Ken France presented on real world business agility. He discussed how business agility allows organizations to rapidly adapt to changes in the market. He defined business agility and explained how it relates to DevOps. France also covered how to implement agile practices within business teams and the different levels of maturity an organization can progress through when integrating agility into the business. The presentation provided examples and a case study on how one large retail organization scaled agile.

1. ©2019 Cprime, Inc. All rights reserved. Do not copy without express written permission. WWW.CPRIME.COM | 877.753.2760

2. REAL WORLD BUSINESS AGILITY

3. OUR SPEAKER
KEN FRANCE, SAFe SPCT/Fellow
• VP of Scaled Agility @Cprime
• 25+ years’ experience
• Executive Enterprise Coach
• Helps Fortune 100 enterprises tackle large complex
scaled agile transformations in various verticals (retail,
healthcare, insurance, finance. etc)
• Passionate about empowering all levels of org in their
journey to drive sustainable improvements and
meaningful change

4. AGENDA
01 WHY BUSINESS AGILITY?
02 BUSINESS AGILITY: THE NEXT DEVOPS?
03 AGILE BUSINESS TEAMS
04 TAKEAWAYS / CONTINUE THE CONVERSATION
05 Q&A

5. WHY BUSINESS AGILITY?

6. WHY BUSINESS AGILITY?
At current churn rate,
75% of current S&P will
be replaced by 2027.

7. WHY BUSINESS AGILITY (cont.)
And the rate of change gap
is only widening between
business models and
organizational changes.

8. WHY BUSINESS AGILITY (cont.)
“Every industry is subject to disruption. Only a truly
agile business is equipped to respond.”
– Forrester Research
Agile firms grow revenue 37% faster. Agile firms
generate 30% higher profits.”
– MIT Sloan
Business agility and
organizational agility are
becoming the norm to
compete and survive.

9. WHY BUSINESS AGILITY (cont.)

10. BUSINESS AGILITY: THE NEXT DEVOPS?

11. BUSINESS AGILITY DEFINITIONS
Business agility is the ability of an
organization to sense changes
internally or externally and respond
accordingly in order to deliver value
to its customers. Business agility is
not a specific methodology or even a
general framework. It’s a description
of how an organization operates
through embodying a specific type of
growth mindset that is very similar to
the agile mindset often described by
members of the agile software
development community. The nature
of that mindset is described in the
Values and Principles section.
1 2
Business agility refers to the "ability
of a business system to rapidly
respond to change[1]
by adapting its
initial stable configuration".[2] It can
be sustained by maintaining and
adapting goods and services in
meeting customer demands,
adjusting to the changes in a
business environment, and taking
advantage of available human
resources.[3]
3
In a business context, agility is the
ability of an organization to rapidly
adapt to market and environmental
changes in productive and cost-
effective ways. An extension of this
concept is the agile enterprise which
refers to an organization that uses
key principles of complex adaptive
systems and complexity science in
achieving success.[4]
Business agility
is the outcome of organizational
intelligence.
4
Business agility is the ability of an
organization to: respond rapidly and
flexibly to customer demands; Adapt
quickly to market changes - internally
and externally; Adapt and lead change in a
productive and cost-effective way without
compromising quality; Continuously be at a
competitive advantage
5
Business agility is concerned with the
adoption of the evolution of values,
behaviours and capabilities. These enable
businesses and individuals to be more
adaptive, creative and resilient when
dealing with complexity, uncertainty and
change leading to improved well-being and
better outcomes.

12. SAFeTM BUSINESS AGILITY 5.0 DEFINED
Business Agility is the ability to compete and thrive in the digital age by quickly responding
to market changes and emerging opportunities with innovative business solutions.
Business Agility requires that everyone involved in delivering solutions—business and
technology leaders, development, IT operations, legal, marketing, finance, support,
compliance, security, and others—use Lean and Agile practices to continually deliver
innovative, high-quality products and services faster than the competition.
© Scaled Agile, Inc.

13. BUSINESS AGILITY
CORE COMPETENCIES

14. MEASURE AND GROW
1
2
3
4
5
Team and Technical Agility (TTA)
Agile Product Delivery (APD)
Enterprise Solution Delivery (ESD)
Lean Portfolio Management (LPM)Lean-Agile Leadership (LAL)
Organizational Agility (OA)
Continuous Learning Culture (CLC)
© Scaled Agile, Inc. All rights reserved.

15. MEASURE AND GROW (DETAIL)
1
2
3
4
5
TTA: Agile Teams
TTA: Built-in Quality
TTA: Team of Agile Teams
APD: Customer Centricity and Design
Thinking
APD: Develop and Cadence; Release on
Demand
APD: DevOps and Continuous Delivery
Pipeline
ESD: Solution and Systems Engineering
ESD: Coordinating Trains and Suppliers
ESD: Continuously Evolve Live Systems
LPM: Strategy and Investment Funding
LPM: Agile Portfolio OperationsLPM: Lean Governance
LAL: Mindset and Principles
LAL: Mindset and Principles
LAL: Leading by Example
OA: Strategy Agility
OA: Lean Business Operations
OA: Lean-Thinking People and Agile
Teams
CLC: Relentless Improvement
CLC: Learning Organization
CLC: Innovation Culture
© Scaled Agile, Inc. All rights reserved.

16. AGILE BUSINESS TEAMS

17. AGILE BUSINESS TEAMS – MATURITY CYCLE
AGILITY “IN” THE BUSINESS
INTEGRATE
AGILITY “OF” THE BUSINESS

18. 1. BE AGILE: AGILE MARKETING
AGILE MARKETING MANIFESTO
Validated learning over opinions and conventions
Customer focused collaboration over silos and hierarchy
Adaptive and iterative campaigns over Big-Bang campaigns
The process of customer discovery over static prediction
Flexible vs. rigid planning
Responding to change over following a plan
Many small experiments over a few large bets
Source: Agilemarketingmanifesto.org

19. 1. BE AGILE: AGILE LEGAL
Source: The Agile Attorney and Sound Immigration
TO DO DOING DONE

20. 1. BE AGILE: AGILE LEADERSHIP TEAMS
• Operate Leadership Teams as
Scrum/Kanban Teams
• Obtain experience with practices
• Demonstrate commitment to the
process and mindset change
• Benefit from visualizing/
prioritizing work, limiting WIP,
enhanced collaboration, etc.

21. 2. JOIN THE VALUE STREAM
EXAMPLES:
• Marketing team joins the ART responsible for defining and building
the products associated to their product line
• Business Readiness embeds tech writers/training specialists on
teams to influence functionality to align to end users and
incrementally build documentation and training assets

22. 2. JOIN THE VALUE STREAM
EXAMPLES:
• Operations support joins the ART to ensure availability and security
requirements are well understood and to minimize cycle time for fixes
and updates
• Enterprise shared services organization (e.g. infrastructure, security),
operates as agile teams or trains and synchronizes its cadence to the
trains it’s supporting, possibly as part of a large solution

23. CASE STUDY:
Retail Organization (Challenges w/Agile in the Business)
1. Being Agile when other BUs are not
2. Training
3. Stories
4. Agile team silos
5. Role confusion
6. Tool hyper-dependence
7. Ad hoc requests
8. Scrum is a job” mindset
3. SPECIALIZE THE PRINCIPLES AND PRACTICES

24. Case Study: Retail Organization (Roadmap)
RECALIBRATE
• Set two-week sprints for
all team, single calendar
• 1:1:1 story estimation, paired
• Run back-to-back Daily Standups,
adjacent locations
• Calculate capacity
• Timebox Backlog Grooming
to 1 hour
• Task all stories, whole team,
in Sprint Planning
• Learn New Retrospective
techniques
• Tighten Product Owner role
• Improve user stories while
prepping for job stories
EVOLVE
• Change focus: visual over electronic
• Socialize practice as an Agile hybrid
• Introduce Agile + Kanban in team
to track ad hocs
• Learn new Release
Planning strategies
• Design/launch Showcases
• Launch PO Roundtable
• Design + run PR campaign
• Secure senior leadership advocacy
• Build recognition + celebration
• Provide Agile Product Owner Coach
in Training role
LEARN
• Team Identity Workshop
• Cadence Refresh
Workshop
• Job Story Workshop
• Product Owner
• Scrum Master
• Executive Practicum
NEXT
• Build Agile Enterprise
Strategy: Elevate
• BU integrations
• Agency Agile strategy
3. SPECIALIZE THE PRINCIPLES AND PRACTICES (cont.)

