Abstract: Are you confident all your teams are delivering on your corporate strategy? Shortly after deciding to go "All in on Agile" across the entire Vistaprint business unit, we began experimenting with an enterprise-wide Agile release planning tool we call the Enterprise Visibility Room. It is forcing us to finally confront our addiction to working on every good idea we think we've ever had, all at the same time. It motivates us to say no, not yet, and to focus intently on our highest value ideas. Through that intense focus, we align our collective efforts to the core of our strategy, balance our supply and demand and increase the flow of value to our customers.
The Enterprise Visibility Room centers on a single, prioritized, enterprise backlog of strategic outcomes. It requires clear descriptions of value for each and every outcome. It visualizes all teams necessary to deliver that value and where each team is actively working. Five ceremonies embody the formal operation of the Room: prioritization, planning, scrum of scrums stand-ups, demonstrations, and retrospectives, all occurring throughout a quarterly cycle.
Peak inside the journey we have taken, hear the lessons learned, the missteps, and unexpected discoveries. Gather insights into which factors enabled us to take this major step in our enterprise Agile transformation, and imagine what an idea like this could do for your organization.
Lessons Learned from Your Experience: - We have been working on too many top priorities simultaneously across our organization and it has been slowing down our flow of value delivery.
- Being clear about where the value lies in a given idea and how we will recognize it has been achieved, creates powerful alignment between idea generators and idea implementers.
- Functional silos are impeding our ability to execute cross functional work and slowing our flow of value delivery.
- Using the language and approach of genuine experimentation has proven to be a very successful means of introducing change within our organization by keeping any unknowns in line with the organization's tolerance for risk.
- Allowing the teams' representatives, the primary participants of the EVR, to own, adapt and reshape the tool and process to their needs fostered rapid creative solutions to long standing coordination difficulties, extreme swarming experimentation and ensured high levels of continuing engagement of the participants.
- Transparency of enterprise level information led to surprising and unexpected benefits for people and teams across the organization.
- It requires a significant mind shift for organizational leaders to stop focusing on their area of specialty and instead optimize for the whole of the enterprise.
- Executing enterprise level work in small increments allows for faster feedback, early value delivery, and regular opportunities to adapt to changing circumstances.
- A single prioritized enterprise backlog is difficult to create, but a powerful tool for aligning teams across the organization.
- Executive support and active participation are necessary for coordination at the enterprise level to occur successfully.
- Not all participating parts of the organization have benefitted equally yet from the Enterprise Visibility Room - there is more to learn and achieve.
- The timing needs to be right for an effort like this to take root in an organization.
- A single physical representation of all work across the enterprise created a level of understanding and engagement that previous digital information systems have never achieved.
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