One answer to this is by ensuring there is alignment throughout the organization, from business priority to ideation to production and delivery, and with marketing and sales on board. And that is done through the creation of value streams, which provide insights into how those teams are operating and continuing (or not) to meet organizational goals.

“When you think about alignment, you have to think about it across our whole value streams of tools, people and processes,” explained Lance Knight, Chief Value Stream Architect at Broadcom-AOD.

According to Broadcom, its ValueOps platform helps tear down organizational silos and helps teams collaborate by providing a single platform that ensures planning a project and delivering outcomes are aligned. When thinking about alignment, it has to bring in all the organization’s value streams of tools, people and process, Knight explained, adding that alignment has to be both downward and upward.

“Let’s say you’re in operations, and you’re working on things, but do those activities align to the outcomes and goals that you’re trying to achieve?” he noted. “Do they align to your OKRs? Do they align to cost and spending?”

Or, he said, let’s say you’re a developer and a defect comes in from a customer, and you think that’s something you need to prioritize and fix right away. But that may not align to the business goal, and isn’t connected to the prioritization alignments in portfolio management. So, while pushing the goals and objectives downward from the business, it’s also important to allow upward alignment, where portfolio teams have awareness of what the different units are working on and say that, yes, there’s technical debt to be cleaned up, but perhaps it’s not important that it get done today to achieve the goals.

However, Knight noted, communication is a two-way street, and perhaps a developer could argue that something in the code needs to be fixed today, even though it might not align with the business goals. 

Alignment, he pointed out, is about sharing the same vision by having all the information about what the teams are working on and knowledge about any particular artifact. That information flows up and down the value stream, in an automated and connected way, within the ValueOps platform.

Tying together Clarity, Rally, ConnectALL and Insights – ValueOps by Broadcom’s business stakeholders have an understanding of why teams are fixing what they’re fixing. And this alignment, Knight said, solves other problems as well. “With alignment,” he said, “you establish trust … trust that we’re building the right things.”

SECOND OF THREE PARTS

PART 1: Three pillars of value stream management
PART 3: Optimize organizational efficiency to drive customer value

The post Organizational alignment is the key to delivering customer value appeared first on SD Times.

No longer is the goal of digital transformation to become digitally native, but instead to drive real, tangible value for the business. Charting a clear path towards that value and executing on it is the differentiator between companies that maximize their strategy and the ones that embrace digital transformation just because everyone else is.

VALUE CREATION

The pace of change in the digital world is dizzying, and it’s easy to get caught-up rubbernecking the competition to spot the latest trends. Digital enthusiasts move in the same circles, read the same articles, and attend the same industry trade shows hyping the hottest tech. The result can be a Frankenstein monster of a digital strategy, cobbled-together tech that might not actually be valuable for their business. The fact is, every organization’s digital transformation is unique, and its success or failure depends on its own specific level of optimization.

At its most basic, digital transformation is a combination of two things – digitization, and optimization. Digitization has been around for a while, and just means digitizing information or making data available in a digital format. Optimization (also referred to as “digitalization”) is more process-focused, and involves using those digital technologies to operate systems more efficiently. A company’s ability to marry digitization with optimization will determine the value of their transformation. 

TECH TALK

Real change occurs by listening, not talking. Oftentimes, CIOs, CDOs and CTOs get swept up in the excitement of a transformation and simply pass down edicts that the company is “going digital” without first determining the strategy or creating KPIs that can properly measure impact. The result? Conflicting plans, varying timelines, and splintered focus. (And a lot of wasted time and money.)

Instead, a digital transformation needs to start by defining business goals and expectations across the leadership team and aligning those goals and expectations with department heads to ensure their vision matches reality. From there, rather than attempt to change an entire organization at once, it’s best to view a digital transformation in layers – what are the areas of importance, how do they stack up against each other, and how can you condense operational needs across departments?

Imagine you’re the CIO of a large consumer packaged goods brand with approximately 50,000 employees across 40+ departments offering hundreds of products to millions of customers. Your technology ecosystem would be a mess of legacy mainframes, aging document storage systems, disparate processes, overloaded IT teams, off-the-shelf systems with low user adoption, and an unstable suite of customer-facing digital channels. How do you encapsulate all of this onto a whiteboard and create a digital transformation roadmap? 

