Decentralizing Control: The Secret to Enterprise Flow
Surviving and thriving in today’s business environment requires quick and efficient decision-making. When managerial input is necessary for most decisions, it causes a queue of decision requests that block progress and hinder — rather than facilitate — the performance of the front-line people doing the work. Worse than that, it stifles autonomy and innovation and creates a situation where knowledge workers are no more than order-takers. Solving these challenges requires restructuring the decision process itself so that those closest to the problem, and armed with local knowledge, have the power to act. This is the essence of decentralized decision-making.
In this session, Chief Methodologist and SAFe Fellow, Andrew Sales, will provide an overview of the updated and expanded guidance for SAFe Principle #9: Decentralize-Decision Making. The session will start by analysing the ‚anatomy of a decision‘ and highlighting the critical responsibility of the decision takers to ensure they have the clarity and competence to make an effective decision as well as communicating the intent of that decision to all affected stakeholders. Additionally, it will cover considerations for defining guardrails and the psychological safety required for creating a culture that supports this new approach.
Andrew Sales, Chief Methodologist and SAFe Fellow, Scaled Agile Inc. As Chief Methodologist, Andrew is passionate about helping SAFe Enterprises identify better ways of working through the application, of Lean, Agile, and DevOps at scale and evolving SAFe guidance to support these goals. In addition, he fulfills the role of Framework Product Manager, ensuring that Scaled Agile has a clear vision, roadmap, and set of priorities for how the Framework will meet the needs of our customers.Andrew has successfully guided numerous organizations through SAFe transformations from across a wide range of industries, drawing on his many years of Lean and Agile experience. He previously led the Agile Services Practice across EMEA for CA Technologies (formerly Rally) and is a regular speaker at Agile conferences and contributor to the Agile community. He is a lifelong learner and recently completed research exploring how organizational structure impacts organizational performance.
