Question 1: What is your company vision, which strategy is supporting it?
What is the long-term vision of your business? Where do you want to be a couple of years down the road. Which business strategy are you currently following?
Question 2: Why do you want to become agile?
Doing an agile transformation is en vogue. However, the essential question ‘Why’ is often being ignored. What is the outcome your organization wants to achieve by being agile. Remember, Agile is not an end, it is a means, it is about being agile.
Question 3: What is the company culture we anticipate?
Think about agile as a mindset from which you derive the organizational values. These values are the basis on which the company principles are derived from. These principles guide everyday practices and behaviours. The right behaviors lead to the right outcome - the company culture. This is enabled through effective leadership.
Question 4: Who will be the leaders of the change?
Working on becoming agile will be faced with resistance. People like to change but not to be changed. On top of that, there is the organizational complacency. Who in the upper management will lead and communicate this effort and if needed remove the encrusted complacency?
Question 4: Who are your customers?
Understanding the customers’ needs, being able to emphasize with them is paramount. The better we serve them, the happier they are, the more customers we will have. This will sustaining our growth.
Question 5: What are your products?
Your customers use your products and services to solve their problems. Each customer has a specific problem which is being solved through one of your products. Therefore, identifying the right products form a customer perspective is essential. Usually a product has P&L (Profit and Loss).
Question 6: What is the value stream for each product?
Once you have identified your products, it is about identifying their respective value stream. Which internal departments, systems, technologies, and people are required to build the product. Those value streams are the basis for the organizational design.
Question 7: What does the agile organizational design look like?
How can you organize your organization around the value streams? It is not about making the problem fit your existing structure, it is about fitting the organizational structure fit our products.
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Congratulations! You have created a strategic roadmap. Now go ahead and turn it into tactical actions!
Walk the Talk!