I challenge you to read the INSPIRED book by Marty Cagan and not be inspired to change the way you make change happen.

The principles, team structures and ways of working claim to overcome many of the pain points that many tech teams have to overcome.

I believe the approach goes further than tech though and goes to the heart of any business that wants to create experiences people love.

My takeaway and I warn you; I tend to oversimplify the world and merge new thinking with other models swirling around in my head, was:-

  • Businesses are made up of products, services and internal services that need constant insight to continue to stay relevant and improve, to attract a market and improve performance
  • That the stop-start spreadsheet-intensive financial planning cycles and business case drawdowns, though necessary, culturally drive a perception of being able to predict the future with confidence, down to the penny and can focus and detract a team from focusing on listening and responding to insightful research.
  • That insightful research and understanding the impact on processes that is the heart of a business analysts role often is to removed from the mindset of the delivery teams who remain inwardly focused on making sure they tick the reporting assurance hurdles and functional deliverables rather than gain fundamental understanding of why and what they are delivering.
  • Moving to the model proposed should be relatively easy – assign your tribe into product/service stacks – establish a cadence of micro, medium and macro releases – set the value return expectations and set the team off on listening, understanding and identifying value-driven change with the remit to prioritise the changes that will deliver the most excellent value within the micro, medium and macro release
  • That this structure and approach drives a ruthless focus on value realisation (which is somewhat more than benefits realisation) it making the whole team curious analysts. It ensures teamwork in that T-shaped way rather than the silo domain structure of the past.
  • Financial performance is at the heart of the model but its not a micro, predictive, actual’s vs forecast of spend and allocation of the cost model. It’s a place your bets, provides funding set outcome ranges and assesses business performance at a micro, medium and macro release level – in my mind; I see this as a constraint model of finance – to drive a return within the constraint of the investment in the tribe.

To all us who have turned the last page of the book – taken a deep breath, and turned around and looked at our organisation – it may seem very overwhelming and near on impossible to convince those that need convincing to move to this new model. The usual challenges of change soon hit you :-

  • Changing people’s roles to those of the inspired tribe – role profile compilation, market assessments – restructuring into the tribes – moving more to a network structure than a hierarchical structure
  • Seeing what it will take to break through the long-established monthly financial planning and sign-off processes – they will still be at the core of the new model they have to be, but it’s more of a pivot in ethos and approach to get the same result for the business and may mean letting go of the micro detail and steering the tribe to be more value obsessed – it’s different
  • Establishing the new mindset of the tribe to one that is obsessed with creating products, and services that people will love – being curious analysts who embrace research test and trial through micro releases and drives medium and macro releases of more fundamental value-adding changes – will change the stance and the velocity of the team and there is a chance this can turn up work addiction levels as a “gamification” level of performance outcomes can start to breed across the organisation

The obstacles and challenges that many traditional corporate businesses will need to overcome are immense – start small – reset a programme move it to this product model, test and trial it for a while – what’s the worst that could happen?