Creating Flow at Waters Corporation
The Situation
Waters Corporation (NYSE:WAT), a global leader in analytical instruments & software with annual revenues of $2.5B, has pioneered chromatography, mass spectrometry, and thermal analysis innovations serving the life, materials, food, health sciences for over 60 years. Employing over 7,800 worldwide, operating directly in over 35 countries, it has 14 manufacturing facilities and products available in over 100 countries.
This story presents the surprising challenges, successes, and failures we experienced in introducing the patterns of Better Value Sooner Safer Happier, experimentation and the Scientific Method into a scientific organization, where determinism and standardisation held fast to project delivery.
Waters had been on an Agile Transformation (capital A, capital T), at the usual great expense, nearly a decade earlier than the starting point. The expected improvements had not materialised, and many influential people had become sceptical of the Agile promise.
From top down the view was of wanton indiscipline and from bottom up the view was of time-and-scope boxed bureaucracy. A culture of fear, lack of psychological safety and mistrust kept things in a perennial state of learned helplessness and broken promises.
The Task
The original request had been to assist various cross functional and disparate functional teams to tackle the issue of under delivery, unpredictability and increasing cost and time risks for the programme to replace its flagship Liquid Chromatography and Mass Spectrometry product.
As early successes were evidenced, this evolved into a larger scale reinvigoration of agility practices that had failed to embed during earlier, vastly more expensive transformation attempts.
The Action / Approach
As can be seen in this accompanying video we chose the approach of starting small and learning fast. We did not attempt to change to many people, too soon.
We respected the Everitt Rogers Diffusion of Innovations model and sought out Innovators and Early Adopters within the organisation.
Marrying aspect of “Better Value Sooner Safer Happier” and “Team Topologies” we began organising for outcomes starting with those people in the organisation who were natural change champions and practitioners.
We increased predictability through the use of Lean Agile practices to encourage increased flow of value (kanban, visualising work and policies, limiting amount of work started, flow and predictability metrics).
We also introduced better prioritisation and sequencing practices (Cost of Delay, Economic Prioritisation)
We created nascent Value Streams through the use of a “Team of Teams” approach with voluntary membership. The membership grew through the use of behavioural economics and behavioural science techniques to make the invitation compelling rather than joining being an imposition handed down from on high.
The Result
We not only put the delivery back on critical path, but also, through the adoption of new product management techniques we also obtained a first customer order with only 75% of the expected “must have” specifications delivered in 2021.
In 2022 Waters Connect, the Unifi replacement, having only been released less than 12 months won the independent BioTech Breakthrough Award
The adoption of the software and business agility practices ensured that the solution delivery was able to be so responsive to sales and marketing requests that the constraints had now shifted to the customer facing functions. This provided the fantastic opportunity for software teams to work with not only marketing but Waters customers and clients more closely.
Focus In On: Responsible for Digital Business Transformation
New Areas of Value:
Increased credibility, confidence and influence across the business
Creating a culture of involvement, empowerment and connection to the business
Improved business agility and ability to rapidly respond to change and opportunity
Effective delivery against financial targets
Direct positive impact on internal and external customer satisfaction
Driving a culture of innovation for easier and faster adoption of future digital trends
Successful, timely delivery of evidence-based digital transformational outcomes; beyond digitisation
More satisfied and engaged employees with increased retention and productivity
More consistent and sustainable profitability and business growth
Digital transformation that drives, moves and resets the organisation’s vision
Enabling collaboration beyond the boundaries of an enterprise
Improvements around:
Lack of agreement of transformation governance and stakeholder understanding leading to a fragmented approach
Lack of transformation, change and agility mindset in leadership
Unclear and siloed business strategy leading to misaligned goals across the organisation that conflict with transformation
Leaders mandating a change management and implementation approach that’s not appropriate to the organisation
Lack of availability of the right people at the right time across both business and technology areas
Lack of clarity around existing operating model, internal business ecosystem or cross-functional teams
Conflict between perception and reality of digital skills, tools, methods and talent required and available
Budget availability affected by external change drivers and uncertain resource estimates
Cynicism, lack of buy-in and resistance to change
The IT function is not aligned to the digital business strategy and vision
Lack of exec sponsorship and ownership
