Highlights from SEACON:UK 2019 - Enterprise Measurement, Enterprise Structuring for Outcomes

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Key themes that emerged from the SEACON:UK Study of Enterprise Agility this year were: measuring success at enterprise level; structuring your organisation for agility; the importance of culture in agility at scale; and the use of Cloud services in the enterprise.

Many of the case studies describe how they changed the focus of their organisation to measuring its Value and Outcomes, then aligned the organisational structure to match these value streams or products and then instigated significant culture change initiatives to align with these new ways of working. This pattern resonated in talks from OVO, VW, and others all available on the conference YouTube space.

SEACON:UK Study of Enterprise Agility is a conference that covers ideas, issues and insights into Enterprise Transformation, Entrepreneurial Leadership, Design, Agile and DevOps at scale. The 2019 edition was held on November 12th, 2019 at HereEast Innovation Centre (Plexal.com) in London. The event is organised and driven by Barry Chandler and in its 3rd year. There was a large representation of senior leadership both as speakers and attendees. All the presentations are watchable here.

The main stage had key talks from Mik Kersten, Gabrielle Benefield & Tim Beattie, Simon Wardley, Jon Smart and Dan Terhorst-North.

Mik Kersten gave an introductory talk to his recently published book Project to Product on why enterprises need to avoid measurement-based on activities and what Kersten called the bad habit of ‘task ticking’. He recommended measurement focused on value to the business. He pointed out that wealth was not being generated by project management or cost watching. He recommended a focus on product and value generation, and in his book proposes a Flow Framework to describe how to make this move. This requires both organisational redesign and measuring success differently. (watch here)

Gabrielle Benefield author, speaker and advisor, presented along with Tim Beattie the Engagement Lead for Red Hat Open Innovation Labs, where they also focused on the theme of improving what we are measuring to drive organisational success. They said the key was to shift the focus of the organisation from outputs to outcomes, and create a culture of continuous Improvement to allow the organisation to adapt as conditions change. (watch here)

Simon Wardley gave an introduction to Wardley mapping (watch here) demonstrating his method for mapping product / organisational strategy. Wardley mapping is growing in popularity as shown by the six hundred attendees at the MapCamp conference in October in London. Wardley showed how the principles of mapping can allow insights for the evaluation of organisational and product strategies. He also demonstrated ways in which an organisation could more clearly evaluate and measure the impact of business choices. To learn more, the Learn Wardley Mapping site is excellent.

Jon Smart who leads enterprise agility at Deloitte, spoke on working with enterprises to have them focus on what they are really optimising for. He showed a model for measurement and delivery in the enterprise and the kinds of paradigms he sees that do and do not work. He promoted measuring outcomes of Better, Sooner, Safer and Happier. (watch here)

The final key talk was Daniel Terhorst-North who spoke about his latest case study at a very large startup, Jio, in India, where he is using his SWARMing model for the enterprise ‘Scaling Without a Religious Methodology’. Terhorst-North is possibly best known for being an originator of BDD (Behaviour Driven Development). (watch here)

Related Topics:

• Culture & Methods
• Organizational Patterns
• Measurement
• Scaling Agile
• Agile at Scale
• Wardley Mapping
• Agile in the Enterprise

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