Last Wednesday I had the pleasure to attend a meetup event about agility organized by InnoIT in the center of Barcelona. The goal was to share tools that supported multiple organizations in their agile journey. So, what’s there?
1. Wardley Maps
The Wardley Maps come up as a solution to measure the organization’s capacity to anticipate technological change, demographic change or how user’s preference it’s going to impact us.
If you check out the web page www.learwardleymapping.com you’ll see they have a video that explains briefly what the wardley maps are about. As you can see we categorize each part of our process into the uncharted – industrialized axis, while on the Y axis you can see how we target our purpose strategically.
I found it extremely powerful in the sense that it obligates you to position your product and visualize your business strategy and creates awareness of the weak points and strenghts around it, so that you can adapt better as information emerges.
I really enjoyed this article which explains very well how can you operate based on that framework: https://medium.com/@hendrik_esser/fit-for-purpose-e442b9015ec7.
2. Flight Levels
Flight levels come in from the point that ‘agility is not about teams’. What this really means is that it’s more than that. Of course agility it will end up affecting the way teams work, however it should be the starting point, we need to see how agile we are at a strategic and end-2-end coordination level and here is where Flight Levels jump in.
If you are still interested in knowing more about flight levels I would recommend you to watch this video:
And buy this book from Klaus Leopold, as I just did 🙂
3. OKRs
I assume this is by far the best well-known tool from all so I won’t expand myself much. OKRs are meant to set a desired target state and find ways to measure our progress towards it.
In this website you’ll find some practical examples of how it works: www.whatmatters.com
4. EVIDENCE-BASED MANAGEMENT
As you can see Evidence-Based Management goes around the idea of focusing on customer outcomes (top axis) and organisational capabilities (bottom axis) to make better organizational decisions.
As you can see in this video:
One of the goals of evidence-based management is to ensure we capture all evidence by following six steps:
- Ask an answerable question to help you identify problems or possible solutions
- Acquire relevant information or evidence that will answer that question
- Appraise the quality of that evidence for its trustworthiness
- Aggregate the evidence by summarizing or pulling it together
- Apply it to the decision you are making
- Asses the outcome of that decision
I think the video explains quite well what the approach is, still, if you are interested in learning more, there is also this book available in amazon.
5. F4P
Fit for Purpose goes around the idea that in agile there is no “one fits all”. Here we are looking at our product from different angles:
- Product
- Metrics
- Costumers
And we can go into deep to analyze how well we are performing at each front. An excellent example that they put was that for instance if you go in business class and they are constantly bothering you to offer you things the overall experience it’s ‘unfit’, within the fitness criteria metric.
To be honest it was not straightforward to find a video or explanatory site around the topic. This is the best I could find:
Recommended Bibliography
Summary
The meetup was very valuable to me. To be honest it was the first time I heard about the Wardley Maps and Fit for Purpose framework, plus it allowed me to have a better understanding on evidence based management and flight levels.
It is also true that during a meetup you really don’t have the chance to go deep into any of the topics, putting real life examples and discussing them with the group. Again, I think the goal of the meeting was accomplished which is to share and give an overview of the tools therefore I am grateful I could be there. Thanks Jerome!
Xavier Figueras 