Is Agile Business the New Normal
Last updated
Last updated
In this webinar Pieter van Schalkwyk, MD of XMPro, will look at how "Agile" business changed the way we work and changed our expectation of the tools that support the way we work. Join Pieter for a 30 minute webinar that will change the way you think about the erratic and unstructured way of work that you may find yourself and your organisation in.
For more information on XMPro please visit our website: www.xmpro.com or send us an email: info@xmpro.com
are you finding that your routine work
is replaced by knowledge style work is
your business and the process is more
complex than what they used to be are
exceptions becoming the norm now um
they're not the rule they're the norm uh
are the infrastructure or
the are the information management tools
that you use a lot more complex than
what they used to be and a lot more
sophis iated than what they used to be
and is it harder to manage all the
change in your organization as everyone
is stuck in this
analysis paralysis environment hi I'm
Peter F scalek I'm the chief agility
officer at XM Pro and I'd like to tell
you that agile business might be the new
normal for
you so if you look at this photo how
agile are you uh would you like to be
more
agile and probably not yourself if you
look at this photo but you can ask the
same question about your business would
you like your business to be um more
agile and would you so that you can bend
over backwards to accommodate changes in
business environment as you can see this
is pretty it looks pretty uncomfortable
but as soon as you've got the hang of it
it actually adds a lot of value um to
what you do so today we're going to talk
at we're going to have a look at how
agile business buiness change the way
that we work and also our expectations
of the tools that we use to manage that
work so essentially three things I'm
going to talk about today or that I'm
going to look at and the one is um how
did we change to Agile business now when
did this happen the second thing is uh
how did it change the way that we work
and then thirdly how do we change the
the tools that we use to
support uh this new way of work so let's
start with the first one is agile
business The New
Normal
so the first thing I'd like uh I'd like
to have a look is the change to Agile
you know the actual change that that
happens to Agile business and the um and
just looking at how did this
happen so uh and what do we mean by Adel
business so I'd like to approach this
once again from three different angles
and the first one is to look at the
dictionary definition of what agile
means and what I quite like is the fact
that it says it is a quick and
well-coordinated
uh um uh in movement sort of agile leap
and secondly the ability to think
quickly um and if you look at the
antonyms it's awkward sluggish and um
which of these describe your
business this might not be sort of quite
like what your business is right at the
moment or the the way that that you see
your uh the the current way that your
business work but
um is this the sort of way that your
business needs to go is uh from this
definition which you like to have a more
quick and responsive versus awkward and
sluggish type um business the challenge
is that that even though you may not be
making that change a lot of businesses
around you are doing that so for example
5 years ago the average product life
cycle was around 2 years and now it is
less than two months and in consumer
electronics it is even down to three
months for some products so I don't know
if you've noticed if you if you've gone
Buy Sony video camera or even just a d
notebook that three months after you
bought a specific model it's no longer
available the whole product life cycles
become so quick and everything around us
has become um has become active and
Lively rather than
sluggish software is gone the same way
how often do you find that your iPhone
has install app updates um mine does it
at least once a week on the software
itself and if you look at guys like
Microsoft which uh in the enterprise
software space you'll find that
Microsoft Office seem to have a new
version every year and I here with
Windows 8 they not um they're now
talking Windows 7 Windows 8 and I'm not
sure I know they've started working on
Windows 9 so they can't use Windows 2008
anymore because within 201 in 11 124 and
by the time we get to Windows 2016
they'll probably have um one every
quarter so uh they had to change the
numbering convention just to be able to
to uh accommodate the change that we see
um in in as everything accelerates and
and it goes forward so if we look at um
at agile from a from a software
perspective and most people know agile
as a software development methodology
this is not what this talk is around it
is not um but it really gives us a good
framework to understand how other
um areas of business have adopted an
agile approach in actual fact the agile
guys have come when I say agile guys
agile software development guys have
have come up with what they call the
agile
Manifesto and um because of this fast
