Organizational Agility Alignment

The Organizational Agility Alignment is a path to organizational improvement. It starts with short facilitated activities that provide a core and foundation for you and your people to make your organization more flexible, to heal its problems, and to enhance its growth.

The Organizational Agility Alignment is a collection of tools and techniques your organization can use to increase its effectiveness and health. Its techniques come from the people whose work has been acknowledged as one of the major foundations of the Agile movement, of SCRUM, and of Extreme Programming. Based on the critically acclaimed book Organizational Patterns of Agile Software Development, and designed by the book’s authors, this program gives your teams the tools, encouragement, support and direction they need to understand their day-to-day problems and to find sound solutions for them.

Who is it for?

This service is for any organization that build things. We specialize in software development teams. The alignment exists to help your teams become more effective. Your team members can benefit whether they are just starting up, or whether they feel against the wall, or whether they feel they need fine-tuning. It can help teams as small as a half-dozen people, and enterprises as large as hundreds of people and groups.

If you’re tired of hype or extreme measures, or if you’re just confused about all the options available for successful team building, this program can help you find your way.

What do you commit to?

Your people must be committed to improving the organization and must be ready to face change. The Organizational Agility Alignment is a participatory program that focuses on whole-organization involvement. The organization must have management support for consulting services, for the time commitments of the team members, and for supporting the team in its improvement efforts.

Each organization commits to a session where we gather data to make a model (the “mirror”) of your organization. We need people at this exercise who can represent the interests of all the organization’s roles, and who can represent the interactions with roles outside the organization – creating a microcosm of your organization. We do not ask that you do any advance preparation for this session. We strive to collect your team’s collective vision of how they really work.

Later, the organization commits to a debriefing of the results and models. This facilitated discussion lays the groundwork for concrete steps of improvement.

What do we provide?

We start by facilitating the session with the selected team from your organization and use the results to build models of your organization. We also facilitate the debriefing for you.

We provide a report that shows the structure of your organization in new ways. We take the results and use them to make several models of your organization. The most common model is called a social network diagram. It shows all the roles in your organization in proximity to each other.

We also provide you a short summary of organizational metrics that compare your organization to other organizations of similar size and complexity. Though this is an imprecise comparison, it can help you understand how you “stack up.”

Last—and perhaps most important—we provide you with an annotated checklist of the patterns in your organization: both those that we find in your organization, and those we find missing. This list is a gold mine for planning your improvement program. We work with you to advise you as you make your choices and plans for organizational improvement, and can provide optional follow-up support as desired.

What can you expect?

This program has been run with over 100 organizations worldwide, and almost all of them have attested to the fidelity of the models we build for them. Paradoxically, the models were full of surprises. The surprises come from the perspectives that the models provide: they help you see your organization in new ways. Some of these surprises come during the sessions themselves, but most of the value comes in the reflection of the social network models that the sessions yield. You can see the affinity relationships between your organization’s roles. You can see how many communication paths there are between key producers and consumer. You can see which roles must work closely together, and then can ask yourself whether your organizational structure, your office assignments, and role mappings are right for your business.

Next Steps

If you would like to learn more about this program or would like to schedule an alignment time with your team, please contact us.