I’m Stuart Ward,
the Agile Mechanic.
I build custom Agile programs tailored to your organization and fix Agile programs gone awry.
Empowerment: The Key to Organizational Agility
When people are not empowered, bad things can happen:
Resistance and Resentment
Management Bottlenecks
People become scapegoats
Micromanaging
Low Morale
Lack of Initiative
Problems with Agile Rooted in the Organizational Operating Model
Scaled Agile framework has increased overhead
Departments are still regularly over budget
Inability to manage priorities across the entire enterprise
Inability to self-organize into teams
Departments are still regularly over budget
Inability to manage priorities across the entire enterprise
Inability to self-organize into teams
What Sets Me Apart?
Unlike agilists who specialize only in recognized Agile practices, I work at a higher level.
I use the leading thinking in organizational design not only to repair and improve your Agile practices, but create true organizational agility by building it directly into the systems that surround and support your Agile practices.
“Stuart's was hired at TicketNetwork to fix the IT department. His systematic approach and spot on solutions, which he called the IT Service Initiative, were so successful, other departments immediately embarked on their own service initiatives”
—Douglas Kruse, Chief Technology Officer, TicketNetwork
“Stuart Ward is an Agile guru who deeply understands the inherent problems with current Agile scalable frameworks, and knows how to make Agile truly agile with a next-generation organizational operating model.”
—N. Dean Meyer, author, How Organizations Should Work
Scaled Frameworks:
Agile Development but Not Agile Team Formation
Scaled Agile frameworks increase productivity but decrease organizational agility because they inhibit dynamic (self-organizing team formation.
Scenario:
You are a development manager for a large organization that has adopted a popular scaled Agile framework. You agreed to fully dedicate your resources to the teams in the framework and not pull them away because the coaches explained Agile teams need to be fully dedicated and long-lived.
A strategic initiative comes in that does not fit into the value streams in the scaled framework. The enterprise-level priority of the strategic initiative is high, as is the political visibility.
You know you should reallocate some of your resources from the teams in the framework to work on the initiative, but you can’t because you agreed to fully dedicate them and not pull them away.
What Went Wrong
Certainly developers need to be dedicated to Products, so they can build deep expertise in their domains of technology. But that doesn’t mean that all their time should be dedicated to enhancements to legacy solutions, with priorities driven by business clients who may not be at a strategic level. In fact, such a framework is anti-agility.
The Solution
What’s needed are long-lived teams dedicated to technology domains and value streams (as long as the business value justifies it)
AND
An agile priority setting process that manages the entire portfolio of requests from all sources and an agile team formation process that assembles just the right specialists from across the organization at just the right time.
Contact me to learn more.