changing Pace in software development um
and we can we can replace a lot of the
words in here with business words um but
what I'm going to do right now is just
very quickly um it's all around
interactions it's all around things that
work right now instead of spending your
life
designning it doesn't say that they
don't there's no documentation but it's
making sure that there's working
software working business processes
working uh in business intelligence or
whatever the case instead of spending so
much time if you look at um the bi tools
the whole uh um intelligent
experimentation um I love that term for
for BPM as well but the whole working
software concept so you get your bi
working quickly get your BPM working
quick get your strategies working
quickly instead of spending a lot of
time trying to document um that and then
also collaboration of uh contract
negotiation so there's a continuous
collaboration um in this whole agile
approach so if you look at s the
software
um uh world as a methodology um they
were the leading guys in this and and
and it's a great example of what I see
as agile as a methodology even for
businesses and business processes and
they've come up with 12 principles I'm
not going to go through through all of
them you can actually um look it up at
the agile manifesto. org um some of the
interesting things are that the highest
priority is to satisy is to satisfy the
customer and to continuously deliver
value you can take the software out um
and you can continuously make changes
because that is what happens in an agile
world there's continuous changes you
deliver new working things regularly um
that doesn't mean to say that's that
it's uncontrolled it's actually a lot of
control in in in the whole agile uh
world it is um it is quite simple but it
embodies the whole radical change of
what we've seen in the software world
where we've gone from a top down
programming like um some of myself and
and a couple of other people on this
webinar may may remember the days that
we did a structured Cobalt programming
um where we had a whole top down
approach those of us in Fortran that did
still did um coding on sheets will
remember top down um and we had to use a
waterfall model you had to specify
everything right to the end degree um
because it was really hard to make any
changes and so from a the waterfall
model which is a very structured you
specify you develop you test everything
in in in in and there are no changes to
the to
the um spec at any or or or to what you
what you deliver all requirements are
locked down based on that specification
because of the way that top- down
programming used to work and it reminds
me of structured business process as
well um so the release Cycles were long
and uh you couldn't move from the spec
it didn't really work well
um if we look at all the overruns and
things um on that where it's a very
rigid and strictly controlled process
what has happened with new programming
languages is that we've got a the whole
object orientation which is sort of an
unstructured programming approach for
lack of a better description um I'm
pretty sure the technical guys will will
Grill me for this but I see it as a as a
sort of we create all these functions
and I can call them at any point in time
so if you look at and one of the things
the key drivers for this was the change
that windows and these graphical
interfaces brought if I right click on
my mouse there's an action that I need
to do um so it needs to call that
specific object it needs to do what it
needs to do and uh then it goes away so
that with that the whole Agile
development methodology also started
because I can make these small little
chunks um of object code and I can call
it I can uh it doesn't have to be
sequential it's not top down I can call
it when I need it um it sort of created
a a a a whole new opportunity to create
Agile development tools as well where we
can shorten the development cycle we can
get products out quicker um and um it
it's easier to add functions without
breaking the logic which is one of the
challenges that we that you have with
with top- down structured programming
and that's why the whole waterfall model
worked well for that um what's nice with
the agile software development
methodology is that it's flexible and it
allows uh for a Agile development
approach um which is essentially what we
want in in in uh in a lot of what we do
in business as well so does that if if
if you replace some of these words that
I've got on the screen here with
business type words
um like the one that I just love is the
Simplicity the art of maximizing the
amount of work not done is essential now
to me that is really just such a
profound statement of what you want to
do in business what we find is everyone
is making it just so much harder to do
stuff and our Approach at at XM Pro is
really to is really to see how can we
maximize the art of uh sorry how can we
um how can we Perfect The Art of
maximizing the amount of work not done
so the whole agile software software
um development methodology um quite well
known and it's it's it's it's got its
