Re-engage Your Teams with a Transformative Planning Approach
The planning process – or lack of it – is one of the biggest pain points for government leaders and workers who want to be
Is agile for government right for you? Sign up for a free one-hour consultation and we’ll share how streamlining your process can lead to happier employees, better outcomes, and a reinvigorated workplace.
We’ve built our agile for government business on the belief that complex organizational problems have achievable solutions. The Empowered Agility Approach involves three clear steps: design your strategy, learn and apply, sustain and grow. As a government leader, you will gain clarity, play to your team’s strengths rather than battling its weaknesses, and transform your culture for the better. Our approach has worked for large and small government teams across the country. It can work for yours, too.
The planning process – or lack of it – is one of the biggest pain points for government leaders and workers who want to be
Government agencies are faced with increasing demand, changing expectations, and constantly evolving requirements. Traditional models of government are failing to keep up. Agility is an
High performing government teams use agile processes and practices to predictability deliver high-value products and services to their customers.They collaborate with each other and engage
Is agile for government right for you? Sign up for a free one-hour consultation and we’ll share how streamlining your process can lead to happier employees, better outcomes, and a reinvigorated workplace.
Agile is a set of principles that can be successfully applied to any environment, industry or sector. There are many examples of government agencies using agile to implement software projects, modernize service delivery and streamline operations in complex environments. We have helped government agencies develop agility through an incremental approach to agile adoption that focuses on “doing agile” (practices & behaviors) and “being agile” (mindset and culture). It is important to start with a clear goal and focus, learn through experimentation and then expand to other areas.
Government agencies are faced with increasing demand, changing expectations, and constantly evolving requirements. Agility is an organization’s ability to adapt quickly, run efficiently and deliver better outcomes to customers and stakeholders. Agility requires a change in the way that you think, lead and work. We help agencies achieve agility by adopting lean and agile principles, providing clarity to purpose and intent, engaging customers and stakeholders, defining measurable outcomes, limiting work in progress and creating feedback systems for continuous improvement.
The foundation for getting started is to gain leadership support for the change and to develop an understanding of the agile principles. Once that is in place, we recommend taking an experimental approach to agility. First, identify the driving challenge, define the desired outcomes and select one or two changes to implement. Then, use those initial change experiments to gather feedback, make adjustments and decide what to work on next.
Leaders are choosing agile to solve significant organizational challenges because agile is an effective approach for making change in complex environments. Agile reduces risk, delivers value incrementally, creates feedback loops and unleashes the power of self-organizing teams. Here are some issues we work with agencies to address through the adoption of agile:
Increasing demand requires more efficiency and productivity
Working in silos with too many hand-offs and dependencies
Too much work in progress and a lack of focus
Unable to get things done quickly
Lack of staff engagement
Changing expectations of clients and staff
Lack of clarity and alignment to strategy
Adopting a new way of thinking and working is a journey and can be very challenging. It takes time to embrace the principles, change behaviors, adopt new mental models and mature to the level required for high-performance. Based on our experience, we see the following common mistakes and missteps in adopting agile:
Leaders don’t understand or support agile principles and practices
Not having enough agile knowledge and expertise to support the change
Focusing on “doing agile” (practices & behaviors) with little to no focus on “being agile” (mindset and culture)
Adopting agile in a silo – one team or area starts making changes without clear communication and coordination with other groups that are impacted
Not defining a clear vision, goals or strategy for the change to agile
We help government agencies address these issues by building leadership buy-in, defining a strategy for agility, identifying the root causes of challenges and using lean change management to create sustainable and lasting change to the culture.
While it is true that agile has its roots with software teams, the principles of agile apply broadly to all types of government agency teams. We have successfully worked with business teams such as policy teams, operations teams, leadership teams, training teams and administrative teams to adopt agile principles and practices. It has been our experience that these non-IT teams have realized some of the greatest gains and improvement in outcomes.
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