Resilient & Battle Ready: Answering Your Questions
WHAT ARE THE QUICK WINS WITHIN A DEFENCE ORGANISATION MOVING TO AGILITY
In a defence organisation beginning the journey toward agility, quick wins are essential for building momentum, gaining leadership support, and demonstrating value without disrupting critical operations.
These wins should be low-risk, high-impact, and visible. Here are key opportunities:
1. Improve Visibility & Transparency
Introduce visual management (Kanban boards, dashboards, flight levels).
Make work visible across teams, departments, and leadership layers.
Highlight WIP (Work in Progress) limits to expose overload and bottlenecks.
Quick win: Use physical or digital boards to show the flow of work and blockers across one value stream or delivery team.
2. Establish Feedback Loops
Regular retrospectives (start monthly if weekly feels too fast).
Short, focused reviews of deliverables with stakeholders.
Use customer proxy roles (internal SMEs) for faster feedback where external users aren’t accessible.
Quick win: Run your first retrospective with a team—capture pain points and act on 1–2 immediately.
3. Clarify Roles & Improve Collaboration
Introduce cross-functional working, even if only partial (e.g., engineering + test + rapid prototype triads).
Define clear Product Owner or delivery lead roles for decision accountability.
Improve collaboration across functions through regular syncs or stand-ups.
Quick win: Engage key stakeholders regularly and transparently on progress.
4. Start Measuring What Matters
Shift focus to outcomes over activity (e.g., cycle time, flow efficiency, throughput).
Begin collecting lead time and throughput data for one team or workstream.
Quick win: Introduce a lightweight delivery metric dashboard for one programme or team.
5. Embed Lightweight Coaching & Enablement
Assign an Agile Coach or Change Agent to support a pilot team.
Offer bite-sized training or lunch-and-learns on agile principles or roles.
Promote peer-to-peer learning (e.g., communities of practice).
Quick win: Be clear about the outcomes and support the development of key teams.
6. Pilot a Lean Governance Model
Replace some status meetings with demo-based reviews or cadence-based updates.
Empower teams with decision-making rights within guardrails.
Embed Lean Portfolio Management (LPM) and management by exception in a test programme.
Quick win: Simplify one programme’s governance by using LPM to replace an update meeting.
7. Use Value Stream MappinG
Map an end-to-end flow (procurement, software dev, system integration, etc.).
Identify delays, rework, and handoffs.
Start removing non-value-adding steps.
Quick win: Run a workshop with 1–2 teams and leadership to map one key process that is a known blocker.
8. A Few Defence-Specific Considerations:
Security & compliance: Work within constraints, but challenge unnecessary over-governance.
Waterfall dependencies: Many external teams will need to work in a hybrid mode—help them do it consciously & to make changes to how they engage
Supplier relationships: Engage suppliers early in agile pilots to avoid misaligned expectations.
Cultural conservatism: Focus on language and framing (e.g., “incremental delivery” instead of “agile sprint”).
Agility is part of the future of defence delivery
In an world of accelerating threats, rapid technological advancement, and geopolitical unpredictability, traditional linear delivery models can no longer keep pace.
Agility enables defence organisations to respond faster, adapt intelligently, and deliver value incrementally in complex, uncertain environments.
By embracing agile principles, iterative development, empowered teams, and continuous feedback, defence can unlock greater innovation, resilience, and mission-readiness across domains.
Agility is a strategic capability for future military and industrial advantage.