To achieve ORGANIZATIONAL AGILITY, it is important to be SMALL. This is a key factor if you want to reduce your Time To Market and gain flexibility to quickly adapt to your customers needs. However, large corporations are characterized by their large size. In this presentation we will see an Agile maturity model (which may seem counter-intuitive to large corporate transformations), which combines an organic adoption with DELIVERED ACTIONS to CONSCIOUSLY DECONSTRUCT a complex organization and base it on teams by strategic Business initiatives. To do this, we rely on de-scaling complexity as much as possible, influencing behaviors through a new organizational structure, explicitly work in the culture (as enabler) and Product Management (as the final result), as well as on other principles.

1. ENTERPRISE AGILE TRANSFORMATION
How to deconstruct your organization
step by step
Xavier Albaladejo
Emerging
Markets
EMEA-LATAM
V1.2

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Speaker Bio & Company Information
 Xavier Albaladejo is specialised in organisational
transformation based on Agile-Lean principles.
 His work as Agile Expert in AXA Emerging Markets EMEA-
LATAM (Europe, Middle East, Africa & Latin America Region)
consists on the introduction of Agile as part of the Digital
transformation of countries in this region, with the aim of
increasing their speed and flexibility in order to better adapt
to their customers’ needs.
 Xavier Albaladejo coordinates the Master on Agile Methods in
the University of La Salle, he is Certified Scrum Practitioner
(Scrum Alliance), Certified LeSS Practitioner, founder of
proyectosagiles.org and Agile Barcelona. He has also been
president of Agile Spain.
Emerging
Markets
EMEA-LATAM

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AGILE @ AXA
Increase business “agility”:
“Reduce Time To Market
and increase flexibility
to quickly adapt to customer needs”
This is NOT the
“problem” we’ll
try to solve
today


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AGILE @ AXA EMEA-LATAM – DIVERSITY OF CONTEXTS
 Very diverse environment:
sizes, organizations, cultures,
products, competitors, process
maturity, knowledge on Agile….
 Typical situations of big
organizations: gap from product
inception to its development and
to its operation: different
departments, partial
responsibilities, particular
priorities, processes that take too
long, …

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HOW TO HELP TO AGILISE SO DIFFERENT ORGANIZATIONS?
 How to guide these countries in
order to increase their business
agility (how to reduce their Time
To Market and win flexibility to
quickly adapt to their business
needs?
?How?
Agile?
Agile?
How?
Agile?
Where are we
going to

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THE NEED OF A TARGET OPERATIVE MODEL
 How to guide these countries in
order to increase their business
agility (how to reduce their Time
To Market and win flexibility to
quickly adapt to their business
needs?
1. Target Model (Vision)
2. Transformation Roadmap

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PRINCIPLES
Big = Fast and flexible?
SMALL autonomous teams
Building block
 CUSTOMER CENTRIC, shared goal.
 All needed skills, including innovation.
 Direct face-to-face communication, teamwork.
CorporateissuesSolutions
Enterprise silos
Selling Claims IT
 Own priorities
 Partial responsibilities
 High effort in inter- coordination
 Team work?
 No customer centric !!
Example:
By design:

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1. Target model
- Customer centric
- Organizational agility
2. Transformation roadmap
transformación- Guidelines to solve problems
- Collaborative & adaptive
 Product Management: innovative, fast & flexible.
 Organization: de-scaled, simple, integrated, based on
small autonomous teams in order to be fast.
 Culture: collaboration, test & learn, knowledge sharing,
transparency, empowerment, motivation.
 NO prescriptive. It’s not a recipe. It’s not a plan.
 “Possible” solutions to problems and steps.
 Starting point for conversations with Agile
Champions and [external] coaches in each country.
 50% of activities are unknown, they will appear
along the path (they are context dependant).
 Adjustable and re-prioritisable considering each
country needs and realities, by their own
transformation team.
 To be grown through workshops in a regular way
(Strategic reviews + PBL Refinements).
ADJUSTABLE AGILE TRANSFORMACIÓN ROADMAP

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TRANSFORMATION AXIS AS LEVERS

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MATURITY LEVELS – 1 TO 3: INTEGRATED VALUE CHAIN
 Agile-Lean Product Portfolio
Management (MVP / small chunks,
limited to capacity & WIP reduction)
 Feature teams (all tiers)
 Organizational impediments service
 Systems thinking
 Lean Startup
 Continuous Delivery – DevOps -
Cloud
 Test & learn mindset
 Small autonomous teams, dedicated
& stable (Scrum, Kanban, XP)
 Biz value KPIs
 Teamwork principles
 Integrated end-to-end

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MATURITY LEVELS – 1 TO 3: INTEGRATED VALUE CHAIN
 Agile-Lean Product Portfolio
Management (MVP / small chunks,
limited to capacity & WIP reduction)
 Feature teams (all tiers)
 Organizational impediments service
 Systems thinking
Level 2 is produces the first key
impact in organizational agility
(enablement of Business Value):
 Focus on selected critical
projects (faster delivery of
them).
 Flexibility to context/market
changes.
 Reduces “wishful thinking”.
 Fosters collaboration.
Can you
start
HERE?

