Hi, I’m Dr. Federico “Fede” Andino—researcher, Buddhist teacher (Lama Fede), and mindfulness practitioner with over 20 years of experience. I’ve spent my career studying meditation (BA, MSc, PhD, and postdoc work on Tibetan practices), teaching it globally—at schools, prisons, hospitals, and corporations like IBM, where I’m a researcher on Mindfulness—and building communities around it. I’ve written books, led studies, and even chaired the Tibetan Religion class at Universidad del Salvador for 15 years.

Now, I’m pouring all that into a new 4-week, science-based mindfulness course to help you sharpen focus, reduce stress, and thrive through practical techniques and community support.

Here’s the deal: I’m opening 10 free spots for my first group, starting soon. In return, I’d love for you to try it out and share a short, honest report on what worked, what didn’t, and how I can make it even better. That’s it—no strings attached. My goal? To refine this into something truly impactful, with your input.

If you’re curious about mindfulness, want to boost your well-being, or just love a good experiment, just sign up here: https://federico-andino-s-school.teachable.com/p/scientific-mindfulness-meditation-for-the-masses

First 10 get in, free. Let’s build something great together!

#Mindfulness #Wellbeing #Community #PersonalGrowth #ScienceBased

Since I’ve been pumping out articles, one of the most common questions that I’ve been getting is: hey, what exactly is what a Digital Transformation consultant does?

This probably is too complex a question for me to answer, but I’m going to take a stab at it, anyway.

The thing is, I’ve been a consultant most of my professional adult life.

I don’t mean to brag about it. It just means that I’m old, to be honest. But in the 27 years (to date) that I’ve been working in corporations, I’ve alternated being a lead of different things such as Architecture , Agile Transformations, Industrial Transformation, etc. i.e. gaining experience in an Area and then doing Consultancy on it.

So, from all the job roles that I’ve done, “Consultant” is the more constant label.

I’m still learning; I’ve had some incredible mentors (which are key to learn something on the job) and I’m lucky to be working right now with some of the best consultants that I know.

So, bearing in mind all these caveats, this is:

FECHO’S FIELD GUIDE TO DIGITAL CONSULTANCY

Table of Contents:

1. Introduction
2. Understanding Digital Transformations
3. Management Consultancy: A Key Player in the Process
4. Enterprise Agility: Accelerating the Transformation
5. The Role of the Consultant in Digital Transformations
6. Key Responsibilities and Deliverables
7. Essential Skills for Success
8. Conclusion
9. Introduction

As the world continues to embrace digitalization, organizations need to adapt their business models to remain competitive and innovative. This adaptation requires a comprehensive understanding of digital transformations, incorporating both management consultancy and enterprise agility. Fecho’s Field Guide aims to provide a detailed overview of the work involved in digital transformations consultancy with a focus on management consultancy and enterprise agility.

2. Understanding Digital Transformations

Digital transformations involve the integration of digital technologies into all aspects of a business, changing the way it operates and delivers value to its customers. It requires organizations to rethink their entire business model and processes, enabling them to become more agile, innovative, and customer-centric.

Key components of a digital transformation include:

• Business Model Innovation
• Customer Experience Enhancement
• Operational Efficiency Improvement
• Workforce Empowerment
• Digitization of Products and Services
• Data-Driven Decision-Making

3. Management Consultancy: A Key Player in the Process

Management consultants play a crucial role in driving digital transformations by providing expert guidance and support throughout the process. They help organizations to:

• Assess their current digital maturity and identify gaps
• Develop a comprehensive digital transformation strategy
• Implement the transformation plan, including change management initiatives
• Monitor and measure the impact of the transformation efforts
• Continuously refine the transformation strategy to ensure long-term success

4. Enterprise Agility: Accelerating the Transformation

Enterprise Agility is the ability of an organization to adapt quickly to changes in the market and maintain a competitive advantage. It is a crucial component of successful digital transformations, as it enables organizations to respond effectively to evolving customer needs, emerging technologies, and new business models. Enterprise agility involves:

• Adopting Agile methodologies and practices
• Implementing Lean principles to streamline operations
• Developing a culture of continuous improvement and learning
• Fostering cross-functional collaboration and communication
• Leveraging data and analytics for informed decision-making

5. The Role of the Consultant in Digital Transformations

As a consultant in digital transformations, your work (and mine) entails providing expert guidance and support to clients throughout their digital journey. This involves:

• Analyzing the client’s current state and digital maturity
• Identifying opportunities for improvement and growth
• Developing a tailored digital transformation strategy
• Facilitating the implementation of the transformation plan
• Ensuring the alignment of the organization’s strategy, culture, and processes
• Monitoring and measuring the impact of the transformation efforts
• Providing ongoing support and guidance to ensure long-term success

6. Key Responsibilities and Deliverables

As a digital transformation consultant, your key responsibilities and deliverables include:

• Conducting digital maturity assessments
• Developing comprehensive digital transformation roadmaps
• Assisting with implementing digital technologies and solutions
• Facilitating change management initiatives
• Providing training and coaching on Agile methodologies and Lean principles
• Ensuring alignment between business strategy, technology, and operations
• Measuring and reporting on the impact of digital transformation efforts
• Identifying and mitigating risks associated with the transformation process

7. Essential Skills for Success

To be successful in your role as a digital transformation consultant, you need to possess a combination of technical and interpersonal skills, including:

• Strong analytical and problem-solving abilities
• Deep understanding of digital technologies and trends
• Familiarity with Agile methodologies and Lean principles
• Excellent project management and organizational skills
• Effective communication and presentation abilities
• Strong interpersonal and relationship-building skills
• Ability to adapt to and manage change effectively
• Sound understanding of various industries and business models
• Experience in implementing and managing digital initiatives

8. Conclusion

In conclusion, as a consultant in digital transformations with a focus on management consultancy and enterprise agility, your work entails guiding organizations through their digital journey by providing expert insights, developing tailored strategies, and facilitating the implementation of digital initiatives. You play a crucial role in helping businesses adapt to the rapidly changing digital landscape, ensuring they maintain a competitive edge while embracing innovation and customer-centricity.

By leveraging your skills and expertise in digital technologies, Agile methodologies, and Lean principles, you support organizations in achieving their digital transformation goals, ensuring they remain relevant and successful in today’s increasingly digital world.

I hope this makes sense to you!

Introduction

So, we’ve discussed SAFe enough, yes? Probably more than what you wanted, to be honest. I love SAFe, I do, but sometimes it seems it is the only Enterprise Agility framework that exists. But that’s not the case. There’s LeSS, for example.

LeSS, or Large Scale Scrum, is an agile framework specifically designed to streamline the process of scaling Scrum across multiple teams working on a single product. As organizations grow and undertake more complex projects, it becomes increasingly important to ensure that teams collaborate effectively and deliver high-quality products within budget and time constraints. LeSS provides the necessary tools and techniques to achieve these goals by emphasizing lean thinking, systems thinking, and empiricism.

Where does it comes from?

LeSS was created by Craig Larman and Bas Vodde, two experienced Scrum practitioners who sought to address the challenges of scaling Scrum without compromising its core principles. Drawing on their extensive experience coaching organizations in agile practices, Larman and Vodde developed the LeSS framework as a response to the growing need for a scalable Scrum solution that maintains the simplicity and agility of the original methodology. Their main philosophy could be seen as Keep it Simple as much as Possible, but no more. Compare and Contrast to SAFe Wall of Acronyms.

Key Principles of LeSS

Leverage Scrum’s Simplicity

LeSS retains the simplicity of Scrum by focusing on the essential elements that make Scrum an effective framework for product development. It avoids adding unnecessary complexity or bureaucracy, emphasizing that the same Scrum principles and practices apply to teams of all sizes.