This is where layers factor in. Trying to find tactical solutions to each of these individual issues would lead to silos, multiple bespoke systems, and fragmented processes. By grouping common issues into layers though, you’ll develop a much more manageable, strategic framework.

LAYERS & PHASES

There are six layers to any digital transformation, each condensing key focus areas:

Data – How do you store and retrieve data securely? How do you scale? How do you ensure data integrity and avoid redundancy/duplication?

Application – How do you apply data to run your day-to-day business operations? How do you democratize data access by providing a centralized abstraction and distribution layer?

Process – How do you streamline your business processes?

Experience – How do your internal (employees) and external customers interact with the processes and systems? (UI/UX)

Collaboration – How do cross-functional teams collaborate more effectively to get work done faster? 

Intelligence – How do you derive insights from data and apply intelligence into the work that you do? 

Each layer must go through its own distinct phases of digitization and optimization to result in a successful (and holistic) transformation. How a company defines their own transformation depends on multiple factors unique to the organization, including budget, available resources, and the capacity for innovation over time. This is what makes true transformation a never-ending journey, the same way customer satisfaction is a never-ending pursuit. 

PLAYING THE LONG GAME

Those looking to embark on their own digital transformation journey should be prepared for the realities of working without a finish line. It’s a process of continuous learning, but one that will ultimately create a more cohesive, efficient, and modern operation. By using the layers and phases of a digital transformation as a framework, CIOs, CDOs and CTOs can build a system that works across their entire organization and truly adds long-term value.

The post The Layers and Phases of Effective Digital Transformations appeared first on SD Times.

The process of value stream identification as laid out by SAFe starts with identifying your operational value stream, the workflow that your business follows to deliver value, and then breaking that down into the systems that support that value stream. Once you understand the systems, you can look at the people who build and support those systems and organize them into development value streams that deliver those systems to support your business. It’s a solid and worthwhile process for software-oriented companies. The challenge is that it goes straight from Step B to Step G without any regard for everything that needs to happen from C to F. In order to understand how to support your development value streams, you have to understand the purpose for which your business exists, what exactly is the value that it delivers, and how do you measure the successful delivery of that value (hint: it’s not ROI).

Once you know what your currency of value is and how you measure it, you still shouldn’t go straight to what systems you use to create that value. Before you go to systems, you have to look at what business processes you use to execute your operational value stream. Once you know what business processes you have in place, then and only then should you start to look at how the people that execute those processes do their work. What systems do they use? What organizational partners and vendors support their delivery? Then you can move on to the rest of the traditional value stream identification exercise.

But what happens if you don’t do this first?

I have seen it repeatedly. Organizations organize around systems that lead to massively siloed functional teams and programs. One large financial group I was brought into had organized themselves into 127 teams of teams called Agile Release Trains (ART), each with a specific system that it maintained. And then as investments were made into large initiatives, projects, and programs, we found that the average initiative required dependency coordination across 70-80 of those ARTs. The amount of overhead and dependency management was staggering, and led to them being less efficient than before, even with the greater understanding of their operational value stream. And this isn’t uncommon! Bad agility is worse than no agility at all. If this organization had taken the time to understand the connections between business processes inside their value stream, they would have realized they didn’t need dedicated ARTs for each system and could have better organized around groups of people aligned to achieving specific business purposes.

Starting with your business processes also allows you to eliminate the single most common roadblock to successful value stream implementation: corporate functions getting left behind. When you don’t talk about business processes, you forget to include functions like supply chain, procurement, HR, legal, accounting, and finance into your development value streams and ARTs. Over and over we see organizations implement new ways of working only to discover that the role matrix doesn’t support it, or that no one invited procurement to strategic planning and so the entire roadmap has to be delayed or emergency authorizations have to be granted. When you start with business processes, and break those down into systems, you end up including those functions as part of the global view you apply to your value streams.

Not only does aligning around business processes enable faster flow of value — which is the whole reason most organizations choose to do value stream identification — it’s also a more complete picture of your organizational and strategic context. The Lean-Agile SAFe approach to value streams is great, but it’s incomplete until you bring the business along for the ride.

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