Let's talk Transformation : The business leaders podcast #154 Transformation : a constellation of outcomes with Tim Beattie
The biggest illusion organisations have about being product-centric is that adopting buzzwords or frameworks alone guarantees success.
What does it mean to move from KPIs to outcomes, from silos to more interconnected ecosystems of teams ?
Moving from project to product is more than a process change; it’s a mindset shift. Tim and I discuss who to help organizations connect their outcomes, their work and their teams into living value streams so that they stop measuring activity and start measuring impact.
Our discussion highlights a crucial point: “When work is still being organized as programs or projects, and there are plans that have got start dates and end dates, that’s usually an indicator that the mindset is still in that project mentality.” This perspective reveals a core issue in many “agile” transformations.
The traditional project approach, with its fixed timelines and temporary teams, often hinders true value delivery. Instead, long-lived, cross-functional teams that “roll the valuable work into the team” rather than “staff a project over people” yield superior results. This fosters psychological safety, boosts performance, and increases adaptability.
The best foundation for success is collaboration and starting small. The perception of mindset and metrics can be changed using value stream mapping/metrics-based process mapping, quantifying before and after, crossover times and rate of completeness to provide data and success stories right from the beginning.
How are you shifting your teams from temporary assignments to continuous value delivery units?
Tim share his wealth of experience and insight from orking with teams and leaders all over the globe.
The main insights you'll get from this episode are :
- Helping organisations connect their outcomes, work and teams into living value streams to measure impact over productivity and bring about sustainable transformation in the delivery of outcomes.
- Claims to be agile or devops-driven are often waterfall projects in disguise - a clear distinction between project mode and product mode is often stymied by organisational infrastructure.
- Cohesive teams outperform projects that are simply resourced, a model that is very dependent on specific skills and requires a shift (from t-shaped to i-shaped) towards m-shaped - cross-functional teams deliver value and are adaptable, permitting value management instead of scaled resourcing.
- Value streams – comprising two components of flow and end-to-end – begin with a need and end with a perceived value, but the entire process and how it all fits together must be understood.
- The perception of mindset and metrics can be changed using value stream mapping/metrics-based process mapping, quantifying before and after, crossover times and rate of completeness.
- Shifting from output to (connected) outcomes involves mapping the constellation using simple visualisation to demonstrate connections within the organisation and what values each team delivers.
- Constellations of bright stars then join together to meet strategic goals and boost engagement; keeping an eye on KPI dashboards within the confines of safety and governance allows progress to be determined by OKRs (create focus, then align).
- The best foundation for success is collaboration – leaders need to make way for an experimental mindset and micro shifts that start small with one team and tell a story which serves as a catalyst for wider implementation.
- Flexible frameworks can establish what tools work in a given organisation, avoiding the hype around ‘the right solutions’, using comfortable language and focusing on the principles rather than the labels to bring the values to life.
- Recommended action to move from a product organisation to a product operating model is to ascertain what the need is; establish how progress will be measured; define a strategy; discuss how to test it; and build feedback loops into the system of work.
- When other strategies have failed, it is important to focus on the retrospective learning, looking at what did work against the backdrop of the change curve - creating communities embraces the people issue to unlearn ingrained habits.
Find out more about Tim and his work here :
https://www.linkedin.com/company/stellafai/