The outcome is really not at the end of the target. . It’s some place like in the middle because this should sustain until the end of its life cycle. -jd
Evan Leybourn: You’re absolutely correct. The idea of an outcome is we should be able to incrementally achieve value towards that outcome. It doesn’t mean that we’re going to do one thing and achieve a 5% revenue increase, no. We’re going to do one thing after another, after another and this team or teams which are accountable for this outcome, they’re going to be constantly developing new capability, new tools, new features – whatever it happens to be, in order to deliver tools and outcome throughout the process. In a program perspective, we might call this benefits or benefits realization. But even within the context of a project, benefits realization occurs at the end of a project. It may start midway but when the project ends, the benefits are meant to be realized. Outcomes realization is really very continuous. So we may hit our 5% target, but then we go for 6% and 7%. There’s an ongoing change. There’s an ongoing improvement to the organization.
Joe Dager: I like the sound of it. I understand it because I’m that service dominant logic type guy; value is in the use of the product. When you start looking at it from that viewpoint, it moves the customer to the center because there’s always something out there at the edges that you can build towards. Whether it’s a product or service, it takes a very disciplined company to think this way?
Evan: Yes. We’re talking about high maturity organizations. If you’re a command and control organization, you want to know what everyone’s doing without giving them any level of autonomy that this approach is not going to work. What tends to happen in organizations that aren’t Agile, you’re a 5-person company, you know what everyone’s doing. You’re the CEO of a 50-person company; you know pretty much what everyone is doing. You get to 150, you get to 1500 people, all of a sudden, you don’t know what everyone’s doing. You can’t physically know what everyone’s doing. So what do you do? You create a process. You create an abstraction of reality that simplifies what people should be doing and you sort of expect them to roughly follow that process.
Now, that’s great because it gives you as CEO or CFO a very clear idea of what everyone is doing or should be doing, even if you don’t know specifically. But what happens in organizations that aren’t agile is that the process becomes the reality, rather than just an obstruction. Any real activity is going to have spikes and troughs in whatever that process. There are exceptions. There are workarounds. A process is only ever as good as the way of looking at that process if opportunities expose themselves. An organization that isn’t agile can’t move beyond the process.
Joe: We limit ourselves a great deal because we’re not what I call maybe the edges and looking at the edges of projects or services because that’s where we find opportunity.
Evan: That’s it. That’s exactly it. When you have a process, you’ve got the middle. The middle is well controlled, but that’s not where opportunities lie. And what also happens is that the middle in reality moves. You have a process that you created a year ago, it’s worked fine, but the market has moved on. Suddenly it’s now mobile-centric rather than web pages. If you’ve got processes around a particular way of working and the market evolves, then what you would consider as being edge is actually the norm, is actually the middle ground and you actually start to lose market share because you cannot compete.
Related Podcast and Transcription: Agile Business Management
About: Evan Leybourn pioneered the field of Agile Business Management; applying the successful concepts and practices from the Lean and Agile movements to corporate management. He keeps busy as a senior IT executive, business management consultant, non-executive director, conference speaker, internationally published author and father. You can find our more about Evan on his website, The Agile Director.
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