Contextual Mobility

Everybody talks about achieving enterprise agility, but unless teams can easily change context, agile processes won’t help you.

The Problem

Enterprise agility describes the ability of an enterprise to react to new information and learning such as changed customer demands by quickly refocusing and aligning around the changed situation.

In the IT world, even if business focus and planning can change quicky, this change is not mapped clearly to what is needed from the IT-teams meaning they are not able to respond and switch contexts in the time needed to leverage the opportunity the new situation provides.

The Solution

Use or create a standardized model enabling mapping between business needs and IT competence needs. This entails two aspects:

• Develop “Team competence profiles” which on top of technical skills include business and functional skills.

• Describe business capabilities and associated development needs using the same model so that

   teams can quickly and clearly understand needs and communicate their competence profiles.

The mobility that can then be achieved is for example like that of an electrician – who can switch between contexts at short notice.

Advantages

• Competence profiles are attached to teams making the mobility of the team the focus and not individuals.

• Team Competence profiles include business and functional skills providing a more complete means of mapping team skills to needed organizational capabilities.

• With clear competence profiles and roadmaps describing upcoming business needs, competence gaps can be identified and addressed before they become critical.

• 

  Teams have a home in their chapters, not the development organization reducing emotional attachment to flexible organizational structures thus making dynamic collaboration models easier.¹

• Teams plan their competence development in all three dimensions technical, business, and functional

Considerations

•  Build up the competence profile over time. It will never be fully “ready”, so start now.

We recommend a competence profile with the three focus areas:

o    Technical skill

o    Business knowledge

o    Functional knowledge

An example could be, software development skills for billing in the B2B area.

• We all need a home; we recommend chapters as stable homes for teams. Chapters should have a defined technical/functional and business focus with some operational responsibility. ¹

•  A team should be fully assigned to a single chapter. ^{1, 2} 

•  Ideally, describe the business capabilities based on a company-wide or industry-standard model such as the telecoms standard eTOM. ³

• Focus on creating portfolio roadmaps and identifying expected upcoming business needs, so that chapters and teams can prepare.y

Compatible to SAFe®

While the concept does extend existing SAFe mechanisms it remains fully compatible.

Contextual mobility.

the ability of a team to move from one context (area of work within the organization) to another. For example, to fulfil B2B billing engagements in various business areas.

Sociotechnical Challenge

A challenge with a human component (most organizational changes for example).

Team Competence Profile

a description of the competence of a team measured in technical, functional, and business terms.  (e.g. java development, in B2B Billing). Competence profiles should be standardized across the organization to enable contextual mobility.

Business Capability.

A particular ability or capacity that an organization may possess or exchange to achieve a specific purpose or outcome⁴. For example, Internet marketing or B2B Billing

1. This addresses the sociotechnical aspect of teams without a strong home base attaching themselves emotionally to dynamic development initiatives, thus reducing agility.

2.  See our white paper “The Future Dynamic Organization“ for more details.

3. See our white paper on creating flexible ARTs using eTOM.

4. Rephrased from TOGAF