Session Title: The Adaptive Company
Submitters: David Stoughton
Abstract: Agile methods have delivered significant benefits. They enable teams to be more productive and efficient but unfortunately, without equivalent changes throughout the organisation, they may only be enabling people to do the wrong thing very well. This is especially true for organisations whose market is changing fast - nearly all of us now.
In the adaptive company senior management must evaluate and prioritise customer, market and organisational demands on a cycle corresponding to the clock speed of change. Programme and product managers must follow a faster cycle fusing the changing goals and targets established by management with information about project status to decide priorities and allocate resources, and project managers and teams must at all times be able to see their priorities, adjust requirements and track whether the organisational goals they contribute to are being met. To enable this the decision making process and hierarchy needs to be more agile, and systems must be established to enable the inward flow of market data and a return flow about progress and performance to drive timely, transparent, decision making at all levels.
Without these organisational changes projects, however well run, quickly become divorced from market demands and end up delivering a product that is sub-optimal by the time it arrives, or too late to meet the need.
This presentation will suggest the structures, processes and systems needed to enable a company to be more adaptive and offer the opportunity for the audience to review and give feedback on the specific changes needed at their organisation.