Systems Thinking

LeSS emphasizes the importance of systems thinking in understanding how teams, products, and organizations interact. By considering the entire system, rather than individual components or teams in isolation, LeSS helps organizations identify areas for improvement and potential bottlenecks, ensuring smoother collaboration and more effective decision-making.

Empirical Process Control

Empiricism, or learning through experience, is at the core of LeSS. The framework encourages organizations to experiment, inspect, and adapt their processes, enabling them to continuously improve and respond to change effectively. LeSS also emphasizes the importance of transparency, inspection, and adaptation as the three pillars that support empirical process control.

Lean Thinking

LeSS incorporates the principles of lean thinking, which focus on maximizing customer value while minimizing waste. By identifying and eliminating non-value-adding activities, organizations using LeSS can increase their efficiency, reduce costs, and deliver better-quality products faster. Still, it incorporates principles rather than full-on practices like SAFe.

Key Practices of LeSS

One Product, Multiple Teams

LeSS emphasizes that all teams working on a product should be part of a single, unified effort. This approach ensures that teams share a common goal and that their work is coordinated and integrated, reducing the risk of duplicated efforts or misaligned priorities.

Feature Teams

LeSS promotes the use of feature teams, which are cross-functional teams capable of delivering end-to-end product features. This structure encourages collaboration, reduces handoffs, and allows teams to work more autonomously, increasing their ability to adapt to changing requirements.

Coordinated Sprint Planning

In LeSS, multiple teams participate in coordinated sprint planning, aligning their efforts and synchronizing their work. This practice ensures that teams are working towards a common goal and that dependencies are identified and managed effectively.

Shared Product Backlog

A single, shared product backlog is used across all teams working on a product in LeSS. This approach simplifies backlog management, ensures that all teams have a clear understanding of the product’s priorities, and promotes collaboration and coordination.

Ok, Fede, that’s all well and good. But how does it compares with SAFe?

And when should you choose one over the other?

LeSS and SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework) are both popular frameworks designed to help organizations scale their agile practices across multiple teams. While they share some similarities, such as their emphasis on lean and agile principles, they also differ in several key aspects. The following comparison will help illuminate the differences and similarities between these two approaches.

Philosophy and Complexity

LeSS is grounded in the simplicity of Scrum and focuses on retaining its straightforwardness while scaling. It emphasizes minimalism and aims to avoid adding unnecessary complexity, bureaucracy, or layers of management. LeSS strives to maintain the agility and adaptability of Scrum, even as the organization grows.

SAFe, on the other hand, is a more prescriptive and comprehensive framework. It provides a detailed blueprint for scaling agile practices and offers a wide range of roles, artifacts, and processes. While SAFe also seeks to maintain agility, its structure and complexity make it more suitable for larger enterprises with multiple layers of management and a higher degree of organizational complexity.

Implementation

LeSS is easier to implement in organizations that are already using Scrum or are familiar with agile principles. Its lightweight nature and focus on the core concepts of Scrum make it a suitable option for those who want to scale their existing agile practices without introducing a significant amount of new processes or roles.

In contrast, SAFe requires more substantial organizational changes and a higher level of commitment from the entire organization. Implementing SAFe often necessitates restructuring teams, roles, and processes to align with the framework’s structure and principles. This may involve a steeper learning curve, but it can provide more guidance and support for organizations seeking a comprehensive approach to scaling agile practices.

Hierarchy and Decentralization

LeSS promotes decentralization, self-organization, and autonomy within teams. It aims to reduce dependencies and handoffs between teams, encouraging cross-functional feature teams that can work independently to deliver end-to-end product features.

SAFe, while still encouraging autonomy and self-organization, incorporates a more hierarchical structure, with specific roles and responsibilities defined for different levels of the organization. This structure is designed to coordinate efforts across teams, programs, and portfolios, but it may also result in a more top-down approach to decision-making and planning compared to LeSS.

Continuous Improvement

Both LeSS and SAFe emphasize the importance of continuous improvement and learning through regular inspection and adaptation. However, LeSS places a stronger focus on empirical process control and systems thinking, encouraging organizations to experiment, learn, and adapt their processes based on real-world experience.

