Enabling Proactivity: what is Agile Governance?

Within the Intelligent Business Agility framework, the Agile Governance enabler represents the capability to guide the organization in a clear and sustainable way, eliminating unnecessary bureaucratic processes to reduce bottlenecks and foster constant responsiveness to market changes.

This model overcomes the limitations of rigid hierarchies and rests on two key factors of organizational adaptability:

• Modern Management: developing a management class capable of giving direction and inspiring people through self-awareness and the application of an extremely effective operating model.
• Antifragile: creating an antifragile and scalable organization that goes beyond traditional agile, through a flexible model actively supported by change agents.

The Agile Governance Activators+

The on-the-ground activation of this enabler occurs through two operational structures called Agile Governance Activators+, designed to decentralize decision-making processes and dynamically connect the members of the company:

1. The Forum+: Spaces of Dynamic and Widespread Decision-Making

Forum+ are structures dedicated to democratizing the decision-making process, ensuring that choices are not made in isolation at the top levels but are collectively built by directly involving the actors concerned. They are not conceived as mere moments of passive alignment on the "status of work progress". Instead, they constitute real opportunities to make timely decisions using the most relevant, fresh, and updated information. Each Forum+ has the responsibility to address specific topics, decide which specific actions to implement on the ground, and activate an adequate communication plan to all the involved structures.

The Harmoniq model is structured around nine main Forum+, each focused on a specific business dimension:

• • Strategy Forum+: manages the discussion on long-term strategic topics, assuming the mandate to guide the different levels of the organization in the practical execution of the strategic choices made.
  • Viability Forum+: evaluates, approves, and prioritizes initiatives, identifying or creating the Value Flow that will take full operational Accountability for them.
  • Value Flow Forum+: ensures continuous internal alignment within each Value Flow, analyzing delivery progress, relative growth aspects, and team performances.
  • Evaluation Forum+: evaluates with scientific rigor the technical and economic feasibility of new opportunities before committing significant resources.
  • PA Forum+ (Process Area): constantly monitors specific effectiveness and (re)evaluates the strategic objectives associated with the services offered.
  • CA Forum+ (Competence Area): ensures the alignment of standards, sharing of practices, experiences, and planning of professional growth activities for the players.
  • Evolutionary Forum+: focuses directly on promoting the evolution of the Organizational Model, Ways of Working (WoW), and everything concerning the processes and operational life of the organization.
  • Ambassador Forum+: coordinates the central efforts of the global Ambassador network.
  • Portfolio Forum+: preserves the strategic alignment of the entire portfolio of initiatives and programs with respect to the organization's objectives, ensuring a sustainable balance between value, risk, and available resources. It governs the entire portfolio lifecycle: ideation, selection, execution, and closure of initiatives; periodically evaluates the overall balance of the portfolio in terms of value, risk, impact, and feasibility; updates investment decisions based on the evolution of the organizational and operating context; approves new initiatives and significant reallocations of budget or resources; monitors overall portfolio performance through metrics and summary dashboards; facilitates discussion between different corporate areas to foster conscious, synergistic, and sustainable choices; and promotes a culture oriented toward value, continuous improvement, and decision-making agility.

2. The Network+: Cross-Functional Horizontal Alliances

Network+ are Horizontal connections, stable or temporary, designed to foster shared and cross-functional development at all levels of the organization. They accompany the entire organizational and operational dynamics, allowing the creation of alliances, more or less permanent, to address specific topics and challenges. A Network+ develops "horizontal" cross-EPA/CA action, connecting the different members of the organization regardless of their structure of origin and the role they hold.

The model provides for three fundamental types of Network+:

• • Player Networks+: create a direct connection between players of the same discipline with the purpose of sharing experiences on the ground, evolving technical guidelines, and suggesting training pathways for domain growth.
  • Delivery Network+: the socio-technically integrated network (composed of Squads+, Tribes+, and individual Players) focused on the actual delivery of a solution or product. Each Delivery Network+ belongs to a specific Value Flow and sees its governance in the Value Delivery FPA.
  • Ambassador Network+: a real distributed activation network that capillarly connects all the different Process Areas of the company with the strategic direction of the Transformation PA.

Focus: the Ambassador Network+ and the Drive for Change

The Ambassador Network+ operates as an activation network, capillarly connecting the different Process Areas with the strategic direction of the Transformation PA. Every Enabling Process Area (EPA) has a dedicated Ambassador who acts as a local sensor. These Ambassadors act as real Change Agents who oversee the development in its entirety, coordinated by the Ambassador Forum+ under the direct governance of Transformation.

The fundamental mandate of the Ambassador Network+ is to enable the organization toward the path that leads it to be a Learning Organization, moving along five core objectives:

1. Maximizing the ROI of experiments/failures: mapping the evidence of local experiments to prevent other PAs from encountering the same type of obstacle, accelerating overall learning (fail fast, learn fast).
2. Propagation of Best Practices: identifying what works in a specific PA, but also in a Value Flow/Squad+/Tribe+, and scaling it globally through the standardization of Ways of Working (WoW).
3. Identification of Frictions: early detection of stoppage points between culture and structure (silos, bureaucratic processes) and bringing them to the Evolutionary Forum+ table for resolution.
4. Validation of MVCs (Minimum Viable Change): testing small organizational changes before implementing them on a large scale, reducing risks and resistance.
5. Feeding the CoNI Framework: gathering data to quantify the cost of missed innovation in individual areas, pushing for targeted investments where the impact is greatest.

Transformation's Direction and the Ambassador Backlog

The activity of the Ambassadors is entirely facilitated and guided by the Transformation PA, which acts as architect and guarantor, ensuring that the Ambassador network has lines of guidelines and frameworks (codifying a common language and tools), coaching and training (continuous methodological support to operate successfully), and governance of the blueprint (supervising the integrity of the corporate architecture in the face of the changes introduced).

All local experimentation and evolution activities are guided by an Ambassador Backlog, populated and updated during the Ambassador Forum+ and in ownership to Transformation. This backlog ensures:

• Strategic Prioritization: interventions are prioritized based on the value generated and the urgency of resolving inefficiencies.
• Synchronization: the backlog ensures that the evolution of ways of working is coherent with the corporate Architectural Blueprint.
• Impact Measurement: every change in the backlog must have associated metrics (e.g., WoW Adoption Rate) to validate its effectiveness on the ground.