Flight Levels Systems Architecture (FLSA) In-Person

Wed Jun 29 2022 at 09:00 am to Thu Jun 30 2022 at 05:00 pm

Teach For America | New York

Ariel Partners
Publisher/HostAriel Partners
Flight Levels Systems Architecture (FLSA) In-Person
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Flight Levels Systems Architecture (FLSA) In-Person
About this Event

Meeting Day, Date, Time

Days: Wednesday to Thursday

Dates: 6/29/2022 - 6/30/2022

Time: 9:00 AM - 5:00 PM EST



We are extremely excited to be bringing Klaus Leopold, the co-founder of the Flight Levels Academy and author of “Rethinking Agile” from his native Austria to NYC in order to teach the inaugural Flight Level Two Design (FL2D) training class. Attendees will learn about this revolutionary new Agile framework straight from the founder, and will each receive a signed copy of “Rethinking Agile,” Mr. Leopold’s latest book.

Class Description

This class teaches students about an exciting new Agile framework called Flight Levels. The class presents an overall view of the framework, the problems it solves and where it fits. Students will learn how to connect all areas of the company to a common (agile) transformation. In Flight Level Systems Architecture, we will cover the basic principles and activities that make up this exciting new approach to agility, and how to create the architectural blueprint for the flight levels system of systems. The flight level system architecture is a guide that shows us which flight level 1, 2, and 3 systems we need and how they fit together. The next step is to start building out the individual flight level 1, 2, and 3 systems, “lighting up” pieces of the map and fleshing it out over time.

The course will cover the following elements:

  • Work Systems Topology : Which flight level 1+2+3 boards do you need and how are they connected?
  • Flight Items : Which work moves through the company and by which systems (boards) is it managed?
  • Flight Routes : Where is work created? Who decides what to work on? How does work move through the company? How does the work make it from decision to delivery?
  • Agile Interactions : Which people need to be talking about what for enterprise-wide business agility?
  • Take-Off : How do you bring the change into the organization in a sustainable way?

In the Flight Levels System Architecture class, we learn how to design a system architecture that conceptually shows us which Flight Level 1, 2, and 3 boards are necessary for an organization, and how these working systems interact with each other. Here is one example:


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Students will learn by doing: We will interactively design a series of flight level architectures and discuss how they could be used to address a set of hypothetical business challenges of increasing complexity. Students will learn a set of principles, criteria, and heuristics to apply to create and refine flight level system architectures, and an understanding of the tradeoffs of alternative approaches. They will learn to evaluate designs by asking key questions such as the following:

  • Which groups of stakeholders need to coordinate their activities?
  • Which interactions are needed? With what frequency?
  • What kinds of work items are flowing? What is the appropriate level of granularity?
  • Where does work enter and exit the system? What are the main pathways and the exception pathways?
  • What are the key measuring points we need in order to gauge our effectiveness?
  • How can we ensure that potential problems will be immediately apparent and facilitate handling them?

Through a set of alternating short lectures and hands-on workshops, participants will come away with a solid understanding of how to go about answering these questions. They will have a solid foundation on which to continue with FL2D and FL3D to ultimately build out a comprehensive approach for improving business results.


Flight Levels provide the means to find out how work flows through the entire organization, what coordination is necessary, and how to effectively roll out the change.


This class is part of a four-step learning curriculum to fully master flight levels:


1. Flight Level System Architecture (FLSA): Identify which flight level systems are needed and how they will fit together. Rather than designing the flight levels themselves, we are looking at the overall system of systems.

2. Flight level 2 Design (FL2D): Understand why flight level 2 systems are needed, what problems they solve, and how to design them. Learn how to create concrete systems at flight level two that will help us to better coordinate the work of multiple teams within a given value stream.

3. Flight level 3 Design (FL3D): Understand why flight level 3 systems are needed, what problems they solve, and how to design them. Learn how to create strategy level boards mapping corporate strategy to our portfolio of work using tools like OKRAs—(objectives, key results, and Actions)

4. Flight Levels Change Leadership (FLCL): Learn how to implement the flight levels framework in an organization to improve overall business agility: at what level should we start? how many flight level systems can we build in parallel? how to scale up? you will learn the answers to these questions and more.


The FLSA class provides a broad overall understanding sufficient for those who are participating in an Agile transformation. However, change leaders, coaches, trainers, and middle and senior management are encouraged to continue and complete all four courses to learn important skills that will help them apply flight levels to remove the barriers and unlock true business agility.


Why Take This Class?

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.


How can it do all this? By helping us visualize the way work flows throughout the enterprise using three lenses. The flight level model recognizes that we need three “viewpoints” for managing our work:

  • Flight level three, or the strategy level,
  • Flight level two, or the coordination level, and
  • Flight level one, or the team level.

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.


Why does this help? 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 solves 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.


