A resilient organizational can not only adapt and respond to incremental change but more importantly, can respond to sudden disruptions and also, be the source of disruption in order to prosper and flourish.

The traditional risk management approach focuses too much on defensive (stopping bad things happen) thinking versus a more progressive (making good things happen) thinking. Being defensive requires consistency across the organization and this is where methodologies like Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA) come in. However, PDCA approach does not bake in the required progressive thinking and flexibility required for a fast company organization which operates in a volatile environment.

Professor David Denyer of Cranfield University has recently published a very interesting research report on Organizational Resilience. He has identified the following four quadrants across to help us think about organizational resilience:

• preventative control (defensive consistency)
• mindful action (defensive flexibility)
• performance optimization (progressive consistency)
• adaptive innovation (progressive flexibility)

In this talk, I'll share my personal experience of using this thinking to help an organization to scale their product to Millions of users. I've dive deep into how we structured our organization for Structural Agility and how we set-up a very lightweight governance model using OKRs to drive the necessary flexible and progressive thinking.

How do you deliver a big policy outcome that normally take 6 months when you only have weeks?

An early election was called and we faced having to develop two sets of a comprehensive policy documents -- the red book (left-wing) and the blue book (right-wing) -- to brief an incoming government in 8 weeks. We were caught by surprise, the normal lead time were gone, and news about policy commitments came faster from TV and social media than traditional internal sources. This was a non ICT business team who hadn't done Agile before however we felt given the time frames, it was the best way to approach for such a high profile project.

Come and learn about and application of Lean Kanban and how we delivered the outcome through:

• engagement with the executive to share drafts of chapters, then gather and incorporate feedback in short iterative cycles to improve transparency and alignment.
• team design in non-software environment
• limiting waste and duplication
• visualising flow
• coordination of “Scrum of Scrums” key daily meetings to promote collaboration, visibility and transparency
• supporting team leads to coordinate the collaborative, dynamic planning process, prioritising work that needs to be done against the capacity and capability of the team
• providing visibility and transparency of work in progress and flow and share this with other teams and stakeholders.

Mia will discuss how she addressed business agility through working with a Portfolio Management Office (PMO) to assist the Incoming Government Brief (IGB) task force to work iteratively and apply agile practices to draft and deliver policy documentation to articulate the details and costing of policy initiatives from each of the major political parties in the lead up to the Federal election. This involved working with Executives and Business stakeholders within the policy domain during a hectic period where policy could change or be adjusted and costed daily as policies were revealed by each side during the campaign. The policy team need to improve the enterprises business agility to respond to rapid change and this involved working with the leadership across 12 branches to align iterations of draft policy documentation over an intensive period. (the taskforce was pulled together to deliver the IGB over 8 weeks). Specifically, Kanban and Lean were chosen as the method for delivery.

This approach resulted in executives having earlier visibility of the approach and content of the IGB and improved quality of IGB by reducing the risk that significant changes being identified late in the delivery. The Teams were focused to delivery higher value work more efficiently, while being transparent about delays to lower value activities. The success of this initiative in a non-ICT environment has promoted the PMO to look at other business areas to implement Agile to develop an Agile mindset across the Agency.

Evidence-Based Management (EBM) is a framework to help measure, manage, and increase the value derived from product delivery. EBM focuses on improving outcomes, reducing risks, and optimising investments and is an important tool to help leaders put the right measures in place to invest in the right places, make smarter decisions and reduce risk using an iterative and incremental approach. This empirical method alongside the agile principles and values of Scrum enables successful steps of change for the organisation.

Organisations invest in agile processes, tools, training, and coaching, but how much are they getting back? Has product delivery improved? How much happier are users and the business customers? Are employees empowered and enabled? Traditional metrics might give you insight into improvements of operational efficiency but the real conversation is about the value created for your organisation by the improved processes. Without measuring value, the success of any agile initiative is based on nothing more than intuition and assumption.

Mia will discuss Evidence based management and how this empirical process can help agile transformations measure and manage the value derived from the transformation initiative. Mia will focus on the 4 Key Value Areas: Current Value, Ability to Innovate, Unrealised Value and time to market and how these contribute to an organisation’s ability to deliver business value.