25. Case Study: Retail Organization (Specialize)
3. SPECIALIZE THE PRINCIPLES AND PRACTICES (cont.)
WHEN
• When is a visual cue of
where this story begins
• It indicates we want
something new to
happen...we will define that
in the Description
• When is also a trigger...it
leads to the Then statement
• It also suggests that where
we are now is not where
we're going to end
up...hence, the new
story action
THEN
• This is the result of what's
been defined in the story
• In other words, it's what
happens, the action the
story delivers
• Team will define it as the
experience we want
consumers to have after
we've delivered and
executed this story
• THEN is the result of what
was triggered by WHEN
• Should match the
title...especially the action
verb that starts each title
KEN
• Scottish word for "know" or
"knowledge"
• When this story is executed, what
will the consumer:
• Know that he/she didn’t
know before?
• Be able to do that he/she
could not do before?
• In Agile, this is where we deliver
business value
• No matter what we do to deliver the
story, we must tie it to what benefits
of the consumers' experience
• Use "As a result of this story, the
consumer will know X and/or be
able to do "X"
ACCEPTANCE
CRITERIA
• Usually a noun...a thing
• An event, promo item,
design plan, sketch, report,
signature, etc.
• Every story needs clearly
defined AC
• PO uses it to ensure he/she
is getting what's needed
from the story
• Also is a test checklist
to make sure the story
is truly Done
• AC should be in sync with
the story title

26. SUMMARY (Case Study)
• Major Business Unit of a $32B company
• 120+ Systems in production
• Initial organization sub-structures based on
various patterns:
o Asset; Customer; Skillset; Corporate Function;
Architectural Layer
Separate Business @ IT Orgs
Matrix-ed environment –
'Bring people to the work'
Phase-gate governance/
release of funds
3-5 year multi-year planning
with yearly budgeting
3. SPECIALIZE THE PRINCIPLES AND PRACTICES (cont.)

27. 3. SPECIALIZE THE PRINCIPLES AND PRACTICES (cont.)
• Centralized decision to roll out SAFe across enterprise
• Opportunistically launched teams within business units
• Established baseline feature team size and skillset composition (t-shaped skills)
• More formally, mapped people into Agile roles
• Dissolved PMO, Business Analysis group and redeployed leaders into Agile roles
• Conducted Value Stream identification to validate BU Portfolios
• Launched Agile Office & Communities of Practice (SM, PO, RTE)

28. 3. SPECIALIZE THE PRINCIPLES AND PRACTICES
1
2
3
4
5
2012
2015
2016
2017
2018
• Launched Agile
• Learnings
• Experimental
time period
• Grassroots
• Executive
Support Pilot
Agile Teams
• Launch the
Agile Trans-
formation
Team
• The rise of the
Agile teams
• Addressing
culture
• Structure and
cadence
• High Performing
Teams
• Scaling with
Release Trains
• Technical Growth
• Measurement
Maturity
• Internal
coaching
sustainability
• Continuous
Integration
1st Generation 2nd Generation
DISCOVERY ENABLE & GROWTH
SUSTAINING &
TECHNICAL EXCELLENCE
LAUNCH CHANGE MATURING & SCALING
0%Agile
20%
Agile
40%
Agile
80%
Agile

29. IN THE END

30. TAKEAWAYS
Don’t get caught up in “software” part of manifesto
• Adapt mindset and principles to
different parts of business
Beware of “DevOps effect”
• Don’t be too distracted by the various
definitions of Business Agility; ensure you
are focused on true business outcomes, not
proxy indicators
• Leverage Measure and Grow assessment in
SAFe 5.0

31. KEEP THE CONVERSATION GOING…
• Reach out and connect with Ken
• Ken.France@cprime.com
• @KenFranceUS on Twitter
• Register for upcoming webinar: Innovation Portfolio Management At Scale with Jira Align
https://cprime.zoom.us/webinar/register/9115716946593/WN_qC6M68z8QAet4oyOlLjCgw
• Check out our upcoming webinars; read our blog, download whitepapers/case studies & more:
• www.cprime.com/resources
• Share with us what topics you are interested in, ask us questions or give us feedback!
• learn@cprime.com
• Follow us on Social Media and share in the conversation & keep updated on thought leadership, events & more.
• www.linkedin.com/company/cprime-inc
• @CprimeInc on Twitter
• Cprime on Facebook

32. THANK YOU