challenges um but it's really if you
look at what the objective is and what
it's trying to to achieve it really
suits the way that businesses work right
now um so those are the 12 um principles
and you can substitute a lot of the
software words with business words and
um and it may sound a little bit like
what your business is or what you would
like your business to be like
so um one of the best definitions i'
I've seen of agility and it comes out of
a
CIO um magazine uh is really uh it was
done by Michael um shre uh and it's the
in the he says in the first and final
analysis agility is is about timely and
coste effective implementation and that
is a key driver these days things need
to be cost effective even doesn't matter
what we Implement with it's a software
BAS solution whether it's business
intelligence whether it's BPM um whether
it's strategy planning whether it
doesn't really matter what it is um but
what he says is that is the key part
full stop there's no question about it
needs to be timely and cost effective
planning is nice analysis is good
governance is groovy but agility means
action agility implies both the capacity
and capability to act now
immediately real time to me this is such
a powerful statement of what we're
trying to achieve in business we need to
have the capacity and the capability to
act we need to do it right now we need
to make the changes right now and we
would like to do it in real time now
there are some challenges with putting
some of these things in and that's
really one of exm Pro's driving
Ambitions is to is to make sure that we
can achieve this with um with business
processes as
well so is that how we should see uh
business processes um if I look at what
we used to do in terms of modeling all
the as EES and 2bs and um and trying to
come up with the writing um this whole
agility process would get us to our
business objectives a lot quicker so
what is a agile business process so I'm
just going to quickly um talk about and
I've got business slpress because it's
actually business um but a key driver of
business is business processes and exm
pro business is business processes so uh
we are not a workflow tool we are
Process Management tool and process is
just by definition uh is not necessarily
sequential uh or um a workflow it is it
is
activities that drive a specific
business outcome and they don't need to
be in a sequential uh uh form so so far
we've looked at um the agile definition
of what uh of what uh agile um method
sorry we've looked at the the dictionary
definition of what agile business is
we've also um looked at um at the
um sort of software methodology and and
when we look at businesses um we see
there's a definite shift in in business
from the predictable to unpredictable uh
I I know for a fact we find it hard to
get five people in a room and get them
to have the same view or version of a
process or uh or a business outcome or
or something like that so easiest way to
look at at at at the um agile business
or business process is to actually look
at the drivers that influence this
change from May from from a very
structured approach where we knew um
exactly how how business worked uh going
into this whole agile um business
approach and Peter draer coined the
phrase so there's the there's um there's
essentially three drivers and one of the
biggest drivers is is is the fact that
we've got this whole new knowledge
worker and Peter draer um uh uh everyone
in the management world NZ um Peter dra
is one of the biggest gurus around
um management strategy and he coined the
phrase knowledge
worker and uh essentially a knowledge
worker is is a is a move away from doing
workers to thinking workers um these are
people who have contextual knowledge
around
processes and they can make decisions
based on this structured processes don't
really work and they have to circumvent
structured processes because they want
to make their own decisions around
routing around logic around all sorts of
things doesn't mean it's uncontrolled
there's still control around uh
knowledge workers but it just means that
they can make their own decisions on a
lot of how uh processes works if you
think back around the the what I'd
explained around the top down
programming versus the object Pro object
orientation programming they are they
work in a world of object orientation if
they need to right click the mouse it
needs to respond to that not workers are
like that so if they have contextual
information they know something about a
process and I'm I'll explain a little
bit more bit later in the in the in the
uh presentation around the knowledge
workers but if or or around this
unstructured work or uh but as soon as
they know if if they have contextual
knowledge or if they know the context in
with in which this process is happening
they can make decisions which will rout
it in a different way it'll have
different business rules so exceptions
for them are the rule um and the rigid
workflow style processes don't really
work so if you've got a rigid workflow
engine that drive the work that they
need to do that's why they use
