Flight Levels is an exciting new Agile framework that is elegantly simple, yet comprehensive enough to address the entire enterprise. Using the flight levels framework, organizations can reduce their time to market, identify and capitalize on new business opportunities, understand their capacity to take on new work, measure the possible impact of new initiatives, and identify the places where adding new resources will give them the highest leverage.
The Flight levels framework is a way of thinking and a way of understanding the organization that enables us to understand where in the organization we need to do what in order to achieve the results we are looking for. We want to understand how that change is going to map to some sort of substantive improvement and try to find the smallest possible thing to change in order to have the effect we are looking for. We do this by using five activities across three levels.
This is intermediate-level training aimed at those working in the following roles:
1 Visualize situation
2 Create focus
3 Establish agile interactions
4 Measure progress
5 Improve
Source: Flight Levels Academy
By helping us visualize the way workflows throughout the enterprise using three lenses. The flight level model recognizes that we need three “viewpoints” for managing our work:
This does not mean we have exactly three Kanban boards. Instead, it recognizes that the means to visualize and manage work differs in important quantitative and qualitative ways depending upon whether you are managing organizational strategy, coordinating work across a value stream, or working within an operational team.
Because the flight levels framework enables us to apply systems thinking to the overall organization, avoiding local optimization. This helps us avoid a common problem with agile transformations, namely, focusing on improving team results rather than business outcomes. Until we can effectively connect operational efforts with business strategy, we cannot effectively understand how our operational-level efforts help or hinder that strategy. Flight levels solve this problem in an elegantly simple way.
When we work at the strategic level articulating our strategies and evaluating hypotheses, deciding which initiatives to start first or whether we need to pivot– we have fundamentally different concerns than when we are working at the operational team level. Coordinating among teams, reserving capacity, and understanding bottlenecks between teams also require different tools and mindsets. While some Agile frameworks hint at this difference, none provide effective and simple toolkits to address them effectively. By contrast, Flight Levels provide a simple and clear way to connect strategy to execution—facilitating alignment and enabling innovation to occur at every level. Unlike complex and prescriptive frameworks, Flight Levels fit in smoothly with your existing processes like Scrum or Kanban and can be adopted quickly and incrementally.
Participants will come away with a new perspective on scaling Agile that they can apply immediately, no matter which Agile framework(s) their organization is using.
Comparison to other Agile Frameworks
Click Here to Learn more about the Flight Levels Training we offer here at Ariel Partners
This course helps you uncover the big levers for improvement and explores how you can practically apply them to your unique situation. We will focus on coordinating the flow of value across multiple teams in a Department, Tribe, Product, or Service area.
The main impediment to flow is a lack of interaction between your teams, not the agility of individual teams.
Build the missing links between Strategy and Operational Agility!
This workshop will help you turn your strategy into action. Learn how to define effective outcomes and translate outcomes into action in a world of dependencies and specialists.
Business Agility involves the entire organisation. However, most agile implementations focus on only team-level agility. Flight Levels take agility beyond the team beyond the portfolio and into strategy.
Flight Levels Systems Architecture will help you: