Introducing the Transformation Participation Engine

Update: This part of the method is no longer being practiced by our team. We still feel that having a clear learning path for individuals is important, but it must be voluntary, transparent, and based on self assessment. It must also be pull based, where participant actually ask to be part of the system. Stay tuned for future updates.I am currently knee-deep in another large-scale IT organizational transformation. Again Kanban is a critical enabler, as are a mixture of agile methods. What makes this transformation different is our team's decision to manage the change initiative using a modified form of lean startup methods.
The following definition of a startup from Eric Ries Lean Startup book particularly inspired us...

a human institution designed to deliver a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty

By this definition, an enterprise change initiative could be deemed a startup, one that could take advantage of Lean Startup techniques.



We quickly came up with an approach to guide our change initiative based on the Lean Startup method. We called it the Lean Startup Change Approach :-). What became quickly obvious to us, is that it was not apparent on what we were supposed to be measuring.

Measuring the things that matter for a change initiative

This turned outTo be more challenging than expected.  At first we tried to be overly be clever, and come up with experiments that would validate the performance benefits of Agile and Kanban practices. This exercise realistically would take many months, if not years, to complete.  Our team did not have the benefit to dedicate that much time.

After a significant amount of thinking we we focused our efforts on figuringOut how to measure behavioral change and capability of the organization to adopt different methods, as opposed to measuring the methods themselves.

Any validated learning effort should focus on assessing the areas of highest risk first. In our case we needed to be able to effectively change the working habits and thinking culture of our clients before our involvement in the change effort came to an end. Our job was to make sure that our clients were positioned for success once we left.

The Transformation Participation Engine

With this in mind we created a "Transformation Participation Engine" framework. The objective was to track and visualize the progress of adoption for individual staff on the journey towards lean thinking. Minimum viable changes (MVC) could then be developed specifically to target measurable changes in a subset of the organization.

We defined such a system by deconstructing the objectives of our change initiative into a set of fine-grained target behaviors. We then grouped those behaviors into specific skills, grouped those skills into tracks, and finally grouped those skills into strategies. Below is a simple diagram showing the components of the Transformation Participation Engine, along with a sample of each component in brackets.



Once we had a robust repository of behavior and skills, we associated each skill with an achievement rating. The Achievement ratings for skills were then used to calculate an individual's overall progress in terms of participation in the transformation. In our first iteration of the transformation participation framework we followed a very simple calculation algorithm. Achieving a rating from a single skill would be enough to promote an individual's overall progress to that rating. We anticipate using a more complex algorithm as we continue to use this framework.




Example: the Kanban category is divided into various tracks including Operate, Invent, Manage and Own. The Invent track contains a number of skills, including the Design skill. In order for someone to successfully achieve this skill, he or she would need to demonstrate evidence of a specific set of behaviors, one of which is building a Kanban system from scratch.
Bob completes the Design skill, which has an achievement level of Prowess, his overall progress is therefore Prowess

Using Kanban to visualize transformation participation

We defined a Kanban system to visualize and measure the learning/participation progress of individual staff, managers and executives using this framework. Each individual was represented as a set of work tickets within a Transformation Participation Kanban system.
A separate swim lane was used to track each FTEs overall progress. Each employee with the organization would have exactly one ticket on the “overall progress” swim lane



A separate area of the Kanban system was used to visualize an individual’s progress in various skills. An employee ticket was cloned for each skill that he/she was trying to complete. These "skill" tickets would progress through the skills track according to skills completed. As skills were completed, they would provide the employee with an "achievement rating".

The employee work ticket within the “overall progress” swim lane would move to the appropriate state according to the achievement rating received by completing particular skills.
With this system in place we were able to both track and project the rate that the organization would be able to adopt new methods. This became our primary method of communicating status throughout the transformation.




Once we had this measurement system in place, our work turned towards determining as quickly as possible whether any of our transformation methods would support the projected velocity of change. We then needed to design MVCs to specifically evaluate these assumptions. In essence, we elected to focus exclusively on "growth assumptions" for the immediate time being.

I'll talk about how we designed our various MVCs, and providing examples in future posts.

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