As markets continually shift and change, the way companies execute their strategy and communicate it to their teams needs to evolve. With digital transformation dominating the world of business, the ability to quickly translate strategy into effective action is critical. 

Going agile is nicely described by the co-author of the agile manifesto Jeff Sutherland and author of the bestseller 'The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time'. 

First of all you cut down delivery times of projects or products to market. That makes the company more competitive and saves cost at the same time. Second, you leverage all the skills and motivation of your teams and let them embrace their creativity. 

Being fast, less costly, lean and innovative are the outcomes if you really and truely go agile. Please find more information in my article 'Why Agile on Linkedin?'

Modern organizations operate in environments that are moving faster than ever before—and your company is no exception. 

As markets continually shift and change, the way you execute your company strategy and communicate it to your teams needs to evolve. With digital transformation dominating the world of business, the ability to quickly translate strategy into effective action is critical. Regardless of your situation, your organization needs to be well prepared to deal with the four attributes of modern business, collectively known as “VUCA”(1): VUCA Volatility Uncertainty Complexity Ambiguity

The speed at which VUCA changes the conditions in your world requires a new approach to strategy implementation. In particular, it means your teams need to be able to collaborate in real time, easily share knowledge and work anywhere. When that happens, you benefit not just from a new and efficient way of working, but also from a clear advantage over competitors who are still working in ways that are slow and not fit for purpose.

Luckily, that new way of working has already been invented. It’s called the Agile approach, and it uses practices like Scrum and Kanban to get work done faster and with better results. Software developers have been using Agile for years, but forward-thinking organizations have started to realize that other lines of business can benefit from it too - as long as they are willing to embrace it.

At swarmOS© the team have worked with midsize and large organizations to help them apply Agile principles to business projects. This article encapsulates what we’ve learned, presenting a nine-step approach to adopting Agile and Swarm organizational practices in your business strategy execution. 

If you’d like to discuss how to make the transition to Agile, Scrum and Swarm, please do contact us - you’ll find our details on the back page.

Successful strategy execution relies on teams being able to work seamlessly and being empowered to make quick, autonomous decisions. In the world of software development, the Agile approach has been successfully used for more than a decade, enabling global innovators like Amazon®, Tesla® and Google® to develop and deploy new software and services, fast. 

One particularly popular “flavor” of Agile is a framework called Scrum – which empowers teams to deliver results in an efficient manner, and which also promotes transparency and real-time collaboration through Agile toolset best practices. (For a great introduction to the benefits of Scrum, we recommend Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time, by Jeff Sutherland.) 

Scrum practices revolve around the concept of “sprints”: development cycles that last two to four weeks, during which teams work on their deliverables and finally present results to customers. Following each sprint, Scrum teams can quickly evaluate measurable results, so they can make adjustments for further project execution.

Another important dimension of Agile for the purposes of this paper is the concept of “Swarm”. This is an organizational principle that enables self-organizing, small, cross functional teams working in different geographies to align, making better use of different skills and resources across the enterprise.

Being fast, less costly, lean and innovative are the outcomes if you really and truely go agile. 

Crucially, business leaders looking to take advantage of Agile, Scrum and Swarm must be prepared to move away from a traditional, top-down management approach. In an Agile world, the key to success is the power of a self-managed team rooted in individual competence, trust and a shared vision on where to go. Once a Scrum team has started its sprint, the role of management is to enable the team to overcome road blocks in the project — not to micromanage. 

Executing a successful Agile project relies on a number of key principles which are defined in the Agile Manifesto.

As an executive team looking to lead by example, moving to Agile and Swarm demands a mindset of cultural change, mutual trust, empowerment of the team and a flexible approach to Agile execution. 

The whole organization must be able to collaborate and communicate in real-time across teams and time zones. 

Effective communication and collaboration require an Agile toolset. Email and file-sharing tools are often unsuitable, as they do not support in context real-time knowledge-sharing and global collaboration.

If you can adopt the right mindset, values, principles, processes, and tools, your organization will quickly feel the strategic impact of Agile. 

In this article, we outline nine steps that will help you convert your business strategy into projects that can be delivered fast using an Agile, Scrum and Swarm approach. 

The first step is to define your strategic goals. Creating impact relies on building a strategy that you can measure, execute, and communicate to your teams effectively. 

You’ll likely have an existing strategy or want advice on a new one, but it’s important to understand why you have a particular strategy (and why you would want or need a new one).

Once you’ve defined your strategy, you need it to cascade down through your organization, so that everything your teams do is aligned to your strategic goals. 

To do this, we use a principle called OKR(2), or Objectives and Key Results. OKR is a great way to transform strategy into something actionable. It starts with a well-formulated strategy underpinning the vision and mission of your organization, generally covering the next 5-10 years. From this, you then define your strategic goals over a 1-5-year period. 