email um so these used to be the
exceptional jobs but right now we find
with the right that technology enables
our
work that it even goes down right to the
lower levels of work so there's a whole
shift to knowledge workers even into
areas that weren't traditionally
knowledge workers so if we look at the
second reason why we've become uh why
there's a move to Agile business it is
really that we've become interrupt
driven now what I mean by that is email
conditions us to stop and start all the
time we don't work in a sequential way
anymore I don't know if you do it um I I
personally if I see an email come in I
will stop whatever else I'm doing and
I'll attend to the email sometimes I do
three or four things at the same time
not that I do um
great job of that um but we've become
interrupt driven so we are used to the
fact that we don't do things in a long
sequential logic or in a in a in a in a
sequential State anymore the other thing
that has happened is conversations are
are now 140
characters um and uh by that I mean with
Twitter uh things like um Twitter has
changed the way that we see
conversations and how we can do
conversations and it's not just Twitter
they're tools like yamama socialcast and
all of those inside organizations that
are now have key parts of conversations
in them that's how we talk that's how we
collaborate um and they broken up into
into into little bit so we've become
interrupt driven in the way so I can
have certain parts of my messaging and
conversation in Yama and I can have an
email and I can have a whole lot of um
of
um uh uh different interrupt driven ways
uh there's tools like like MSN so I
might just also have a quick MSN chat
and office is looking at productizing
what the office Microsoft is looking at
productizing something they call office
talk we'll probably see it in the next
versions of office CRM and all those
products where it comes with a built-in
collaboration component or Twitter for
business or whatever weever whatever we
want to call that um the third driver
for agile business so the first one was
the fact that we knowledge workers the
second one is that we're now interrupt
driven and the third one which has had a
profound impact is actually uh mua's law
which say and because a lot of the work
that we do these days and doesn't matter
in what uh what type of job it is in
organization uh we find more and more um
that that people people use computers to
to do parts of their work and processing
power inside computers are doubling
every two years now if you look at this
graph is unbelievable um if you look at
the i7 processor that we have right now
in most of our in most of our uh
notebooks that we carry around you'll
find that it's got 2.6 billion transa uh
transactions on a chip uh interesting
conversation with a financial guy this
morning said to me so uh how many are
there in a packet if there's 2.6 billion
on a chip not everyone understands that
so um he said as a joke but um yeah so
that gives you some some perspective of
of what is happening with computing
power this just drives um what we can do
with computers and the way that we can
that we can use it what is more
interesting is uh Zuckerberg's law so we
had mu's Lord came out he's he was the
CEO of Intel at the time as far as I can
recall um mu but Mark Zuckerberg the CEO
of Facebook has come out with with a a
very interesting uh very similar and is
based on mu's law which is the law of
social sharing which says that we will
double the content that we share every
two years on social networks and they
base it on what they see in Facebook
right now there are around five billion
things statuses images videos all of
that shared on Facebook a day now this
was announced in SE end of September in
2011 at the F fi developers conference
so this is pretty recent um stats as
well four billion things and his view is
that this will double in the next per
per person we will double the um amount
what we share in a social way um or in a
collaborative way so all of these things
are driving um and it's got a a massive
impact on business because it actually
drives um what we do now I've got my own
my own law which I call F sc's law and I
hope it'll catch on which uh and the
statement is that business agility will
double every two years if we take all
these factors into consideration M's law
zacher BG's law and all the um social
phenomena that we see and the interrupt
driven I predict that we will become
twice as agile every so we will double
our agility every two years um that's
from sc's law and you can quote me on
that then uh Steve uh Keith snon and
Sandy kemsley um Keith Swinson is the
R&D vice president for fitso based in
the US he writes a lot on BPM case
management all of those sort of things
and S kimley is a well
recognized
um BPM analyst and she does she she also
does a lot of writing research and she's
got a great blog as well which I can
recommend and they've come up with if
you look at agile
BPM in a in a webinar that they did on
uh agile BPM using uh well just looking
at how process of change and what I like
about this is that the goal of the
