Today, agility is essential for the success and sustainable growth of companies. The Flight Levels approach provides a framework that extends agility beyond individual teams to the entire organizational structure and enables true business agility. Flight Levels Day 2024 provided a platform to gain insights into the practical implementation of Flight Levels and showed how companies use them to achieve their strategic goals faster. Below I share my personal insights and highlights of the day.
Insights from Flight Levels Day 2024
Focus on speed & value
There is a clear shift towards greater speed and the delivery of tangible value for customers. Tangible business results are an important factor in implementing agility in the company, where discussions about the right agile method or framework can be a hindrance. Flight levels are particularly helpful at this point, as they are method-agnostic and thus help to generate value more quickly. At this point, some presentations also emphasized once again how important it is to ensure focus at all levels, e.g. through work in progress (WIP) limits. By concentrating on value-adding tasks, throughput times are shortened so that value can be generated for the customer more quickly.
Strategy for all levels
The strategy must not be limited to the upper levels (Flight Level 3). It must be cascaded throughout the organization and clearly communicated to ensure that every employee in the organization understands the overall strategy and aligns operational work accordingly. It was also emphasized in some presentations that strategies can exist at many levels, e.g. each team or area in the organization can have its own strategy. What is important is that all strategies are aligned with the overall strategy of the organization.
Transparency and communication
Effective communication and transparency at all levels are essential in order to involve all stakeholders within the organization in the implementation of an agile transformation from the very beginning. This includes not only the teams at the operational level, but also key stakeholders and customers, as several speakers emphasized. This includes defining clear goals, promoting strong teams and adapting the communication style. An important message at this point was that we need to unlearn old habits in order to learn new habits for the transformation to succeed (quote: “Learning new stuff boils down to unlearning old stuff”).
Highlights of the day
Thomas Krause’s presentation on building Flight Level 3 dashboards with Confluence Whiteboards and Jira was a practical and inspiring insight into the visualization possibilities.
Equally fascinating was the concept of the “magnetic effect” by Russel Hill, which shows how a well-defined Flight Levels system can inspire other departments to adopt similar practices.
Conclusion
Flight Levels Day 2024 was a great platform that not only highlighted the importance of agility as a collection of tools and frameworks, but also emphasized the cultural shift towards more collaboration, transparency and value creation focus. I see great potential in the insights and methods presented to effectively drive agile transformation in organizations and look forward to integrating them into my work.
