SIMPLe is based on three values and one principle of the agile manifesto in order to drive agile transformations.
Values
Agile Manifesto: Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
1. Collaboration and collective knowledge of people over blueprints and frameworks
SIMPLe emphasises the collective knowledge of people to come up with ideas for complex problems instead of applying blueprints and frameworks. This does not mean that frameworks or blueprints do not contain great useful ideas and concepts.
Agile Manifesto: Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
2. Co-creation over top-down approaches
It stretches the importance of including all the people affected in the change process to gain acceptance and increase ownership of possible solutions and failures. Top down approaches are important to provide some guidance, but regular collaborations across all levels of a possible hierarchy is important for long term success.
Agile Manifesto: Responding to change over following a plan
3. Small steps one after another over one big bang
Business agility cannot be improved by following a plan. It is a dynamic process that needs the capability to be able to adapt to change. Planing only small steps and measuring success is very useful and reduces the risk of failing.
Principles
Agile Manifesto: Simplicity – the art of maximizing the amount of work not done- is essential
Maximize focus and keep it simple.
Improve business agility with one small step at the time.
An agile transformation makes a lot of problems in organisations transparent. The ability to be able to tackle the most important things and ignore the rest is essential when defining actions and make plans. Otherwise there is the big risk to overwhelm the organisation with change.
SIMPLe suggests:
- Focus on the systemic view of the transformation. Not on working streams.
- Strive to remove complexity by small iterative steps instead of trying to manage it by installing new coordination institutions and roles.
- Use one roadmap for all activities such as product development, discovery and improvement activities.
- A short cadence for large retrospectives is important, because improving business agility is not a project with a start and an end. It is rather a continuous improvement process where retrospectives have to take regularly place in order to be able to adapt the next step. It recommend a cadence of 2 , max 4 weeks.