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Are you ready for the final
acceleration?

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MATURITY LEVELS – 4: KNOWLEDGE SHARING AND ALIGNMENT
Communities of Practice
(specialty strategy, cross-
learning, standardization and
innovation re-use)

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MATURITY LEVELS – 4: ORGANISATIONAL IMPROVEMENT
Improvement
Champion
(E2E view)
Organizational
impediments service
(started in level 2)
Very short, clear priorities &
focus, no inventory waste
Scrum Masters, Agile
Coaches, Management
 Based on teams needs (Gemba)
 Back to CoPs and teams backlogs

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MATURITY LEVELS – 4: ORGANISATIONAL SCAFFOLDING !!
 Communities of Practice (specialty
strategy, cross-learning,
standardization and innovation re-
use)
 Organizational impediments
service (started in level 2)
 End-to-End organization KPIs
 Competence development &
Teams empowerment
In a natural
way, the team
identifies the
transversal
impact of
Business
initiatives

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MATURITY LEVELS – 5: VALUE CENTRES
 Customer centric micro-enterprises
(own responsibility with all end-to-
end business skills integrated)
 Strategic objectives by Value Center,
own budget
 Strong alignment through values
(hiring & firing) and common purpose

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TARGET ORGANISATIONAL MODEL : CUSTOMER CENTRICITY
Autonomy (and innovation) on
customer segment decisions
(why, what, how, budget,
organization).
Ownership and empowerment.
Supporting
ecosystem
Central services:
 Business agnostic
 Small, fast & efficient
(otherwise, value centers
can take their functions)
Teams are the basic organizational building block
This organizational model
supports any company size:
a big organization is a
fractal of smaller ones
so it’s easy to scale if new
business needs appear

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How to
do it

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CHANGE: DELIBERATED AND ORGANIC DE-CONSTRUCTION
1 Need of business agility
3
Ready, right moment, key
Agile roles in place
2 Right people = open minded /
People ask for Agile (organic)
Deep & narrow
(iterative deconstruction and
maturity increase by area)
Broad
sales
motion
will FAIL

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= impact in Management
CHANGE: IMPACT IN BUSINESS AND CULTURE BY MATURITY LEVEL
Systems thinking (capacity based, WIP reduction)
& new organizational structure
Competence Management &
Teams empowerment
Strong alignment through values
(hiring & firing)
Test & learn mindset
(avoiding fear of failure)
Teamwork principles, breaking silos (Biz vs IT)
Joint Visual Management
 New structure & roles
 Right people
 High sponsorship
1. Ration out”
cultural change
in order not to
die by overdose

2. Transform area
by area (deep &
narrow test &
learn)

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CONCLUSIONS
 The essential goal is to get satisfied
customers. Instead of coordinate
specialities and departments, it is better
to integrate the full value chain by
customer segment.
 If organisations get slower and more
politized as much as their increase their
size, then it’s better to have small self-
contained teams which are
empowered to take decisions (the
organizational building block).

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LAST RECOMMENDATIONS
 “Organic” adoption – The organization should decide on agilization actions by
taking into account which is the most important aspect to improve at any
moment.
 “Test & learn” – As the environment usually is complex, first test things in
small contexts and learn before disseminating across the organization.
 Models and principles where to dig deeply :
 LESS (Large Scale Scrum) & Spotify
 Organize for Complexity - Betacodex
 Cynefin framework
 Favor what implies direct interaction between people who do the “real” work,
in the trences.

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LAST RECOMMENDATIONS
Product /
service X
Strategic
initiative A
Strategic
initiative B
DELIBERATED
deconstruction
 You can move from level 1 to 5 very quickly if you segregate Value Centers:
internal spin-offs!!

24. Xavier Albaladejo
Agile transformation expert
• Blog: www.proyectosagiles.org
• Twitter:@xavi_albaladejo
Emerging
Markets
EMEA-LATAM