[Music] welcome back to the Enterprise agility podcast I'm your host John Lim and today we'll be talking with Andy Jordan and Fred Champlain about what's next for hybrid work it's never easy to say what the future will hold but of course that's exactly what I've asked our team to do here today let's listen in now in the last podcast which I'm sure you've just listened to um Fred suggested that the way that people need to work today is not the way that people need to work tomorrow the world of work is continuously evolving and in order to be successful there has to be that ability to adapt so we're going to talk today about how hybrid fits into that and what it might look like and and we've deliberately not talked prior to this recording so that we could sort of throw some ideas around and and keep it fresh so here's the first thing I'm going to challenge you onred I think that the future of hybrid is a complete removal of standardization we're going to see that organizations are going to create an environment where there are guidelines or safety rails or whatever you want to call it in place around the way to work in an agile manner potentially the way to work in in a plan driven manner where that's still appropriate and then between those two extremes and within those guidelines guard rails whatever project managers and their teams product managers are going to have the freedom to work however they want creating their own version of hybrid for every single project every single unique Endeavor every digital product every value stream every epic whatever it might be that they're doing they'll have that freedom to work the way that works for them to deliver the best possible solution driving the best possible client and Enterprise Value so there's my first thought tell me where I'm wrong I Andy I think there's a great hypothesis and and and so just a few thoughts around that um I agree uh I I think um you know as we said earlier um there's the flexibility of finding the right fit but I think also as this uh as we see work evolve we're seeing a lot of Trends and one of them is um for a lot of uh organizations is really empowering uh teams so you have some Federation or decentralization of the work but to do that effectively you have to all have shared um ideas of of a mindset ways of working but what you really need is the scaling factors that we think about so you mentioned guard rails as policies um you need okrs you need goals common goals um and you need a mechanism to uh for everybody to use uh and convey and measure and track those goals um you need to find and manage your risk so you think about dependencies in particular is is a sometimes very difficult risk between teams uh but teams that have the tools and the capabilities in a real-time fashion to look at this and to think about the funding um and make sure they have continuous planning and funding so they can man manage their demand um it allows them to be empowered it allows them to then be more Federated and adaptive so it's underlying part of the business agility and again this is why I believe companies are are finding what fits for them and uh you from plan driven to more of an iterative agile approach and finding whatever that that combination is um once you have the overarching um tooling if you will for okrs uh for dependency management visibility you can look at your architecture um and you've got the right level of tools tooling whether it's you know Enterprise agile planning or maybe collaborative Work Management uh might be the right fit so these teams can find a better fit for them and organizations product teams program teams uh they can find the right fit for the delivery I think that's what we're providing that's where we're headed that's what the future looks like absolutely I agree I mean one of the push backs I always get when I sort of suggest that people are going to or organization is going to move away from standardization it's like well how do we measure performance we have to be able to measure velocity and compare performance across teams or we have to be able to look at stoplight models to understand who's red and who's green and well those things don't tell you anything worthwhile the idea of okr allows you to actually measure what matters are we contributing value are we aligning that value with the priorities and needs of the organization and that's the kind of thing that the tooling and the processes needs to be able to support if we're going to ask our teams to deliver work that enables business outcomes to be achieved then we need to be able to help them with tools that keep that alignment and with reporting and Analysis that allows us to identify when adjustments are necessary and I think that's one of the the great advantages that that service now offers is that it doesn't just do that it does that with multiple different opportunities and options for working so that every team is still working the way they want but that leadership has got that visibility they need into what's happening and whether or not the performance the contributions to those okrs is actually happening that's right Andy and and being able to manage the funding the capacity location Resource Management in a holistic way really enables uh the teams to to uh have the the configuration the topology or the team topology that's needed for the situation so I I think it's about providing that flexibility providing the richness of the environment providing uh the workflow the policies that it takes uh to bring this together all together keeping in mind uh architecture for most of our customers are are you know building digital products cyber physical products um and we're increasingly seeing you know a pivot into product um perspectives right and in terms of a framework product framework uh product and services um and and when we think about that that's really where we need the teams to be enabled to make those decisions um to be competitive and and really have the organizational capability to Pivot and respond to hypotheses and respond as an organization that's really what the competitiveness is the the business agility that it takes to be competitive and remain viable in the market absolutely and that's going to become ever more important the World shows no prospects of slowing down and and AI is just accelerating things all over again and I think for people listening to this one of the advantages that they have with service now is service now is already thinking about this it's already developing this it's providing clients with functionality that they're going to need not just with what they need right now you're already looking for the future and enabling the future as opposed to running to try and catch up with what people want to do today and I think that's that's a key differentiator absolutely and you mentioned Ai and gen AI uh as we think from a platform perspective as we start to have really large uh training capability across the platform to uh go beyond what we think of today as as SPM and PPM and Enterprise agile planning and cwm but really to delve into product operations and operations and and start finding correlations of architecture and you know fit of architecture as well and manage our technical debt and let AI to start find and surface those opportunities as we think about value stream optimization and flow uh flow at multiple levels um through our system um whether it's a development value stream or a business or operational value stream um we have tremendous potential in this area as we move forward um certainly we'll also work to enable and make uh the work of products more efficient um I think that's where you'll see us uh initially uh apply some geni but the future when we look over that Horizon is is pretty powerful absolutely and I can't do better than that the future is pretty powerful um I don't think we any of us know exactly what it's going to be like but it's going to be pretty powerful ladies and gentlemen so that seems like a great place to end this podcast join us again real soon and we'll talk about something else that is equally exciting and just as [Music] powerful