What are the most important considerations for organisations planning to accelerate?
I would say there's four pain points to consider: your people, your financial controls, your governance model, and your ability to actually deliver.
I once took away a team of people for a camping and team-building weekend. We had to go and find various points on a map – and the further away from base it was, the more points you got. If you looked at the map, some points were at the top of steep hills, some were flat rides and easier to get to.
A couple of us were standing around and one guy jumped on his bike and started going off as fast as possible. We asked him where he was going, and he said, “I don’t know, but I’m going to get there really fast.” And then he rode straight into a hedge.
When someone says we must accelerate, I think about that story. The first thing we need to understand is where we’re going. Have you asked your customer where it should be? Do you have the people who can help you accelerate?
Second, think about your culture. Have you got people in the organisation that are willing to come up with ideas without any fear, and does your culture allow that?
Third, are there ‘blockers’ who will get in the way of your change? We often have people whose job it is to stop us from doing stupid things, do they need to be briefed to allow this acceleration? Because there’s a level of risk involved in going more quickly. A perfect example of this is Lloyds Bank which has controls to stop change happening on the banking website – 70 people were involved in changing one sentence. Then, during the pandemic, a load of information had to be added within 24 hours. After that, why bother going back to the old, slow process?
There's four pain points to consider: your people, your financial controls, your governance model, and your ability to actually deliver the thing.
What does agility and resilience mean to your organisation?
For me, agility in software or service development is all about getting something into customers’ hands as fast as you can, to find out how wrong you are. From a resilience point of view, I take an inside-out approach. It’s looking at our organisation and mapping what’s needed to pick up the phone and serve an enquiry call.
If your payroll didn’t work for a day, how many people would you need to support before the process really broke down – is it 10% or 20% or 80%? What’s the least we need to do to maintain our façade and get operations back underway? I think that’s how you plan for resilience.
From a resilience point of view, I take an inside out approach. It’s looking at our organisation and mapping what’s needed to pick up the phone and serve an enquiry call.
What can organisations do to help people adapt and keep up with the pace of change?
We have a concept called the Engineering Academy, where we take learning and wrap it around the work that people are actually doing, rather than going to a training course and getting content that is separate from your business or your real world. It means that you’re still carrying on with your work, you're just doing it better, more efficiently, and accelerating your changes that you do.