As Agilists, we’re familiar with the challenges our clients and organizations face, and we have a full toolkit with keys tailored made for these knotty situations, including established approaches such as Scrum or Kanban or SAFe. But, now with Business Agility, we’re faced with some new and intriguing challenges, and none of our existing keys are quite the right fit.

The Compass for Agility framework uses principles such as transparency, collaboration, time-boxed and value-driven, to help organizations identify their challenges and craft response strategies customized their unique circumstances. Agile coaches and other change agents can use this framework to help facilitate a design thinking approach to business agility.

The framework consists of five steps, and provides three alternatives for each step so that organizations can select the appropriate level of investment at every point

1. Ideation – what is your challenge and its context? Identifying a challenge is not helpful, without a systems thinking approach of its context, both internal and external.
2. Identification – what are you doing currently? What are your principles, processes and outcomes? Are they helping or hindering your organizational goals?
3. Intake – develop a holistic approach towards problem-solving, by first identifying all the possible actions, and then deciding which option to pursue first.
4. In Action – implementation, based on the decisions made in the previous three steps. Relies heavily on either a time-boxed approach like Scrum, or a flow-based approach like Kanban.
5. Introspection – reflection at all levels of the organization on the decisions made in the previous four steps, as well as their outcomes. Did we address the challenge effectively? What did we learn? What can be our next step to take advantage of our learning and outcomes?

The framework is designed to be recurring, to either build fluency in addressing the current challenge or by broadening the target area to address a separate challenge. Repetitions of the framework are designed to both address challenges not just by applying Agile values, but to also cultivate Agile mindset within the organization.

I would use an activity designed to take groups through the mindset and delivery of this framework, including identifying the core competency for each step as well as the techniques that enable delivery of each step within the designated time-box. The activity kit includes three techniques for each step, while opening the discussion for other techniques that can be substituted, which enables participants to tailor the framework for themselves.

The Four Rules of Improv that Tina Fey delivered in her best-selling book, Bossypants, serve as the inspiration for this workshop. We will explore these four rules and why they’re invaluable in cultivating and reinforcing Agile mindset and achieve sustainable agility. In this experiential workshop, we will pair each rule with an activity that illuminates the rule while connecting it to specific Agile principles and scenarios.

Become an agile catalyst by understanding and applying the Four Rules of Improv to help create a fulfilling environment for yourself and your organization.

Rediscover the universality of Agile principles (and help your clients truly understand them) by playing the Friday Night at the ER simulation.
 
'Friday Night at the ER' (c) is a powerful training game used originally by healthcare management to improve organizational responsiveness and quality. By imitating the challenge of managing a hospital during a 24-hour period, the game helps people experience and internalize the value of thinking systemically, innovating and collaborating across real and anticipated boundaries to achieve their goals. This game focuses on the role of management across various functions who must come together across organizational silos in order to deliver complete and high quality service to customers/patients. Non-uniform arrival of patients, random events, staffing challenges, and other real-world scenarios not only add a sense of reality to the game, but also help to show how these same challenges within our IT organizations can be addressed using Lean principles.

The 45 minute game play is followed by a 45 minute debriefing in which participants are guided through sharing their insights from the game experience and in relating to similarities to their work environments. The takeaway increased insight in helping individuals understand the Agile mindset and bridge silos within their organizations in order to improve flow of delivery.

With all due respect to Shakespeare, the question no longer is To Be or Not To Be [Agile]?

Most of us, at least in this conference, have already made the decision to be Agile on an individual level and are working in environments that have decided that Agile is a worthwhile goal.

So, in order to move towards Agility, we need a roadmap. And as Agile coaches or practioners, we are often tasked to create this roadmap. An effective roadmap requires at least two points: the starting point and the destination.

This presentation is about the starting point. For, if we do not know where we are, it is rather difficult to get to the destination effectively taking into account real-world constraints of schedule, cost, etc.

In order to determine an organization's current state, we typically do an Agile assessment. Most current assessment models are practice-based. That is, they assess the quantity and quality of Agile practices -- doing Agile -- and extrapolate from there. But increasingly we are seeing and experiencing organizations that are not getting the expected benefits of Agile, despite rather diligent implementation and execution of Agile practices.

Therefore, I propose, that an outcomes based Agile assessment model, with the Agile principles at its core, would be more effective in helping us create a customized roadmap for each environment and help our organizations reap the benefits of being Agile.

This workshop will explore various metrics that can capture the essence of the Agile principles and how these metrics can be combined to create an outcomes based Agile assessment model with descriptive, predictive and prescriptive analytics.