TOPP Agility Model

This is a reference resource intended to be linked to in order to provide just a little more insight in an easily digestible format.  This is not intended to introduce the concept as a standalone article.

The VFS T.O.P.P Agility Model is a subset of our Competitive Business Agility Framework and sits inside our T.E.E.M concept, within the Capabilities & Behaviours layer..  Yes, models, models, models..."But how do these actually help?"  I hear you ask.  They're simply a collection of tools that we find useful for helping to decompose complex situations and for providing just enough structure and guidance to successfully navigate them.

“A concept is a brick. It can be used to build a courthouse of reason. Or it can be thrown through the window.”

- Gilles Deleuze

The TOPP Agility Model is typically most useful during times of major changes and improvements, but is also a useful day-to-day management tool.  The concept is simply to have a balanced portfolio of oversight and initiatives across these four areas:

Technical Agility at the individual & team activity level focuses on the capabilities of the Technology/IT teams to create, enhance and retire software systems in a fast,  sustainable and secure manner. Technical excellence ensures high grade software solutions, but not necessarily the ability to release frequently, safely, sustainably and effectively respond to feedback.  Technical Agility supports business agility with technical excellence that is laser focussed on business needs whilst ensuring that the tech can enable the business to be nimble and adaptable.

How people and teams are organised is a vital ingredient in achieving Business Agility.  It is however more than simply how people are arranged or organised.  It is about having the right cultural norms, about the correct behaviours being exhibited by the senior management, about hierarchy and power not getting in the way of - and actively empowering - people to contribute, perform and deliver value. 

Process Agility can be considered at the macro ‘value stream’ level, to the details of day to day practices. It is having awareness of the underlying principles of the various methodologies and frameworks that are intended to help create agility; and the ‘toolbox’ of approaches and practices that can be used to achieve it.

Personal Agility is a collection of personal skills and knowledge that allows each and every individual to help establish their team as a High Performing Team.    The skills make team interactions more effective and the knowledge helps to recognise the missing conditions (Environmental Enablers) that are needed for a High Performing Team to exist.

The sphere of influence for these four aspects of the model can be scaled out or reigned in depending on the situation and the user of the model.

Focus on People then Process then Tools....but before all that, Technology

We've included the book extract below because it's common that change initiatives are likely to refer to "being more agile" or "able to fail faster" for example.

This chapter reflects on a time when the author focussed on bringing about changes in behaviour, en masse.  It's about creating a high performing Technology function that delivers high quality software solutions to solve problems and meet business needs.  But it's also about setting expectations with senior stakeholders that some agile principles and practices within software development can't simply be achieved with process change or culture change, and that at the foundation of being able to iteratively develop and incrementally deliver lies the technical ability to deliver small changes safely and efficiently.

Extract from the book:

Pivot is an inspiring and informative collection of cut through stories from 17 experts at the frontline of agility and organisational transformation.

Edited by Matt Bradley and Adrian Stalham from the Agility Gigs Community, and business author, Andrew Priestley, it features contributions from Adrian Stalham, Jacqueline Shakespeare, Scott Potter, Brett Ansley, Wayne Palmer, Matt Bradley, Bhavesh Vaghela, Angie Main, Karan Jain, Andrew Kidd, David Smith, Ahmed Syed, John Coleman, Mike Nuttall, Bruce Thompson, Jessica Gilbert, and John Boyes.

Pivot is available worldwide in Kindle and Paperback.

Below is a section from the chapter written by Scott Potter



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  CLICK TO EXPAND

My TOPP Agility model


For these three years, I had a strategy that ensured we didn’t over focus on one area of transformation at the expense of another.  What I mean by this is that the technical foundations had to be in place and the right engineering practices being followed, to ensure that all the teams were capable of a fast turnaround time and able to release quickly, confidently and sustainably to production.  There is little business benefit from implementing scrum ceremonies if you can't actually test ideas or incrementally build and release your product.


Likewise, even with a sound Technology foundation and development practices in place, if the principles underpinning our Product development and (dare I even use the term) Project Management processes were wrong, and the processes themselves couldn’t provide ample feedback loops that increased our knowledge of options; progress; correctness and verification of value, then we still wouldn’t be able to exhibit the speed and agility that I was determined to achieve.


Indeed, we may be pair-programming and conducting peer-reviews, but if people didn't feel comfortable giving difficult feedback to each one of their teammates, we wouldn't get the benefits of such practices.


Or conversely, if we grew the soft skills of each individual to be able to drive higher standards and help make their team a high performing team, but we hadn’t dealt with the organisational issues to get the right level of delegated decision making authority into the team, then we still wouldn’t be able to adapt quickly.  Agility has several cornerstones of excellence... Technical, Organisational, Process and Personal were the ones that I used for the TOPP agility model which helped us retain a suitably balanced portfolio of change initiatives.

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The main point here is to have a Balanced portfolio, a BSC even, to guide your priorities and efforts.

It's easy for people to fall back to what they know or enjoy.  It's rare for people to spread their time effectively across such a broad spectrum of topics.  Your strategy needs to enable and encourage this.