VISEO Agile Transformation Conference: Report

Why an agile transformation conference?

At a time of agile bashing, when even Ron Jeffries, a signatory to the Agile Manifesto, is asking developers to give up agility, what happens to companies that have chosen to deploy agility on a global scale and are courageously trying to break down the barriers between business activities and the IT department? Have any companies been successful in implementing scaled frameworks? What recipes or tools did these companies use? This is what the twenty or so coaches of the practice offered us by organizing a conference combining workshops and company feedback, to reveal the importance of culture, transparency and experimentation…

During the conference, participants were able to attend several lectures and workshop sessions led by our guest speakers.

About Appreciative Inquiry

Claire Lustig-Rochet, founder of CLR Consulting and "At the heart of AI", opened the conference with a keynote address on "Appreciative Inquiry to Support Transformation".

Claire first set out to present the state of mind: an ongoing, conscious search for what works in individuals, teams and organizations, driven by positive curiosity, as the foundation for a transformation that will leverage resources rather than fill gaps.

Through some exercises, participants were able to practice this state of mind for themselves, to sweep away a problem situation by "increasing the radius of their radar", and thus broaden their perception of the situation. Then, through some examples of missions, she presented how to deploy the different stages of an appreciative transformation, focusing on a second very important aspect: appreciative questioning, which will seek constructive energy in the very heart of difficulties. 

In the practical workshop that followed the presentation, all the participants were able to practice this famous appreciative interview in pairs, a fundamental starting point for "digging into the positive" and generating in return the collective constructive energy that we want to release for successful transformations. 

If you would like to know more about this, go to www.au-coeur-de-l-ai.com, or get the book "AI to the power of 5, how to deploy the full power of “Appreciative Inquiry" (to be released at the end of October, currently an ebook on Amazon). 

The transformation of the "Pôle Emploi" (National Job Agency) IT department in a context of scaled agility

Michel Levaslot, in charge of the transformation of the IT department of the Pôle Emploi job agency, explained to us the importance of having a structured transformation approach to support the evolution of his entity. 

This structuring is based on several principles: 

- To coordinate the evolution of HR standards and practices (skills standards, job standards, job management, training, certification, recruitment, etc.) with methodological choices (agility with Scrum and SAFe, UX, etc.) and technological choices (Big Data, Artificial Intelligence, Mobile First, REST Architecture, etc.), to avoid inconsistencies that could make difficulties for employees  

- To rely on the concept of business communities to deploy the transformation uniformly throughout the entity 

- To stay in step with market developments to give a modern image 

- To know as much as necessary how to use recognized transformation approaches such as that of John Kotter 

By using these principles, the IT department of Pôle Emploi deployed scaled agility within its teams in three years, spending most of its IT manufacturing in this construction mode, while deploying practices such as DevOps, Design Thinking, and Lean Startup.

Feedback on several scaled Agile transformations in banking

Led by Laurence Jourdain, Culture & Transformation Wizard | Storytelling Fairy Digital Scaler, and Thierry Delvaux, Partner and passionate digital transformation leader Digital Scaler, this feedback was an opportunity to share some key lessons in scaling agility, and also to hear the various issues and situations of the market, which are always excellent topics for reflection and calling into question! 

The three main items to retain from this presentation are:

- Agile models and methods must be adapted to each organization. An academic, dogmatic approach to a methodology is not recommended by the speakers. 

- The "Big Bang" approach, recommended to launch a common agility culture and language is an empirical conviction, tested and approved in Laurence and Thierry's way of working. Identifying a base of unifying transformation items is a real way of facilitating and accelerating change. 

- The transformation of agility into mere delivery in the field is not enough. A holistic transformation approach of several poles around agility must be planned from the outset, and deployed in parallel with the methods and models. Whether it is architecture review, deployment of automation and DevOps, or intelligent reskilling of the human factor, these are real dependencies and accelerators of the transformation that should not be considered as secondary, but essential. 

Digital Scaler arose from the rallying of some Transformation experts towards Agile@Scale. After years of working together in various companies and industries, the opportunity to combine their experience and knowledge around consulting services in this field was an obvious opportunity for the team. 

Intervention around the Schneider model

Culture defines how a company succeeds collectively. Each organization has a dominant culture, a fundamental means of success. You can't force a program, strategy or project into an organization unless it is consistent with the company's culture.

Schneider's model, presented by Thierry Guiette, VISEO Agile Coach, provides tools to evaluate the chances of success of an organizational change in a company. It categorizes four types of culture (Control, Cultivation, Collaboration, Competence), and defines the characteristics that allow them to be identified through a 20-question questionnaire. A graph then allows us to situate the dominant culture in relation to others in order to assess the chances of success of the desired transformation: we are more likely to succeed if the underlying values of these changes are compatible with the dominant culture of the organization that is to integrate them.

Need support with your transformation? Feel free to contact our teams.

Contact: 

Olivier Lefaucheux
Activity Director - Customer Engagement VISEO
olivier.lefaucheux@viseo.com