Over the holiday break, I had the pleasure of spending an hour with Peter Senge from MIT and founder of the Society on Organizational Learning talking through some of the concepts and models in his new book, Necessary Revolution. In particular, he uses the Shareholder Value matrix from Hart and Milstein to help organizations build a comprehensive vision and strategy for sustainable value.

4-elements-shareholder-value

We decided to use that model for our 2-day annual planning session that was led by Jean Tully at Creating Clarity.  The model worked very well and helped us manage four intertwined aspects of strategy, divided on the axes of today/tomorrow and internal/external.

While using the model in planning at Rally, we realized that working in two dimensions allowed us to see the whole, and bound the conversations in a way that made the meeting very productive. We are students of Verne Harnish and Gazelles.com; we have and continue to use his one-page strategic planning matrix. However, we have struggled in the past in only talking  along the time dimension.

Proposed Framework for Agile Adoption

It was so successful that I built an example Agile adoption strategy model to help illustrated its use. I built this model of a fictitious software-driven organization to illustrate the result of completing only the “Today” part of the plan at the exclusion of “Tomorrow.” The trick of balancing short-term and long-term agility  is completing both the top and the bottom to keep the business from myopically focusing on today.

This proposed framework can help you effectively communicate your Agile strategy in the context of the overall business.

example use of the framework for a software driven organization

Example use of the Agile adoption framework for a software-driven organization

In this model, I define Agile as a strategy and not a driver.  I have yet to meet a company who has been successful at adopting Agile development that did not have a higher-level driver or business goal such as a massive increase in quality, cycle-time, customer satisfaction or market innovation.  However, many people argue about what is Agile – a methodology, an approach, a process?  To me it is all of those things, but its success and impact are starting to make it a strategy for many of our customers.

BTW, Peter Senge’s book is great for folks new to sustainability (balancing economic, social and environmental factors – see the SoL sustainability consortium) and deep learning strategies or for folks with a deep collection of both. And, if you are really interested consider attending their two-day training in Boston next week.

Further Reading:

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