Next, you define your objectives and key results, so that every team can define the bi-weekly and monthly actions they must take. Usually, objectives will work to a quarterly timeline and be measured against pre-defined key results—maintaining transparency throughout the organization. This also ensures that every employee is working towards the same measurable objectives. 

Keep in mind that to execute on your strategy, all actions and deliverables must contribute to at least one objective. If they don’t, you need to scrutinize whether they really add any value to your organization — or rearrange your OKRs to provide the linkages needed.

As an Agile or Swarm organization, your toolset is as important as any other key design principle. If you can’t create an environment that supports effective communication, collaboration and Agile practices, you won’t get the benefits of Agile - especially if you have distributed teams working on complex projects. 

There are a range of tools available to support Agile project management (as opposed to traditional, “waterfall”-style project management), but according to Gartner®, Atlassian®, an Australian enterprise software company, has one of the most modern toolsets, and is growing by 45% per year in the Agile management software space. 

The Atlassian toolset is the most complete and integrated software we have come across, with an open and modern architecture to support add-ons for additional functionality. We find it’s best suited for bringing new flexibility to software and business projects, as well as supporting operational service desk processes. While other tools are up to the job, none has the full spectrum and well integrated functionalities of agile project management features that Atlassian has.

The importance of a toolset that business users feel comfortable with

A critical point to bear in mind is that Agile toolsets are predominantly designed by and for software development teams. They lack the kind of business-friendly user interface (UI) that encourages adoption among business project users. 

When you come to evaluate toolsets for business use, you will ideally look for one with the following key features: 

•  Guides users and helps them create and lead new business projects easily
  
•  Has a simple, intuitive UI that ensures a satisfying business user experience
  
•  Can easily visualize key business project success factors such as:
  
•  Project Scope to be delivered in comparison to your teams capacity - which determines the timeline
  
•  Breakdown of project time spent and costs accrued to make budget
  
•  Critical issues or dependencies that require user intervention
  
•  Feedback from customer and business teams 
  
•  Road blocks that require management intervention 
  
•  Translates Agile into the business world by using deliverables, risks and milestones
  

Whether you choose Atlassian or another Agile toolset, it should be one that lets you create business projects with the right issue types and attributes (milestones, deliverables, escalations, risks), and different workflows for deliverables (e.g. approval workflows on legal contracts). It should also have easy to use screen designs and dashboards that prompt user action. 

While Agile principles can help you accelerate business projects, there are key differences between the way Agile applies to the worlds of development and business. 

Software projects are defined by the code base of their modules or services, something that can be tested and evaluated directly. Software demands a certain standard of infrastructure, data models, and defined APIs to produce a complete product. In a Scrum software project, the norm is to have the Scrum team together in one room, talking and completing the Scrum board face-to-face. 

By contrast, a business project has more dependencies, and the deliverables are much more diverse. You could be drawing up contracts, completing a warehouse project, hiring new staff or obtaining government approvals, for example. Usually, business projects involve teams from across different business functions, with project teams often distributed across countries and regions.

Like software projects, business projects are measured based on outcomes. The stories, tasks and sub-tasks which make it to new versions of code are known as deliverables in the business world. Business deliverables are outcomes that are measurable and can be shown to and evaluated by the customer. However, they cannot be tested in the same way that software can, and should already be proven to be ready for business use before they are deployed. 

The chosen toolset should support the implementation of deliverables which are required for business projects. 

Your organization is invested in a variety of projects at any one time: these may be transformational projects digitizing your business processes, digital projects or simply everyday operations. However, they should all have one thing in common: they should contribute to your company strategy. Otherwise, you should not waste precious resources on them. 

Projects need to be measured on outcomes that produce deliverables, and create value for the organization. That means linking every project to one or more of your objectives. Your project managers (product owners) must be able to explain the links between their project and the objectives, and show that they are measured against key results – in Scrum the product owner is responsible for the return on investment.

After you’ve converted your strategy into workable objectives and ensured key results are measurable and linked to your project, the next step is to “scrumify” your project execution. 

All Agile approaches rely on real-time team collaboration to organize workloads and execution. Agile projects are organized in a way that displays all the key deliverables needed to achieve the project goals, resulting in a Minimal Viable Product (MVP). These deliverables (in the software world they’re called “user stories”) are prioritized in the backlog and split into sprints. Every team then runs a sprint to complete a certain number of deliverables, which are then delivered at the end of the sprint.

Transparency, collaboration, prioritization, and self-organization are all important components of a successful sprint, and team commitment levels are measured at the end of the sprint. 

