“Generative cultures create monitoring systems and visible displays that enable people throughout the organization to rapidly access relevant information – which, in turn, changes their orientation. Changes in orientation will cause us to update what we measure and how information flows through the organization. In pathological and bureaucratic organizational cultures, measurement is used as a form of control, and people hide information that challenges existing rules, strategies, and power structures.” 1
On the first days of 2019, we have witnessed that Apple shares lost more than 9% of their value on Wall Street after the company dramatically cut its revenue forecasts for the first time in 16 years. Although the company is blaming the economic slowdown in China on “the trade wars”, it is not a secret that Apple has been facing a fierce competition from new rising players. Huawei overtook Apple to become the world’s second-largest smartphone seller behind Samsung in the second quarter of 2018. 2
Undoubtedly, Apple is still a very strong player in the market with a strong App Store ecosystem, a successful marketing strategy and unique user experience provided by IOS. However, as a part of the generation who experienced the quick rise and fall of giants in the smartphone industry such as Ericsson, Nokia, and Blackberry, I wouldn’t be too surprised if the company’s market share will continue shrinking due to its release strategy based on having only small upgrades for each new model as well as expensive price tags.
In today’s digitalized world, accelerating speed of innovation and competition is becoming more and more deadly force for not only dying, niche industries and also today’s glorious enterprises or even yesterday’s leaders of innovation. New technologies, apps and start-ups are entering into the market to bite the share in an accelerating speed every day. And new giants, China, Korea and India are increasingly challenging old glorious players by new brands, technology and innovation. “Half a century ago, the life expectancy of a firm in the Fortune 500 was around 75 years. Now it’s less than 15 years and declining even further.” 3
The way your organization responds to this accelerating change has become crucial more than ever. If the organization is too big, complex and organizational culture doesn’t allow to respond to the change; it’s proven that old finance/HR based strategies such as downsizing or panic attempts to cut the cost of a giant organization can just create delusion that the walking dead is still alive. They likely give more space to the competitors when they are already gaining a momentum and cutting crucial investment to help transformation towards being an adaptive organization. “This waste comes not from the inefficient organization of work rather from working on the wrong things –and on an industrial scale.”4 Needless to say, it would also cause demoralization among employees whom organization needs more than ever to fight for its life.
Therefore, many enterprise organizations around the world have been through big transformation processes to become more Lean and Agile organizations so that they can respond to the change more quickly. Lean approach urges enterprises to cut the waste which is produced by the process focused project approach, have short lead times in order to learn from customers and build a cultural and physical environment which allows innovation.
Nevertheless, it’s not an easy transformation and requires cultural change rather than implementing new tools and processes. It, doubtless, does not mean that new tools and processes are not important. It’s still very important to have the right tools and processes in place because cultural change cannot be possible while you are living by old rituals. Relatively new Scaled Agile frameworks are providing a good framework to implement Lean Portfolio or Agile methodologies at an enterprise scale. However, “Every organization will take its own path to address changes, aligned to its own business objectives; to create lasting results, we must enable teams to try things out and learn what works and what doesn’t for themselves” 5 Therefore, it’s not a realistic approach to see this transformation process in a very formulated way and isolated from companies’ current conditions, organization and culture.
Digital Dashboards: a new way of reporting
Having dual life together is the one of the biggest challenges for the transformation process for enterprise organizations. It’s not realistic to expect, even for organizations which are most determine to change, to leave all old projects and ways of working at once and start a new life. Lean Enterprise approach already recommends avoiding a big-bang approach for transformation anyway. However, this dual life and journey from project and process based approach to product and outcome based approach also brings some significant problems which can cost the journey itself. Starting a journey does not guarantee reaching the destination. In particular, if your destination is as ambitions as the changing the culture.
One of the biggest difficulty in this dual life emerges around the way we report to Senior Management, PMO or IT Finance Departments. In a transforming enterprise, we often witness that Delivery or Product Managers are preparing excel reports to interpret their Lean-Agile development cycles into a process based reporting. Thus, PMO, IT Finance or Senior Managers can have a feeling of safety by seeing progress against resource and time based planning. This way of reporting has many problems such as creating vanity reports or building wrong expectations. However, I believe the biggest problem here is laying down change itself. This kind of reporting doesn’t give room to a new cultural climate so that it can thrive.
Another way for dual life enterprises to tackle this problem is to leave agile teams out of the main reporting processes. I have seen different approaches in this way of working. In some cases, Agile teams have their own Lean Portfolio Management and the reports they are producing are mostly determined by the Scaled Agile framework chosen by the enterprise, if there is any. Sometimes enterprise might have different Scaled Agile Frameworks or tailored models together.6 Nevertheless, in most cases transforming enterprise would end up having many reports trying to show different type of progress. It would be no surprise to see that every product/project group have their own standards and PMO and IT Finance are lost among figures. In that world, whereas process based projects still have their own reports, some Agile teams might have their own standards to create their reports from just one burn-down/up charts to reports based on Lean Portfolio Metrics, some others may not create any reports at all.
The main problem about this sort of autonomy is it creates isolated islands which have their own language. In that environment teams don’t have visibility and transparency throughout the organization. Without transparency (one of the core value of Lean-Agile approach) teams and therefore organizations lose their ability to learn from each other. Furthermore, this transparency is not only important for agile teams themselves, it’s also important for even process based project teams to gradually learn and adapt to lean-agile culture.
Therefore, a transforming enterprise towards lean-agile development and cultural environment needs a new, transparent way of reporting for Lean Portfolio Management. Digital Dashboards can be an effective tool of this new type of reporting. First of all, main consumers of this new type of reporting will be teams themselves followed by other stakeholders and even none-agile teams. And secondly those reports should be accessible and visible for the relevant parties in the enterprise. While they are providing actionable, accessible and auditable metrics to teams and stakeholders, they can also help enterprise to create a new, transparent language of reporting.
1. Lean Enterprise; Jez Humble, Joanne Molesky & Barry O’Reilly; O’Reilly, 2015; page: 56 ↩2. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/aug/01/huawei-beats-apple-smartphone-manufacturer-samsung-iphone ↩
3. https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2011/11/19/peggy-noonan-on-steve-jobs-and-why-big-companies-die ↩
4. The Lean Startup, Eric Ries, Portfolio Penguin, 2011, Page: 274 ↩
5. Lean Enterprise; Jez Humble, Joanne Molesky & O’Reilly; O’Reilly, 2015; page: 109 ↩
6. “Both Large-Scale Scrum (LeSS) and Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) have a history with Nokia and use it as a reference. What most people do not realize, is that Nokia was two big loosely coupled companies. LeSS was and is mostly used at Nokia Networks (now still called Nokia Networks) side while SAFe was mostly used at Nokia Mobile Phones side (now mostly Microsoft or closed down).”, Ari Tikka, https://less.works/blog/courses/2015/03/25/less-vs-safe.html ↩