system so when we look at the
transactional system the are the and
it's not that these are going away
that's the 8020 principle 20% of
processes will still be transactional we
still have a reg structure but we have a
80% of business and this is from Gartner
that came up with the 8020 um Janelle
Hill um at Gartner but the the the
what's great about this is that the that
the goal of the system in the past was
just efficiency and automation now it's
moved to problem resolution we can
actually do stuff with this so it's not
just about getting people to do things
faster but it's actually to solve
problems um and the the challenge is
that instead of being highly repeatable
it's become unpredictable so you need
tools to to to kind for um for that
so how does that change the way that we
work I said earlier that there are three
questions uh and and the first one was
why did we
um um
so just to step back
um of those three questions the first
one is agile business um and to me this
describes that agile business is The New
Normal so how does it change the way
that we work
well um in terms of the three questions
the first one was why did we change to
Agile business the second one is is um
is um how do we change the work and then
lastly we'll also look at the tools that
we that that we do this so if I just
quickly go back and we look at the 12
principles of the agile methodology
we'll recognize that that that um that
some of these have a profound
way profound impact on the way that
agile business has changed the way that
we work so so the first one is all
around continuous Improvement so we've
moved away from this trying to to get
one to get the spec for the process
which which was the BPR way the business
process re-engineering way we would
spend a lot of money to get Consultants
into can spend a lot of time and it's
not that we don't do that agile doesn't
say no documentation it means adequate
documentation so that we can uh get the
first version out quickly and we can
start improving on that so instead of
doing three years of BPR we can get the
base requirements down um without
spending all our time and money on that
and by the time you've got the base
requirement oh sorry if you do the
threeyear BPR project by the time we get
to do something all our processes have
changed we'd like to take a lot more of
a continuous Improvement proc approach
um in most of the work that we do these
days doesn't matter what it is um we'd
like to do smaller chunks we like to get
results a lot quicker and we'd like to
see things happen um a a lot easier and
I just love the next slide which is um
salvad doy said have no fear of
perfection you will never reach it to me
that is so so profound as well in terms
of what you're trying to achieve do
enough to from a we we find that right
now um the way that we work is become
let's do enough so we can get started
and get something done a lot of
businesses especially the ones that
perform uh well I've taken that um that
approach the second thing is what we
want to do is is sort of have what we
call intelligent experimentation I love
this for BPM but it's actually a phrase
that is used in the BR world uh um
that's where I've I've heard it um being
used but intelligent experimentation
doesn't mean um we just it still means
that we work in a controlled fashion we
take information from our analytics
tools from the process uh from from our
um analytics is a great driver for this
so we'll get information out of our
analytics tools and decide how we're
going to change it we're going to split
test certain things the the marketing
guys are brilliant at split testing ads
so that they can see which is the best
performing one and they'll drop the
other one and then start a new um
process uh uh ad that will compete with
the other one and and so that's how they
sort of um through a evolutionary
process build um the the strongest AD
that they can just continuous testing
there's no reason why we why we can't do
that in other areas of business and we
starting to we starting we start to see
that that emerges in a in a in a lot of
that we do so
um the other the other um great one that
I saw and this is this is once again
Gartner I take credit for this is to
design by doing rather than doing by
design gner has now come out and said
listen Maybe maybe you don't need to
spend as much time on trying to get that
or to strive for Perfection to get the
spec 100% right rather design by doing
it and as you do you improve it rather
than trying to do this whole design and
get the right thing um because you will
actually never never get there we find
more and more where there's a drive and
this impacts the way that we work uh and
it doesn't only apply to BPM it applies
to a whole lot of uh areas that Gardener
um in terms of the competency areas that
they apply this design by doing now so
there's a definite impact um on that and
then also we change our minds often
that's always been the case we just
never had the opportunity to change our
mind or to say that we'd like our
requirements to differ um what has
happened with uh with
