How did Solution Wolfe start?

After reflecting on the last 6 months, I wanted to share why I started Solution Wolfe and how I intend to bring you value.

Organizations want to make their data visible so they have enough information at the right time to make persist or pivot decisions at the highest level of the business but are having trouble identifying exactly what that data is and how to use it in a way that does cause pain (to the people and/or efficiencies).

Some folks are tackling this problem from an agile transformation solution perspective… organize around value and learn to be a healthy company that inspects, adapts and iterates around that value. Some folks are tackling this from a tooling perspective… turn on the Jira and we’ll see that we are getting work done faster and where we are not moving fast enough. Both of these approaches are still leaving the humans on the ground not understanding the expectations of their jobs and how they can make the value their teams are creating visible in the tools so they can have meaningful conversations at the right time, with the right data. Almost never do I see an organization agree on what value actually is.  How can we expect anyone to be eager for change when the change makers aren't careful to make them feel safe during the change?

Safety looks like setting up clear, achievable expectations for the way your organization collaborates around producing value.  We need more consultants with empathy for the people who live in the problems they are paid to solve.

For change to occur, as a leader of your organization, you need to own the problem.

Feel free to hire another consulting firm for a problem you can and should lead your teams to solve. Instead of hiring a consulting firm to solve your organizational problems for you, learn the tools necessary to lead the change your teams are desperately waiting for. I'm all for hiring a partner or hiring to enable and educate your organization but if you are an absent leader in the effort, the change will not stick.  The focus of anyone who is going to help you should be to give you tools so you are able to lead this change on your own.

Why is it so hard to give organizations the tools they need to lead the change on their own?

I dove deep on this problem (Wardley Mapping, impact mapping, journey mapping, all the analysis brain dumps), talked to many of you who are reading this right now and my biggest take away is the lack of knowledge and understanding at the middle layer of the organization around both the transformation around value approach and the tooling to make it visible approach. I hypothesize that the market needs a catalyst in the experts who understand these concepts. We need more people who have a human centric empathy driven mindset in organizations helping to solve this problem.

It’s looking like the next shiny things to chase are Lean Portfolio Management (LPM) and Objectives and Key Results (OKRs)… for most of these large companies, if they can’t even get the middle layer of the organization operating in a healthy way (all ways you look at health) then there are slim chances LPM & OKRs are going to work either. In my experience, while each organization has very similar problems, each organization is also unique when it comes to these solutions as most large companies (especially after M&A) have this bootstrapped together and lack visibility into all the parts that support their operations let alone the work that operation is producing to provide value to the organization. A one size fits all approach is NOT going to work and the trauma of the past makes it hard to see that a solution is possible.

People need to see and feel what it’s like when this problem is solved uniquely from their perspective. At this point, many have been through so many transformations and tool changes that they don’t believe any next best thing is going to work and are burnt out on whatever the consultant firm in front of them is offering. They know they have a problem and don’t believe there is really a solution out there as much as they really do wish there was. I wanted to find a way to help as many people as possible, feel safe solving these problems and meet them where they are to do so.

In order to help people get past the fears of the past, we must build trust and show them that a real solution does exist and it can exist for where they are right now in their organizations with the tools they currently have. Solution Wolfe is currently experimenting with building courses for the Atlassian products you use every day around the meaningful collaborations that happen in an organization large enough to have a middle layer and plan at that level on a routine cadence (typically quarterly).

This solution aims to builds trust to help understand your options so you can see a path to where you want to be.  Once you know where you want to be, this also provide a solution approach for anyone who will be implementing once the you have decided the solution is fit for your purpose around each of the meaningful collaborations that make the magic sauce in your organization. This will help shorten the long back and forth sales cycle and is a win-win Atlassian Tooling and Agile at Scale partners, and all of their customers (you!!)! So we built the Planning Preparation course as the fundamental step every organization should adopt as a starting point to making data visible to promote the creation of value in a healthy way.

The large blue box represents a meaningful collaboration (in this case Planning Preparation) and will be the first course available through this experiment. Each pink rectangle in the box represents the job to be done you will learn that supports the meaningful collaboration.

What happened to a role based approach?

Solution Wolfe is taking a team collaboration approach vs. a role based approach because the reality of many organizations is that they do not have the skills necessary to depend on the other roles that may bring the additional value to the collaboration and be essential to the outcomes you hope to get out of the collaboration. Therefore, everyone on the team of teams (that middle layer of your org) must have foundational awareness of the jobs to be done for the collaboration to be successful and chip in wherever possible to make that happen. The course will provide the awareness around the levels of growth through each job to be done so everyone can collectively get behind the expectations for the collaboration and work together to ensure its success.  This will also show where you may need to bring in a coach for help (and a path for the coach to know how far you want to go).

The end goal is for the humans who are going to be working in these systems, to experience the solution from a maturity perspective through growth levels so the possibilities can be understood. The people using these tools seek better collaboration in the tools they are using right now and this course will help give them line of sight into what the future could hold if they made some changes to make it possible (ways of working over tools). Each job to be done that we teach will follow the following pattern when possible (some jobs will need a higher level of maturity for it to make sense to configure in any tool):

• Level 1 - Confluence + Atlas (Free)

  • "We kinda know agile but are just getting started"

• Level 2- Confluence + Atlas (Free/Standard) + Jira Standard

  • "We are planning on cadence and have at least 1-3 planning events (or equivalent) behind us and ready to establish meaningful governance"

• Level 3 - Confluence + Atlas (Standard) + Jira Premium + Product Discovery

  • "We are ready to start optimizing for value at scale and making that value visible in the organization"

• Level 4 - Confluence + Atlas (Premium) + Jira Premium + Product Discovery + Jira Align

  • "We need to understand how our execution decisions are affecting the outcomes we are driving in our organization"