Wang Minglan - original Huawei, Microsoft's innovation and transformation coach, director of Huawei's cloud SaaS products, well-known experts in Lean & Agile Transformation
VUCA from the earliest Cold War, the business world in the modern world means more and more uncertain, more volatile, more unpredictable, we have entered into VUCA era.
We can no longer come to work with the original kind of traditional, plan-driven way, because of the uncertainty of the times, we have to embrace change. Agile itself is in a background as more and more development and growth. If you fall back many years before, agile will not grow, because we have not yet entered this era.
Previously, enterprise life cycle is relatively long, but now the company's life cycle is shorter and shorter, the past few decades, centuries, and now is 10 years, 15 years. Uncertainty more serious, so the company can continue to explore how to make themselves more responsive to market changes and adapt to the times, it was a lot of companies are trying to agile driving force behind the transformation.
The book we all know what that is? TEAM OF TEAMS, this book is very fire bestseller, called empowerment.
In our view the contents of the book and the name is actually talking about is how large-scale organization which can enhance the organization's ability to adapt. Enabling speak as we all know, during the war in Iraq, the US military how to change their own to deal with attacks on terrorist organizations. I summed up the whole book which describes the US military which made several changes:
1- From centralized military bloc into a small Special Forces unit;
2- highly visual form of some of the war quickly make scientific decisions;
3- ongoing feedback and adjustment
These three points actually applies not only to the war, the book became a bestseller not because the description of the war, but he was very common in the business world.
I did a lot of agile consulting company, found that different enterprise agile transformation of urgency is not the same, some very urgent business, some companies still belong to does not matter, some companies feel wanted, but did not dare.
What kind of business it would be more urgent? There is such a survey, if the company's increasingly uncertain economic environment, this kind of enterprise transformation it is even more urgent. For example, the communications industry: like Nokia, Nokia Siemens communications industry companies to do this very quickly early, though not very Huawei speak, but do agility Huawei in China's private enterprises is one of the earliest in Huawei from 2008 to doing, unknown, because Huawei does not encourage employees to come out and say.
In addition, the banking industry in substantially all of the state-owned big firms are trying to agile transformation. Why transition? Also under pressure as the business.
That in the end what kind of organization can be called a nimble organization do?
I summed up the need for three of the agile organization:
The first rapid response force;
second strong execution;
the third is the need for continuous innovation.
Light easy thing to say three behind, along with Sanli, with enterprises under extreme circumstances very, very small.
Rapid response force
Rapid response force needs a firm organizational structure it needs to be able to respond quickly.
What organizations need to respond quickly? If you do one thing to be layers of approval to the report, and then to the top-level approval is issued down to down, this company, it will not be quick response force.
Agile organization is what? Agile organization that advocates of open-end value chain. For example, I am I doing some banks enterprise consulting, the bank's research and development team would like to line a small feature on the phone inside the bank, which in itself is a very simple thing, in general a team to get things, but they are not the same, on-line a functional need to pull through seven or eight teams, seven, eight team and across three or four departments, on this line, it needs two months.
If, for a start-up companies, it is very fast on the last line, but the bank can not do in this organization. Do not because of the poor people, not because of poor technology, because the organizational structure is too complex. Do any one thing, we need to cross the other team, or even other departments to collaboration to complete. Agile organizations need is to get through these structures, built as a fully functional team, so that these teams have high-speed response to a force as entrepreneurial team.
Therefore, the construction agile organization structure, it is to flat organizational structure, break down barriers, so that each team are the same as the entrepreneurial team
After the Scrum agile team is essentially the smallest organization unit, they constitute a Scrum team each member of a team, it is no longer dependent on other teams, will be able to deliver an end to end, this is one of the essence of Scrum.
Scrum inventor Jeff Sutherland in the past two years out of a new book called "agile revolution", the meaning of this book is that it describes the application of Scrum in the IT industry outside in, and this is quite a breakthrough . Although agile development for so many years, we thought it was only in the field of software development, no thought can also be applied outside the software development. But Jeff Sutherland in this book he describes the application of Scrum in a variety of industries, including the United Nations, governments, television and so there is no work in software development.
Scrum software development and nature is not related to, the nature of its front row of "empowerment" in the same three points:
1- cross-functional teams
2- essentially small cycles
3- early failure
Strong execution
Execution of this topic has been talked about for many years, with the implementation of agile force nothing on history, not what agile command and control, seem to feel is top-down execution.
I think so before, this is understandable, but in recent years some of my business sectors other than R & D do consulting, found leadership in these sectors is highly desirable to have a method to help them come and build execution, but they do not have an effective method. I found that agile is actually a very good way to help them build execution.
This best-selling book called "executive", although there is no mention of any Agile philosophy, but there is talk of a method of execution, there are very agile mind, this is quite surprised me. For example, speaking of the seven basic leadership behaviors need to have:
First, Article understand the business and employees
second, adhere to fact-based
Third, establish clear objectives and goals of the order of
the fourth, to follow up
fifth, to reward the implementation of
the sixth, improve staff capacity and quality of
the seventh , know yourself
Continuous innovation
From the organization, the core is the biggest motivation is a sense of crisis, as an organization if there is no sense of crisis there is no incentive to innovate, why Huawei has sustained the power of innovation? Because it is too a sense of crisis.
Light a sense of crisis is not enough, companies need a blend of down and bottom-up mechanism to build on ongoing innovation since, OKR It provides this mechanism
OKR mechanism that allows organizations to embrace innovation mechanism from the system, from the bottom up.
I think the whole OKR embodies the principles of agility, it is the equivalent of agile principles explored in the field of HR inside a set of methods, but the word has any connection with agility does not matter, this is very strange. Because it allows organizations it can be determined in addition to the set target of uncertainty, but also top-down feedback their goals.
Concluded, agile organizations need to build three power are: rapid response force, strong execution and continuous innovation. There is no light in response to force execution, many of these organizations will want to do but there is no way to perform landing; Without constant innovation, the organization will easily be subverted.
Source: Worktile agile blog
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