Designing Adaptive Organizations: A Manager's Guide

Motivation

You’re probably a senior manager that wants to skillfully “scale” adaptive (“agile”) development to many teams, and do a widespread adoption. Why? To increase adaptiveness to easily change direction based on learning, focus more on high-value delivery, and reduce lead time.

Key point: This is not a change in practices, methods, or operating models; it’s a change in organizational design.

And since changing the org design–such as new group structures, positions, roles, incentives, and policies–is the remit of senior management, this is the group that needs to learn and lead such change. It can’t be delegated to middle management, as only senior management is empowered to make deep organizational design changes.

But there's a change problem that you are part of... If I had to boil down about 40 years of this work to a key successful change idea, it is this:

People must own — not rent — change and org design ideas.

And to really own the change implications with insight — versus following fads or the advice of a consulting company — senior managers benefit from doing the reasoning and learning themselves, to be able to lead from insight.

Workshop

In this intensive 4-hour workshop you will work through multiple org design problems in small teams of 5, with guidance and feedback from the coach, Craig Larman, who has decades of experience in this field, and is the co-creator of LeSS, a framework for simplifying large product development organizations to be adaptive.

What will you Learn?

• organizational design

  implications of changing to large-scale adaptive development
• adoption implications
• what it means to descale (simplify and flatten) a large organization and why that’s important before trying to scale Scrum or similar approaches
• systems thinking