Some Responses to Questions on Bimodal from Today’s Webinar

Thanks for taking the time to participate today. We did not get time to get through all the questions, so i thought I’d pick up on a couple of the outstanding questions here.

Q. What does it mean “different metrics”? 

A. There are implications at many levels for metrics. But for example :

• Metrics need to be become much more team based, rather than individually based.  The multi-disciplinary teams operating in(or mostly in) Mode 2 need to  be measured against the outcomes they produce, collectively, not on an individual basis.  The team become much more self-organizing, and so within the team they may do a 360 degree assessment of each other, but they collectively succeed or fail together.
• You need to start finding measures of innovation, which is tricky and messy.  You might want to look at measures of the culture of innovation or the process of innovation.  So measures of the former might include the ability of the organization to learn from mistakes. A measure of the latter would be the cycle time from creation of an idea to the best ideas making it into production.

Q. Have you seen organizations that have officially reorganized around a Bimodal approach?  What kind of job titles/job descriptions are you seeing?

It’s much less an organizational structure change, and much more about culture, process and method. But yes, it is not unusual in the short to mid-term to differentiate teams. Mode 2 usually starts life as being quite small, and often needs “protection”, to prevent the organizational anti-bodies killing it off. It is better to go narrow and deep and focus the capability on a particular part of the enterprise, or on particular domains like mobile for example. Small IT organizations (<50) don’t have the option to create any kind of split of course).

With regards to the job titles, there are usual titles that go with agile, like Scrum Master, Product Owner, Product Manager. But one of the consequences of going down this route is that the boundary between roles within teams blurs, and staff become less focused on what the job description says and more focused on what needs doing within the confines of relatively small teams.  Makes for less work for the HR department as well.

Thanks again for attending.

Couple of useful documents for those with access to Gartner.com

Dispel the Myths of Bimodal to Succeed With Digital Transformation

Deliver on the Promise of Bimodal

Simon