Amplios
What is an Amplio?
Amplio means “improve” in Latin. Amplio is a collection of workshops, books, Miro boards, and consulting approaches to help individuals, groups, and organizations improve. The salient characteristic of Amplio is that it is tailored for those using it. Unlike popular frameworks, it is not preset to make it easier to sell, train, and promote. This does not mean it is harder to use. Just the opposite. It has a sophisticated design that enables it to be delivered in a fit-for-purpose manner that makes it easier for adopters to consume.
Amplio is based on first principles and a deep understanding of what it takes for teams and organizations to be effective. This enables an Amplio Consultant-Educator (ACE) to quickly tailor it for your needs.Â
All Amplios are designed to work in the modern-day world of remote work. Each Amplio uses Miro board to enable virtual collaboration.
Amplio Collaborative Engagements.
Typical consulting engagements involve a consultant spending some time at the organization, working with people to decide what to do, creating a slew of Word, PowerPoint, and Excel documents to present to management. The challenge with this is that these documents turn stale as soon as the consultant leaves.Â
Amplio Consultant-Educators work differently. They don’t just have interviews, write it up in their hotel room, give a report, and then fly home. Instead, ACEs use Miro boards to enage with all the roles involved, regardless of their location. The boards are specifically designed to help create an effective starting point for a new adoption or set of actions to improve an existing one.Â
These boards not only enable the co-creation of what to do, they record why you decided to create every aspect of the plan. These boards continue to be used throughout the engagement.
The boards also allow engagements to be spread out over a few days which opens up involvement by more people. During the collaborative engagement, the engagement leader educates and guides the participants through the Amplio Decision Framework (ADF). This process takes advantage of what the participants know about their organization while being guided by someone who has deep experience in what works. This way of working takes general knowledge of practices and tunes them to the specifics of the organization. A tailored working method that includes roles, events, artifacts, and guidance is the result. The Miro board, plus other Miro boards of general applicability, are licensed to the engaged company for use for continuous improvement.Â
What is the Amplio Approach?
Because the Amplio approach is based on the first principles of Flow, Lean, and the Theory of Constraints, any part of it can be used to improve other methods, such as Scrum, Kanban, and SAFe.
Amplio is not an extension of the current Agile. Just a few years after the Agile Manifesto Net Objectives shifted into being based on Lean, then included Flow and the Theory of Constraints. Amplio, therefore, has a long, deep heritage. After years of attempting to get Scrum, Kanban, and SAFe to include these approaches Al Shalloway is now bringing Amplio out on its own. It is being rebuilt from scratch since the PMI acquired the Net Objectives IP.
Amplio is based on a different mindset, has different content, and uses different training methods than the popular Agile frameworks. The mindset is the key difference. Amplio covers the entire spectrum of business development.
| Mindset | Content | Training methods |
1.  Designed to improve business agility 2.  Based on systems thinking and the first principles of Flow, Lean, and the Theory of Constraints 3. It is based on the full Amplio pattern language 4.  Uses value stream management 5.  Deals with complexity via visibility and quick feedback 6.  Sets up people to think for themselves and not follow a framework | 1. Provides a way to quantify values of stakeholders 2. Minimum Business Increments 3. Provides the factors for effective value streams 4. Provide fit-for-purpose solutions | 1.  Provide ongoing, instructor-led training to learn over a period of months 2.  Provide a way for internal change agents to train their company’s staff |
Amplio@Teams
Amplio@Team is designed to help a team, or small group of teams, learn how to be effective in Agile development. Amplio@Team can also be used to tune a team already doing Scrum, Kanban, or another approach. Depending upon the number and experience of the teams involved, this engagement can take the equivalent of 1-2 days.
Participants are led through some basic Flow, Lean, and Theory of Constraints theory on which Amplio@Team is based. Then the participants use the decision framework in both collaborations with each other and with the engagement leader. A consensus on manifesting the 2 roles, events, artifacts, and guidance required for effective teams is achieved. This decision process ends with documentation of what’s been decided and the rationale for the decisions. Finally, the decision framework and other Miro boards are provided to the engaging teams for continuous improvement.
Amplio@Scale
Amplio@Scale is designed to help small to midsize organizations improve their ability to deliver value to their clients while improving the quality of life of their employees. Two Amplio@Scale workshops are being offered – Amplio@Midscale and Amplio@ForSAFe. Both work essentially the same way, but the Midscale engagement takes an organization from ground zero, so to speak, in learning Agile while the Amplio@ForSAFe takes advantage of their current SAFe adoption.
While companies are different, there are many objectives they must take to be effective. These include effective budgeting, timely allocation of funds, identifying what would be of value to their customers, how teams decide what to work on, and more. In addition, some companies have additional external constraints such as government regulation or more internal complexity such as integrating hardware and software.
Amplio@Scale takes a value workflow (often called a value stream) approach. Flow, Lean, and systems thinking tell us that starting anywhere except for an entire value stream will be, at best, a partial solution. Amplio@Scale borrows from the best practices of Kanban, LeSS, SAFe and Disciplined Agile’s FLEX to identify what an organization needs to do to have effective value delivery. The collaborative engagement centers around creating a tailored approach for selected value streams that may compromise some or all of the organization involved.
This decision process ends with documentation of what’s been decided. The decision framework and other Miro boards are provided to the engaging teams to use for continuous improvement.