1. How to become Agile in Enterprise
- Align organizational attention to achieve global optimization

2. Local optimization is self centered
Align organizational attention to achieve global optimization

3. Optimization at different levels
We all know Agile is hard in big enterprise – because Agile in R&D is a local optimization
Every organization optimizes for its own benefit
Developers optimize around development process, technology, etc.
QA optimizes around testability, automation, etc.
Finance optimizes around spend, cost, capitalization, etc.
Support optimizes around response time, call volume, etc.
Because of this, organizational alignment is difficult to achieve
Different processes are created to specifically optimize each organization
From the outside, everyone looks like headless chicken

4. Headless chicken? Time – 2014
Location – a giant conference room in a giant retail company
What happened – red-faced project managers and scrum masters were performing an incredible political dance to defend their budget request through dozens of spreadsheets and hundreds of line items. They were desperately trying to please a group of senior leaders who control budget.
Why they were headless chickens? The entire spreadsheet and the requested budget were simply …

5. Introducing organizational attention
Organizational attention is defined as the socially structured pattern of attention evidenced by decision makers within the organization (Ocasio, 1997)
Organizational attention has the following characteristics
Can be treated as a currency
Limited – like true currency, it’s not only limited but can rise and fall with time
Commands focus and effort – attention translates directly into time of focus and effort spent on any particular issues, risks, projects, etc.
Costs can be lowered through either controlled or automated process
Local optimization relies on processes to increase its own organizational attention, often at the cost of global optimization

6. Examples of organizational attentions through local optimization
Tradition Software Development
Agile Software Development
Finance
Hosting

7. Aligning attention for sympathetic vibration
Enterprise level Agility can only be achieved through global optimization
Align organizational attention at global level can ensure Agile implementation’s success (think sympathetic vibration)
What does this do to each of the organizations?
Engineering – develop gated feature release on top of frequent releases
QA – revolutionize both process and tooling
Product management – segment features through thin slice of features
Finance – align spend, timesheet entry, create “permanent” team
Hosting – align with development through use of DevOps
Support – align support through controlled release process
Marketing – retool marketing methods, capabilities, build-in feature toggle for gated go-to market strategy

8. Examples of globally optimized model - MatrixCare
Agile Software Development
Finance – why there’s a lag in synchronization? (timesheet cycle)
Hosting – what makes hosting to synch up with development? (DevOps)

9. Results
When you can align organizational attention to focus on global optimization, amazing results can happen
Level 1 – everyone gives up something to achieve something greater
Level 2 – everyone works on a synergized set of processes to achieve clarity
Level 3 – everyone feeds off the synergy to achieve something far greater.
At MatrixCare, we have aligned organizational attention throughout almost all departments, and we have achieved…

10. Questions?