Talk: Managing the work, not the people - Reinventing organisations in an Agile way
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Speaker:
Alison Sturgess-Durden
Talk description
Title:
Managing the work, not the people - Reinventing organisations in an Agile way
Short synopsis:
Our talk will describe the journey we are on to redesign our organisational structures and processes in line with Agile and ‘Teal’ principles. Developing our own company structure in place of a traditional hierarchy, we consider some of the challenges and rewards of scaling Agile principles to a whole organisation. We will look at the various organisational elements that need to be redesigned and adopted to create a whole company operating structure, including values, strategy, decision making, roles and coaching.
Max size: 500 chars
Long synopsis (optional):
In 2013 Mayden adopted an Agile approach to its software development process, and implemented Scrum throughout its software teams. It seemed like a brave move at the time, but we just knew that something had to change - it was taking us three months to release new features, and both our customers and developers were becoming frustrated. Fast forward four years and it was safe to say we had cut our Agile teeth and were not far from our 100th sprint. But whilst we were happy with the way an Agile approach was serving the business, all was not quite as we wanted it to be. Over those four years the company had grown from around 25 people to more than 60. Our products were increasingly complex, as were our customers’ needs. Not only had we chosen to adopt an Agile approach, we wanted to be as ‘flat’ an organisation as possible in terms of our management structure - in keeping with Agile principles and the promise of greater creativity and engagement that should come from less hierarchy. The software development teams were already self managing, why not the rest of the organisation? So with the very best intentions of taking an Agile approach to the rest of the company we started taking away much of the structure and traditional tools of management such as formal appraisals and all but the minimum line management. Contrary to what we expected, however, staff satisfaction began to slide. So at a pivotal staff day in November 2016, the whole company was asked, ‘what needs to change?’. The answers were wide and varied, including improve customer engagement, make the reward and recognition system more transparent, improve team and individual goals and feedback, and address cross-team working. With 12 topics in total, we knew there was a large job in hand to improve staff satisfaction and develop our own way of working. Inspired by a ‘Teal’ paradigm*, guided by Agile principles, and using some techniques from Scrum the ‘Mayden Backlog’ was born for our organisational development initiatives across the company. We use tools and techniques from Scrum to manage our organisational development programme: - There is a single source of work identified by our stakeholders as important to achieve our organisation development goals - The work is broken up into epics and stories - There is a Product Owner for the Mayden backlog - We have a definition of done - We prioritise the work in the backlog and break it into discrete tasks - We work in two week sprints to get the work done - We work closely with our customers and other stakeholders (staff, directors) to agree priorities and how the work will be done Small ‘task and finish’ groups take on stories and find ways to answer them. To date this has resulted in: - a company vision and set of values that everyone has been involved in developing - a new system for giving and receiving feedback - a new training policy and self-managed training budget for the whole organisation - rolling out a decision making protocol - doing away with our ‘Exec Team’ and in its place setting up a series of issue based strategic and operational groups with membership from across the business - over half our people now have a personal coach, a trained colleague who can help them work through challenges, explore possibilities and map their development path. Is this approach working? In many ways, yes. After a year of undertaking our organisational development work in this way we have achieved the best staff survey results since the company began. Our people really feel they are involved in decisions that affect them and know how to tackle something they’re not happy about. But we still have a way to go. There’s still a sense there are too many meetings and not enough decisions or ownership of issues. Because the alternative to hierarchy is subtly yet fundamentally different to traditional ways of working, it can be challenging for everyone to understand the difference and know what is expected. We are now embarking on our second year of the Mayden Backlog. We’re calling it “Chapter 2” as we feel we’ve closed the first chapter of figuring out how to work internally in this way, and are looking forward to tackling the next set of stories in the backlog. *http://www.reinventingorganizationswiki.com/Teal_Organizations
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