XITASO’S Experiment Canvas
Author: Paul Epping
XITASO is a software company based in Augsburg, Germany. Baptiste is an Agile coach (or Scrum master).
The company is not only focusing on digitalization, software development and consulting, but also on outsourcing developers. Unlike outsourcing companies, XITASO is outsourcing entire teams for software developing. The power of teams that know their strengths and aligned is usually stronger than single developers in a strange and complex environment.
Outsourced teams or delivery teams can be seen as value stream crews for the insourcing company. Usually, the crews include a product owner and a coach. The coach is taking care of the relationship with the customer and focusing on the experiences the team creates in the insourcing company.
More inputs here: https://xitaso.com/en/career/working-at-xitaso/
Before XITASO itself embraced the unFIX thinking, it was a software company divided in departments based on technical areas such as ‘mobile-’, ‘server--’, ‘network’ or department. And, as so often, the departments/teams are not talking to each other. Life can be boring.
The structure was not the most compelling example of scalability.
Therefore, the company was considering moving towards a holocratic inspired structure.
The core contained the patterns such as:
Shared services
Platform crew
FinCon crew
And other crews ‘further away from the customers’
At the edge or ‘outer layer’, and closer to the customers the delivery teams reside (value streams)
In between XITASO communities such as:
Product owners
Software engineering
Experience
Marketing
Mentoring
Research & Innovation
Other communities oversee strategy, IT or HR.
Communities/teams can mingle and extended with other teams or crews.
Each community has a ‘speaker’, collectively chosen and easily be changed. This can be compared with the Captains of the unFIX philosophy. They are not really captains or chiefs but more ‘spokes-persons’ – they formulate and share their vision of the community.
Here you can sense the power of the unFIX philosophy; it is not about vocabulary, visuals, or colors. It is about patterns in organizations that can be recognized as archetypes but freely used in whatever organization without fragmenting them. As in all living system, things are connected (holistically). This is one of the core principles of the thinking.
As a consulting company, organizational transformation is one of XITASO offerings.
We will introduce you to a transformation process, led by Baptiste Grand, for a smaller software company. This company was aware of the capabilities of XITASO, specifically for this offering.
The story goes as follows.
The company reached out to XITASO to help them to solve a problem that we see in many companies. It is called: ‘throw it over the wall’. Team members reached a confidence in finding their way to the two founders blindly. The effect: the founder got overwhelmed.
Teams were sent to Agile and Scrum courses, but that didn’t help.
The ask: ‘how can we change this?’
This was not said to fall on deaf ears. Carrying certificates and years of expertise as Agile coach and Scum master in his back pocket, Baptiste felt confident to take this challenge on. Meanwhile, the certificates got blended with insights from the unFIX philosophy, Systems theory, Management 3.0 and quite some spices from Team Topologies. The extended Legobox on the road!
As starting point 2 focus areas were defined:
Don’t focus on solving but on finding a solution. Focusing on the problem that a client wants to solve, or a general problem in the world. It is one of the famous quotes of the legend Clayton Christensen†
Creating a culture of experimentation
It all seems so obvious, but if it would be that simple why has it not been embraced right from the beginning? Because an organization must be ready for that. It means that you must take responsibility and that leaders in an organization must allow that employees take responsibilities and that they may fail when they are trying to figure out things. Experimentation means that you are formulating hypotheses and how are you going to test that to get a validation: good to go – adjust it a bit and test again – reject. Only when the lights are on green, you can move on to the next traffic light. Saves the company a lot of money, adds science to the madness and people have more fun (and responsibility). Moreover, you figure it out with your team. College must have left some traces… lecturers didn’t solve that test for you, did they?
Another important feature had to be infused: trust and psychological safety! This applied to the entire organization! So, the teams defined timeframes, set the criteria and everyone had the right of veto. A brilliant idea because that made everybody equal in decision power.
This also helped to crack the nut with respect to communication between the two roles that were dominant in the company: consultants and developers. Consultants usually talk about abstract things that developers don’t understand and the concrete codes in the developer’s world don’t make any sense in the consultancy domain. ‘Houston, we have a problem!’
By Focusing on this integral approach, teams started to communicate and understanding each other’s worlds.
The teams were asked to structure themselves and that was what happened.
It was very attractive because the focus was now on value streams for the company but also for themselves!
Governance crew consisted of the two owners who were now able to focus on strategy and growth and not being distracted anymore by questions from team members, who were supposed to know things themselves, but didn’t allow themselves to follow that expert instinct.
For the near future the company is removing Management by Objectives (linked to incentive) and their crews will work on using OKRs (Objective Key Results). An extensive mentoring system is also being deployed by the employees themselves to further push the personal growth of all.
The relationship with unFIX could be tightened and roll over in a partnership and on top of that, benefitting from mentoring XITASO, to improve their own offering.
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ABOUT XITASO’S Experiment Canvas:
Why do I need this?
A cornerstone of the agile and modern way of working is the reliance in experimentations, observations, and continuous improvements.
Sadly, there is a dangerous but common misconception that this should happen sporadically and without any structures: “We will see how it goes”, “Let’s do it agile”, “YOLO!” … I have heard these too often when discussing a complex problem to solve or a risky task to try out, mostly when the participants just wouldn't bother to analyse or plan it. It can work, of course. This is ultimately how we learn and grow as kids: running, jumping, falling, learning, where the main trigger for learning is pain. Translated to organisation structures, relying on pain or luck as decision-making mechanism is obviously risky — especially when this is not wished by design. Thankfully, the scientific method was discovered and can bring us consistent results and contrasting outcomes, which maximise our learning and growing potential. The Agile Coaches at XITASO sharing this view designed the Experiment Canvas, as the way to offer a minimal canvas for running reliable experiments, delivering consistent results.
How does it work?
The Experiment Canvas is here to help us to design, run and conclude better Experiments by bringing structure to them.
First, decide the name, the timeframe, and the owner of the experiment. This is done for transparency purpose so that anyone in the organisation can know what's going on. The hope describes what you are aiming at. You don't need to describe how the experiment will run but the result you are wishing for.
The Success Criteria are what you will look at, or measure, to see if your Experiment was a success: at the end of the timeframe, have a look at the criteria and check the results ✅❌. The worst output possible would be the impossibility to observe or measure the results, which would mean that the experiment was performed for nothing... 🚫
The Next Steps are also here to maximize transparency.
