish a requirements specification that would have had to be done by very expensive business consultants.

Therefore, the system was bought from the friend who also became responsible for swapping the business Information System and for training the future users.

The swap consisted of data transfer from the old system to the new one, which was supposed to be much better than the old one—although “better” was defined only as “faster response time and a more user-friendly web-based user interface.”

An Accept-Test was established after the data had been transferred to the new system. This Accept-Test was a mere demonstration of the new system for the future users thereof. All questions of a critical nature were wiped away with answers such as “This will be available once in operation and once you have been trained in using the new system.” The questions and answers were not documented, and the business owner accepted the new system to go into production immediately.

The start of usage happened as a big bang once all data had been transferred from the old system—of course, only the data relevant for the new system—and the system had proved available to all future users technically speaking.

The future users were:

• Shop owners placing orders and receiving equipment to their local warehouse and in response to client orders.

• Central and distributed personnel managing stock, purchase, logistics, and finance.

Once the users opened their wonderful new system, the problems began:

• The products were there, but only once.

• Stock locations were simple sub-structures to the central warehouse without specific pricing, purchasing, and delivery conditions.

This was completely different from the old system, which had been established as a real Information System in support of their specific business strengths and needs.

The new “solution” was based on business conditions dreamed up by the COTS software vendor.

The COTS software vendor offered very expensive adaptations with delivery lead times that were unacceptable. Furthermore, the COTS vendor would not maintain specific adaptations to the COTS software.

Unbelievably, this is a true 2012 story, and the poor employees and shop owners are still struggling with manual adaptations allowing them to do their business only based on homemade spreadsheets even today in 2013.

1.3 WHY OUR METHODS

In 1986, I established my first company, Lyngso Information Industry, with the objective of delivering strategically aligned Information Systems...