White paper: Exploring the delta in AgileSHIFT

Happy to see that my white paper Exploring the delta in AgileSHIFT is now live on the AXELOS content hub.

Enterprise agility is key. It is not just about implementing an agile way of working in your IT department but a transformation for your whole organization. You have to understand where the market is going, where your competitors are moving, where your customers want to be, and, as a result, where your organization needs to be. One technique to understand this is the concept of the delta. The difference between where the organization wants to be, expressed as ‘what great looks like’, and where it currently is.

This paper explores the concept of the delta, explaining how this is addressed in AgileSHIFT®, and providing practical recommendations and examples on the subject. It is aimed at senior managers, portfolio officers and transition directors who are overseeing fast-moving environments and are running the risk of competitors or disruptors taking over their organization’s market share.

AgileSHIFT helps prepare individuals and organizations for transformational shift by creating a culture of enterprise agility. This cultural change is not driven by simply adopting an agile framework, method or tool, but by understanding and distilling the ethos behind agile ways of working and leveraging them across the entire organization.

A key theme within AgileSHIFT is the delta and the importance to narrow your company’s delta. The delta is the difference between where an organization wants to be and where it currently is. This could be measured in terms of capability, performance, or value delivered. The larger the delta, the greater the vulnerability of the organization to competitors and disruptors. Unfortunately, the delta is not static, so it will grow again. Narrowing the delta will be an ongoing process and you must keep changing to manage the delta, otherwise competitors will be ahead of you and take it all.

In the article I explore what it means where you want to be. This is what you could call ‘great’ and this could relate to your products, services, technology, processes et cetera. I explain that this could be related to the technology. Can you expect a (digital) tech-shift in your company’s work (tech-supported, tech-enabled or tech-centric)? If the delta is large your company is at risk and vulnerable to other competitors who could destroy your own business. What would be the impact of disruptors or exponential organizations on your own business? Will you survive?

I make use of some scenario’s like a dentist practice and a Cyclecity bike shop to explain the concept of the delta and how you could narrow the delta by closing the existing gap. For the Cyclecity bike shop I use a business model canvas to explain the as-is and the to-be situations. I use the GDS/IPS’s 7 lenses of transformation (vision, design, plan, transformational leadership, collaboration, accountability and people) to give a first, but incomplete, impression of how the transformation programme to bridge the gap between the as-is and the to-be could be outlined.

I hope this white paper will be useful and feel free to give me your comments.

To download: AgileSHIFT_wp_Exploring-the-delta-in-AgileSHIFT