Many organizations we admire around us today have embarked on a journey to productize their org structure - by assembling people around a common mission, getting them to own their "product", and setting realistic objectives / outcomes to work towards. But what about when your customer is a miner, who is risking their life every single day, in the middle of a global pandemic, to drive value for their organization? How do you productize that?

This story is about how one of the world's largest Mining and Metals organizations, sparked a shift to a product oriented way of working to:

• Move from agile projects to products
• Deepen customer centricity and user insights
• Boost end-to-end ownership over problems & solutions
• Enhance speed to market and quality of delivery
• Integrate Business and Technology stakeholders

Working alongside our client team, we were tasked with transforming two strategic investment areas for their organization:

1. Digital Geotechnical Program – “Leveraging technology to improve the safety and efficiency of our key assets”
2. Railroad Production Management – “Building the railroad of the future to deliver goods and services to the world”

For the two areas outlined above, this task became immensely challenging, as we aimed to take a fairly technology-focused concept (i.e. product-based teams) and take it out of the office and into the real world. Within each program we sought to validate a key hypothesis for each of the areas we explored:

1. Within the Digital Geotechnical Program, we sought to understand "how do we build a product team that can effectively inspect/measure/analyze the health of our assets, to improve safety?"
2. Within the Railroad Production Management Program, we looked to understand "how do we build a product team who can manage one of the most complex industrial railroads in the world, to boost efficiency and safety?"

As we embarked on this journey, we were faced with a number of key challenges, including:

• How do you productize an offering that delivers value to both business and technical users?
• How do you strategically rollout such a wide impacting change to the org in a middle of a pandemic, across languages, time zones and differing levels of maturity?
• How do we influence the business to see the value in shifting to this new way of working?
• How do you shift to this new way of working in a heavily vendor supplied environment?

If any of the above challenges resonate with you or your organization, join us for an engaging talk on some on our lessons learned from our adventure in embarking on a journey to productize the world of mining!

Many organizations are trying to adopt Agile as a methodology across their enterprises through standing up Agile Centre of Excellence (CoE). This entity is often revered as the governing body for “all things agile” across the organization and if you don’t play nice, you’re often greeted with a “sorry, you’re not allowed to be agile”. Sound familiar?

If not, maybe some of these attributes might ring a bell:

• Enable change Force change on the organization, tomorrow
• Provide training and coaching Sorry teams, fend for yourselves
• Enable process creation Nope, its our way or the highway
• Remove impediments Let’s create some new problems
• Create awareness Shhh don’t tell anyone

So we’re going to fail. Great. Now what do we do?

Having run CoE’s that have made their hair go grey and having set up several CoEs for fortune 500 companies in healthcare, banking, insurance and telecommunications, we’ve seen and made a lot of mistakes when it comes to Agile CoEs. And in the process, developed a backlog of war stories for “What to do if you want your Agile CoE to fail”, or more importantly “Things you might want to consider if you want your CoE to have a shot at success”.

Come learn more about all the things not to do when setting up an Agile CoE…and hey, we guarantee you’ll find some nuggets to enable your CoE to succeed and deliver value as part of your transformational journey.