The Agile Congruence Framework Overview

In their paper A model for diagnosing organizational behavior, Nadler and Tushman define a process for implementing their change model. In that spirit, Figure 3 shows an overview of the process for using Agile Congruence to implement a software driven organizational change process.

While I use these steps when implementing technology changes, I don’t go through a formal documentation process. This process can be accomplished with a whiteboard or two, an Excel spreadsheet, a PowerPoint, or whatever tools you use to best organize your thoughts. Many organizations use tools like Jira or Gitlab Issues to manage their backlogs, but other tools like Post-It notes or Excel spreadsheets work fine as well. I would be very sad if I saw an organization produce a binder of documentation formally documenting this process. 

1. Identify Symptoms: What is the big picture? Why are you trying to make an organizational change?
2. Understand your inputs: What is outside of your ability to change?
3. Define your outputs: What are the current and desired outputs? What is the gap between them?
4. Analyze the gaps and build a backlog: What organizational changes could be made to close the gaps? 
5. Model your organization: What is the current state of the organization?
6. Assess Congruence: How will the work identified affect the rest of the organization?
7. Determine Value and Prioritize: For each change in the backlog evaluate the cost, time constraints, and impact of that change. Simple, low cost, high impact changes are the top priority. Difficult, expensive, low value changes will probably never happen and go at the bottom.
8. Decide to continue or reevaluate: If there are high value changes then continue. If no high value changes are available, then your change process is complete, and you can focus on other projects.
9. Implement Changes
   • Deliver software:  As soon as you have a prioritized backlog you can start to deliver. Working software should be delivered within weeks of the priorities being determined, and this software should begin to integrate into the organization. 
   • Org Changes: All Changes to people, org structure, informal processes, and non-software formal processes should be aligned with the delivery of software.
10. Remeasure your outputs, update your org model, reprioritize your changes: Each release is a change process. 
11. GOTO 7

The process for using Agile Congruence to deliver high value enterprise software.