Flight Levels help you:
  • Understand and manage your flow, between teams
  • Connect the your levels to each other, creating a shared focus
  • Keep the collective focus on delivering your Company Strategy

As a result, you can:
  • See your capacity in real-time. With appropriate detail on each level.
  • Measure the outcomes, not just outputs, and gauge progress towards Strategic Goals.
  • Teams can see how operational work connects to strategy. Leaders see how Strategy connects to Reality.

Comparison to other Agile Frameworks

  • Flight levels is neither vague nor overly prescriptive.
  • Unlike many Agile frameworks, Flight levels can be used by the entire company—it is non-IT specific.
  • Flight Levels happily co-exists with Scrum and/or Kanban, as well as LeSS or Nexus.
  • Flight Levels is relatively simple to learn.
  • Flight Levels do not require specialized tools. Physical whiteboards, digital whiteboards, or Agile lifecycle management tools work well.
  • Flight Levels can be used as an effective and accelerated way to introduce the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe).

Class Information

Class Duration

The class takes place for two days from 9am to 5pm, with a 1-hour lunch break. In order to receive a certificate, each student must attend both days.


Target Audience

This is intermediate-level training aimed at those working in the following roles:

  • Leadership
  • Middle and Senior Managers
  • Transformation Leaders
  • Enterprise Agile Coaches
  • Organizational Designers
  • Agile team-level coaches and trainers

Prerequisites

  • Introduction to Flight Levels (1/2 day in-person or online class)
  • The book Rethinking Agile by Klaus Leopold is highly recommended

Certification


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This workshop is certified by Flight Levels Academy. After completing the workshop, participants receive a “Certificate of Completion” from the Flight Levels Academy.


The knowledge imparted in the Flight Levels Systems Architecture Workshop (FLSA) is a basic requirement if you want to become a certified Flight Levels Coach (FLC).


Flight Levels Framework

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.


Five Activities

1. Visualize the situation: build some visual representation of the work and the items that we are trying to make changes to, so we can understand how they flow and interact with teams and stakeholders.

2. Create focus: This is about being clear on what the most important things to do are, so we can resolve some of the dependencies and scheduling challenges we may have between the teams, departments and functions within an organization

3. Establish agile interactions: Between the layers within an organization and between multiple areas of a team.

4. Measure progress: We want to be able to tell if the things we are making changes to are actually making improvements, but also which parts of what we are doing are already working quite well.

5. Operate and improve: The above four steps are repeated as a continuous improvement cycle, at multiple levels.


Three Levels

Unlike traditional org charts that depict reporting hierarchies, the flight level system maps the flow of work and helps us understand the needs for coordination--where we need daily touch points and feedback loops. A flight level system consists of a flight level three, as well as one or more flight level two boards, connecting to our standard flight level one operational team-level Scrum or Kanban boards:


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Level 1

Operations: Teams and individuals, where the work gets delivered, the product made and customers helped.


Level 3

At the top guiding us we have Strategy: the direction and priority of the company.


Level 2

Connecting them is Level 2 – Coordination: between the Levels, and across the teams.



About the Trainers

Speaker Bio - Dr Klaus Leopold


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Dr Klaus Leopold is a computer scientist and, as a top management consultant, he has been helping companies worldwide to move agile in the market for more than ten years. Klaus developed the Flight Levels model because he repeatedly observed a phenomenon in agile transformations: Teams are “agilized”, but these local optimizations do not lead to an agile business. In his book “Rethinking Agile”, he shows how to avoid this error from the very beginning and what makes for real business agility when aligning an organization with the market’s demands. In his early years in the Agile community, Klaus was intensively involved with Kanban. He wrote two standard works on the subject with “Practical Kanban” and “Kanban Change Leadership”. Today, his focus is on offering a way for organizations to find their individual path to more business agility with the Flight Levels model. He shares his thoughts, experiences and insights on the blog of www.LEANability.com and under @klausleopold on Twitter. His three books are available at Amazon and Apple books:


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Speaker Bio - Craeg Strong


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Craeg Strong is the CTO of Ariel Partners, a small IT consulting company based in Times Square. He teaches public classes in Kanban and Human Centered Design and coaches teams to adopt and mature Agile/Kanban practices in the NYC area. He has 25 years of experience in information technology, starting at Project Athena during his undergraduate studies at MIT. Mr. Strong has successfully instituted Agile and DevOps practices on large and complex commercial and government software projects, helping them to obtain new capabilities and realize significant cost efficiencies. Mr. Strong leverages his experience as a hands-on software architect, trainer and agile coach to help remove the barriers that prevent organizations from adopting new technologies-- such as cloud. Mr. Strong led a successful transformation of a major FBI Criminal justice program from a traditional waterfall lifecycle and manual intensive processes to lighter weight agile processes and full DevOps automation.


Cancellation Policy

Registration fees, less a non-refundable $10 processing charge, are refundable if cancellation is received by noon on the date registration closes. There are no refunds thereafter.


Refund

To request a refund, send email to [email protected] and provide the Order # and Event Start Date


COVID Vaccination Information

Not Required

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Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Teach For America, 25 Broadway, New York, United States

Tickets

USD 2790.00 to USD 3100.00

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