Using FLEX to Perform an Assessment for Mid-Scale Organizations

Going Beyond Lean and Agile: Introducing FLEX – FLow for Enterprise Transformation (online book)

Table of Contents

Preface

Introduction to FLEX

Part I: Understanding what is required for flow in your organization (with exercises)

Part II: Using FLEX to transform your organization (with exercises)

  1. The Purpose of an Assessment
  2. Using FLEX to Perform an Assessment for Small-Scale Organizations.
  3. Using FLEX to Perform an Assessment for Mid-Scale Organizations
  4. Using the Theory of Flow to Find Your Impediments
  5. The assessment timeline for a development group of less than 125 people
  6. Setting up a Transition Monitoring Team
  7. Creating a Roadmap for Improvement
  8. Using the Intake Process to Educate Leadership
  9. How Using MBIs Tie Strategies, the intake process, ATDD, and planning together

Part III: Topics In Depth - Value Stream Wide

Part IV: Topics in Depth - Practices

Part V: Topics in Depth - Teaching and Adoption

Part VI: Using FLEX to both enhance and simplify SAFe

Part VII: Additional Resources on the Net Objectives Portal

Appendix

Provide Feedback

We define a “mid-scale” organization to be when several business stakeholders are driving initiatives. A handful of Product Managers are needed to coordinate with these stakeholders and act as their agents. Product Owners act as liaisons between product management and the teams. Shared services are almost certainly present and teams are likely organized into mostly independent programs. Typically, the size of the development group is 100 to 1000.

Figure 1: FLEX at Mid-scale

To do an assessment at mid-scale first requires knowing how to do an assessment at a small scale. If you have not yet done so, read Using FLEX to Perform an Assessment for Small-Scale Organizations.

Here are the main differences between small and mid-scale assessments.

  • Product Managers and Product Owners now work in tandem to create a many business stakeholder to many product owner relationship
  • Shared Services becomes more complicated as there are more business stakeholders
  • DevOps becomes more critical as there are more business stakeholders
  • There may be dependencies across value streams driven by different business stakeholders who have competing agendas
  • Value Stream Network Architect, a new role. This person or committee coordinates the interactions that will occur to a greater extent across the value streams at this larger scale

How to manage the above situations is briefly covered in Product Manager and Product Owner case study.  More will be written later.