LitheSpeed
Supporting Leaders and Accelerating Business Agility

Business leaders are faced with ever evolving challenges, from budget constraints tobalancing the enterprise portfolio. As markets shift, leaders continuously respond, tweaking the company to adapt. When companies and their executive teams are used to doing business a certain way, there is often resistance. Even when executives are onboard or leadingnecessary shifts, middle management may resist, freezing the organization from the middle (Commonly known as the ‘Frozen Middle’). In today’s “adapt-or-die” environment, if change is blocked at any level, the enterprise risks becoming obsolete.Even when change is underway, many leaders find it difficultfor true transformation to take hold, either because they forcea ‘by the book’ framework, or often because they don’t exactly know how to go about managing it. As a result, leaders often need external validation and help. LitheSpeedhelps visionary enterprise leaders initiate and navigate disruptive transformation.

One way LitheSpeed helps organizations is through the setup of the Agile Value Management Office (Agile VMO®). The Agile VMO is one of LitheSpeed’s Business Agility Sparks®, a framework of portfolio and organizational shifts supporting leaders by making it easier to track project flow, value, and outcomes. Implementing these Sparks helps leaders and their organizations pivot from a project to a product model, and focus more on outcomes than on output.

Personal executive growth and support are often overlooked as organizations are undergoing major transformation. To address this, LitheSpeedhas built a learning journey exclusively for executives, the Agile Leadership Academy® (ALA), which helps executives transform their management approach and their organization. Apart from leadership training, LitheSpeed also provides comprehensive training for all levels of the organization, in wide variety of frameworks including Scrum and the Scaled Agile Framework® (SAFe®).

When a client comes to LitheSpeed to transform or rethink their business, the company initially performs an Agile Maturity Assessment. Working closely with the client, results are gathered through interviews, self-assessments, and a deep analysis of the client’s objectives and desired key results. The resulting Maturity Plan combines a pilot-driven rollout with an Agile approach to managing change.

“One thing we particularly focus on is building transformational capabilities within the organizations that we’re working in,” says Roland Cuellar, SVP of Business Agility. Thus, LitheSpeed starts a continuous improvement loop in the organization. This is done to ensure that organizations have the ability to sustain the positive changes long after any coaches and consultants are gone.

What differentiates LitheSpeed from its competitors is their work culture, which is based on self-management and self-discipline. As Amanda Geary, VP of Finance and Operations, says, “All the techniques that we use at our client’s site, we’re also implementing within LitheSpeed.”

We appreciate working with clients who are changing the world by changing the way the work is done

The company’s organizational structure is based on the ‘Teal’ culture, where employees are motivated by the evolutionary purpose of the organization. Employees drive organizational goals along with their own schedules. Employees are encouraged to continuously learn, share ideas and bring new ideas back to the team.

An example of LitheSpeed’s portfolio level support is the company’s partnership with a Fortune 100 financial services company. LitheSpeed helped this largecompanylaunch their Agile journey in 2007. Despite the initial Agile adoption, a few years ago, the company’s digital marketing group had suffered due tolong requirements lead time, i.e., its requirement cycle was too long. This lag caused the organization to lose its ground to competitors. To turn things around, LitheSpeed identified three Business Agility Sparks to implement. For the first Spark, the company put together an End-to-End Value Stream Team to get business, IT, and customer side to collaborate. Then, it designed an Agile VMO to help executive and middle management map portfolio work. The teams could then break larger requirements into smaller chunks and feed them to the End-to-End teams for delivery. The third Spark was Lean Discovery, where LitheSpeedhelped teams discover and better understand end customers needs, andspeed user feedback loops. As a result, the digital marketing group observed a 67 percent improvement in business side velocity and a 15 percent reduction in cost.

In coming months, LitheSpeedwill offer Agile VMO virtual training to provide convenient, on demand support to managers and leaders. LitheSpeed looks forward to helping even more visionary and forward-thinking leaders push the boundaries of modern management. As Sanjiv Augustine, CEO of LitheSpeed says, “We appreciate working with clients who are changing the world by changing the way work is done.”