um the new tools especially we and
social tools we have the ability to
change our mind often and that is now
getting into the way that we work we
expect things to change quickly we
expect next time uh that uh that there's
update on uh on Facebook that my um
iPhone app will automatically pick it up
um I don't have to worry about it so we
can change our minds often we can um and
that's got a profound impact on on on
the way that we that we work so once
again and I keep going back to this um
but really if you take those 12
principles and and you just apply the
business side of it you can see how this
impact the way that we uh the way that
we work
um So based on that agile work is The
New Normal we don't work the way that we
that we used to work we expect uh that
we will be experimenting we expect that
we'll be changing our mind so we've we
we we we have come up with a agile work
approach which we see as The New Normal
so in the last place I'm just going to
quickly talk around the tools that we
need to manage this so I've I've given
you um how business have changed and how
the work that we've done have changed so
they the the only thing that now still
needs to that remains that needs to
change is the actual tools because the
old tools don't work anymore the old way
that we've done things um don't work
anymore with this whole agile business
approach and once again I just want to
remind you it's not agile software
methodology even though it's a great
it's it's a great analogy around what
has happened in business but this is
really these are business tools that we
use anything from your bi tools to um to
to your BPM tools or whatever the case
might be um how many of you are still in
the water in the waterfall mode the
workflow style um versus the more struct
or unstructured uh um object orientation
or agile uh style so um you know only
20% of businesses can actually survive
on the on the
um uh on the sorry only 20% of processes
in sort of inside of organization will
survive on your old tools the others
need new tools and if you're not going
to provide it it will circum circumvent
that so just quickly going back to what
we want to achieve we want continuous
Improvement we want intelligent
experimentation we want designed by
doing and want to change our minds often
so how do we do that um well with XM Pro
for example we give you the ability to
create this Dynamic interrupt driven
processes you don't have to draw the
flow people can can sequence these at
runtime for example so we've got inside
as a feature we can do unstructured
process configuration this is not a runr
through of all the the features that we
have in exm Pro it is a very
comprehensive big uh application and it
does a whole lot of things I've I'm I'm
not not even scratching the surface on
on on most of the functionality I just
want to I just want to highlight the
fact that if if you're going to use
agile BPM methodology um by getting
things out quickly getting a lot of
collaborative design um XM proos
unstructured process configuration
allows you to do that so in the same
breath if you want to do Dynamic
allocation of logic instead of writing a
lot of code and that sort of thing you
can use our new Dynamic allocation logic
which is part of of XM Pro as well if we
look at intelligent experimentation you
need versions of processes you want to
split test them against each other so X
and PR version management handles a lot
of um what you need there so um and then
lastly just as a as a as a agile
implementation methodology if you if
you're going to use agile in your
business and you you going to make your
business bend over backwards to
accommodate the changes that that you
have in your organization the XM Pro
allows you to do that it allows you to
to do to get processes out quickly it
allows you to do integration to external
applications quickly it allows you to um
to change the way a process work and
test it against another process quickly
it is an Ideal tool if you're looking at
a at a agile approach to fit your agile
business and our whole dynamic BPM
platform is really built around and we
ideally suited to uh organizations that
that instead of wanting to get a whole
um um group of business process
re-engineering Consultants there are
looking to to spec enough get it out
test it improve it and look at the
intelligent experimentation I just love
the term so you'll find that intelligent
tools will be the new normal I say is
The New Normal um yes it is here right
now a lot of companies haven't caught on
to that yet but agile tools will be the
new normal you're not going to be back
in the workflow days um workflow is only
a very small component of
it so thank you very much thank you for
joining us on this if you want to see a
lot more around how we can actually in
terms of the BPM agile methodology um
free to discuss it with ourselves or one
of our partners and we can also give you
a full demonstration of what XM Pro
is we'd love to talk to you about um uh
your agile or how your business can be
more agile going into the future and uh
thank you very much appreciate your time
listening to me