An important part of the Scrum approach is a regular feedback loop within the team. Typically, this takes the form of daily stand-up meetings, sprint reviews, recognition and reflection. This allows for a readjustment after every sprint on the direction of the project scope and desired outcome. 

When teams are self-organized and have the capabilities to solve tasks internally, execution velocity improves and productivity increases — leaving management free to focus on resolving bottlenecks. 

To make the move from strategy to achieving strategic goals, objectives and key results, you need to make your OKRs visible and measurable by moving them into your chosen toolset. Create your project and link it to the goals and objectives you have defined.

Create your project and start creating the user stories 'deliverables' using versions 'milestones' and EPICs zu structure your project.

Although not a standard procedure in Agile software development, risks are critical to manage throughout any business project, as your executives need to be aware of any major business impact. Creating a risk element allows every team member to document points of risk, which can then be evaluated by the product owner. This gives transparency to areas of risk and makes them more manageable. 

Sprint planning can manage risks by reprioritizing backlogs or through resource planning. Areas of risk can easily be viewed on the dashboard and sorted by priority and/or completion date. 

The ability to estimate a backlog based on the effort, entered as points at creation of a deliverable, allows product owners to see the total effort as a sum of points of the backlog. 

By logging the number of teams and sprints working on a project — including their velocity in points (team capacity) — you can start estimating time to completion based on the sum of points of deliverables (scope to deliver the project goal) in the backlog, matched to the team’s capacity. That requires that your chosen toolset has team management included and being able to match team capacity and your project scope.

Your project is still in Agile execution while visualizing the estimated timeline by matching your backlog points to your team’s capacity. Significant changes of the scope immediately get recognized and will be evaluated against the timeline and cost estimations. 

Using a project budget for the project, you can view and match the daily cost rates across teams and multiple sprints. Adding the budget to the project description can help you to create truly accurate cost estimates by matching your actual cost run rates, times the number of sprints plus the money spent so far. The capacity against your points in the backlog provides a precise view of your required sprints. Estimating time and cost of your business projects in agile mode creates great confidence with your stakeholders.

Blockages can create significant issues on any project, and undermine the basic principles of Agile. By weighting deliverables using a points-based system when they are created, you will ensure important information gets added early on in the project – and gets refined during the sprint planning. We propose certain ways of discovering potential blockages such as impactful chains of blocking project issues and escalation of user stories by the team.

The ability to document links between deliverables as being “blocked” or “related” means that priorities can be displayed using a chain of open deliverables dependent on each other. By adding up all the points (work effort) within a chain, product owners can see how significant each chain of deliverables is and what order of priority they should take. 

Being able to visualize the most impactful chains based on priority and effort ensures that project risks are flagged immediately and can be prioritized. This is useful for projects that can contain more than 5,000 issues running at once – where manual discovery processes would normally fail. 

The escalation is available for every team member to trigger an automated monitoring process. Escalations will be raised by a team member when a blockage appears that can't be solved by the team. There are three levels of escalation severity based on which different audiences will be notified. Red escalations are immediately passed to the product owner and executive to be resolved – removing the blockage in the project and enable the team to execute.

The ability to visualize project costs, and budget estimates, along with timeline, team and customer status, can help you predict project results with an accuracy that only gets more precise as the project unfolds. Because all deliverables are linked to the objectives set by the strategy early on, project outcomes and ROI can be matched against key results. 

This allows product owners to clearly communicate estimated project results, which can be linked to strategic company goals and vision. No polished executive presentations are needed as the executives have access to the project dashboard in real time - the single source of truth.

Using the full advantage of the Agile approach and deliver ‘twice as much in half of the time’ according to Jeff Sutherland creates the expected ROI. The ability to adjust your project deliverables for optimal outcome thoughout the project improves your success rate further.

We know what it is like to live through long nights on critical business projects with high dependencies, escalations, tough timelines and milestones. This article reflects the experience of managing business projects using Agile, Scrum and Swarm approaches - delivering faster results, better outcomes, and leaner business operations.

With the agile approach and toolset you are able to translate your strategy into executable work items organized in agile projects. You leverage the power of your whole organization by using swarm organizational principles. Teams work against well defined sprints and manage their work themselves. The outcome is closely aligned between all stakeholders. Your organization can move to agile and get agility, reduced time to market and fully leverage your motivated and highly skilled workforce. Your company becomes much more competitive in a VUCA world. 

the author is founder of swarmOS GmbH.

(1) Horney, Nick, PhD; Pasmore, Bill, PhD, SVP; O'Shea, Tom, CMC. People and Strategy, suppl. Special Issue: Leading in a Time of Uncertainty; New York33.4 (2010): 32-38.

(2) “Objectives and Key Results: Driving Focus, Alignment, and Engagement with OKRs” Paul R. Niven and Ben Lamorte