How does a 42-year-old business become disruptive? This is the first of a series of blogs in which our Enterprise Agility Advisors will discuss the CA Technologies business agility transformation, including an overview of the program and its impact across the organization and for CA technologies customers. Co-Authored by Sri Parthasarathy.
So how does a 42-year-old business turn the tables when one of its key markets is steadily shrinking? In the last two years, CA Technologies has reduced time to market, increased customer satisfaction, boosted innovation, and increased employee engagement. And we?ve achieved all this thanks to an Agile transformation.
Here at CA Technologies, we?re harnessing a Lean-Agile mindset and practices to transform the customer experience, help us stay ahead of our competitors, and maximize employee potential. Agile isn?t just a new way of developing software, it?s a new mindset, a new working culture, and a new way of running a business.
We?re making it easier for our leaders, lines of business, and teams to work together and with our customers on a global scale ? from Mumbai to Prague, across Europe and the Americas. We?re empowering employees at the front line to make decisions for themselves and creating a less hierarchical, flatter organizational structure.
Three key areas of change need to be considered in an Agile transformation, and these have applied to us as well as our customers: support for adapting to a Lean-Agile mindset (people), new working practices, and technology/data.
People
People need a purpose and a reason for change. In 2016, CA Technologies dedicated itself to a modern mission ? to remove the barriers between ideas and outcomes. As part of this exercise, we identified the CA DNA and our aspirational values, which describe how we show up when we?re at our best. Both include Lean-Agile thinking and values.
To further support our people, we also provided:
- Coaching and training in Lean/Agile thinking and leadership.
- Training on Agile-at-scale practices and strategic facilitation.
- Modern career pathing and role-based training.
Practices
An Agile transformation must include a change of common work practices and language. It?s a critical investment that we?ve helped hundreds of organizations bring about. At CA Technologies we?re leveraging:
- Lean strategy deployment methods on a quarterly cadence to steer our lines of business.
- Strategic facilitation techniques to have meetings that create improved engagement, clarity, and alignment.
- The Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) as the cornerstone for Agile delivery, involving hundreds of people, projects, and products.
- A business Agility maturity model that?s evaluated in terms of continuous improvement.
Technology
By ?technology investments,? we aren?t just referring to the Agile Management products we use to make our work visible, limit our work in progress, and prioritize our portfolio investments, but also the real-time reports, metrics, and data we use to run our business.
Working Better Together
We want to make CA a great place to work as well as a great company to work with, and we?re achieving these goals with greater business agility.
If you?re interested in learning more about agile, follow our later Champagne Blog series posts, or try reading other blogs by the team. You can also check out the AgilityCast for Business series.