SAFe also values continuous improvement but places more emphasis on its structured and prescriptive framework for implementing agile practices. This structure can provide more guidance for organizations, but it may also limit experimentation and innovation to some extent.

So you go for LeSS when you have LeSS of an Enterprise structure and more of an Agile Mindset in place. Fintechs, Startups, etc. are great LeSS candidates. But for hierarchical institutions like Banks or Utilities companies, SAFe is often a safer bet. #sorrynotsorry

Conclusion

LeSS provides a powerful and effective solution for organizations looking to scale their Scrum practices while maintaining the agility, simplicity, and effectiveness of the original framework. By focusing on lean thinking, systems thinking, and empiricism, LeSS helps organizations to overcome the challenges of scaling, enabling them to deliver high-quality products more efficiently and effectively.

Last week’s article on Two-speed IT brought a lot of interest. But also one repeated question. Ok, you have an hybrid model between Agile and Core ways of working. How do you keep both in sync?

Well, by having a sync-layer and a new role: the Communication Manager.

In Two-Speed IT, a communication manager is a role responsible for developing and implementing communication plans to ensure effective communication between the core IT team and the agile IT team. The communication manager works to establish communication channels and protocols and ensures that all team members are aware of the communication plan and understand their roles and responsibilities. He or she is the main role of the Sync layer.

The communication manager plays a critical role in ensuring that communication is clear and effective between the core and agile IT teams. They are responsible for establishing communication channels, such as email, instant messaging, or video conferencing, and ensuring that all team members are aware of these channels and how to use them. The communication manager also establishes protocols for communication, such as frequency and format, and ensures that all team members understand these protocols and follow them.

CMs are also responsible for monitoring communication channels to ensure that they are working effectively and that team members are communicating with each other in a timely and efficient manner. They also provide feedback to team members to ensure that communication is effective and efficient, and to identify areas for improvement.

The communication manager is typically a highly skilled professional with experience in communication, project management, and IT. They have excellent communication skills, both written and verbal, and are able to communicate effectively with a variety of stakeholders, including business leaders, IT professionals, and end-users.

Overall, the communication manager plays a critical role in ensuring that communication is clear and effective between the core and agile IT teams in Two-Speed IT. By establishing clear communication channels and protocols, and monitoring communication channels to ensure that they are working effectively, the communication manager helps to ensure that the benefits of the Two-Speed IT approach are realized.

The CM populates a layer with a mixture of Agile roles (Scrum Master, PO, etc.) and traditional roles (PM, PMO, etc.) which is used for synchronicity. By enabling a series of intersecting communications between GANTTs, Epics and holding Quarterly Planning meetings, the CMs in an organization keep the work on path.

But which are the other roles of Two-speed it?

The Agile IT Team: The agile IT team is responsible for developing and implementing new systems and technologies that are more flexible and adaptable to change. To achieve this, they need to work collaboratively with business units and stakeholders to understand their needs and requirements. The agile IT team is responsible for communicating the status of their projects, sharing updates on their progress, and collaborating with the core IT team to ensure that the new systems are integrated with the existing core systems. The main Agile roles are Scrum Master, Product Owner, Team Member and Kanban Coach.

The Core IT Team: The core IT team is responsible for maintaining the stability and reliability of the organization’s foundational IT systems. They need to communicate with business units and end-users to understand their needs and requirements, and provide support to resolve any issues or problems that arise. The core IT team is responsible for communicating the status of their projects, sharing updates on their progress, and collaborating with the agile IT team to ensure that the new systems are integrated with the existing core systems. The main roles are Business Analyst, Programmer, Tester, Project Manager.

Together with the CMs, and roles that vary depending on which flavor of methodology you are using (i.e. Agile Coaches, PMOs, etc.) but which can be slotted into one of the three layers:

1. Agile IT
2. Core IT
3. Sync layer

I hope this helps to clarify this aspect of Two-speed IT!