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Why Flow Academy

Why Flow Academy

The challenge facing modern businesses is how to apply their capabilities to improving value discovery, management and delivery.

It sounds simple when set out on a page like that but the workplace is an arena of competing demands and very different skill sets: product innovation and management, marketing, IT infrastructure, software development and delivery.

These reflect very distinct backgrounds and skills and one of the challenges is to find a way to get them to work together for a common cause.

Flow Academy brings together those skill-sets and experiences. We are from a business and IT background. Our experiences stand out above those even of major consultancies. We have practical hands-on experience of managing transformation at scale in fast-moving business environments and have designed and pioneered many of the techniques you need.

Many practitioners learn their trade by reading articles and books and riding on the coattails of consultancies that have a set model for how to change.

We understand how to analyse context and to support you in uncovering what needs to change, how you can scale down a challenge and skill up ready for that change, and how you build the learning environment that you need in order to make that change successful.

Some of the clients we have worked with

Flow Academy

Who are we

Fin Goulding

Fin Goulding

Fin Goulding has earned a global reputation as an experienced IT senior leader improving agile methodologies and implementing extreme delivery techniques within major organisations.

A noted bridge-builder between an agile IT capability and business strategy, over the past five years he has transformed into a business agility expert.

He brings experience as a senior IT Executive in organisations like Visa, RBS, NatWest, HSBC, Aviva and digital startups such as lastminute.com, travelocity.com and paddypower.com together with his Flow Academy practitioner work to advise companies undergoing transformation.

As well as being a popular keynote speaker and panellist, Fin co-founded the Flow Academy with Haydn to help bridge the IT-business divide and support leaders and executives in designing successful digital, agile and business transformations.
Haydn Shaughnessy

Haydn Shaughnessy

Haydn has a thirty-year background in innovation and transformation. He has pioneered platform and ecosystem thinking, one of the main operating model transitions in the modern age.

He has spent decades researching and advising on the impact of new technology on customer requirements and organisational structure and competitiveness.

Through this extensive engagement with application innovation, he has been able to lead Flow Academy’s work on new value discovery tools and operating model design.

A thought leader for several US think tanks, such as nGenera and Gigaom, his work has appeared in the Harvard Business Review, Strategy and Leadership, the Wall St Journal and Forbes.

Haydn’s work was described by Forbes as “everything you need to know about digital transformation but were afraid to ask.”

Testimonials

The essence of agility is enabling new behaviours and thinking to emerge throughout your organisation. Fin and Haydn outline an actionable yet minimal framework to innovate your ways of working and create a culture of experimentation and learning. The lessons, methods and tools shared in this book will provide you with an effective guide to succeed on your own journey towards higher performance, better results and flow.
Barry O'Reilly
Barry O'ReillyAuthor of Unlearn and Lean Enterprise
In Flow, Fin Goulding and Haydn Shaughnessy provide a wonderful combination of principles and practices for technology leaders, not only for improving their teams' outcomes, but to help them bring all their other business stakeholders along on the journey too. Highly recommended.
Gene Kim
Gene KimAuthor of the Phoenix Project, Unicorn Project and the DevOps Handbook
A lot is written about how Agile and Lean supports faster and more efficient software development, often describing how to do the wrong things faster. Flow is about how to introduce Agile and Lean to deliver the “right” things faster. Fin and Haydn show practical ways to get whole organisations (not just development) thinking and solving customers problems, then flawlessly flowing that value to those customers.
Troy Magennis
Troy MagennisFounder/Metrics & Forecasting Consultant, Focused Objective
Flow is the perfect introduction to Business & Technical agility for those who are new to the field. It is smart/intuitive challenge to those readers who see themselves as experts. At its core it redefines how we go about digital transformation and create the new agile business.
Serena De Stacpoole
Serena De StacpooleInnovation Consultant at Sylon Solutions and Startup Week Dublin Organiser
I love the Executive Wall, and the other walls that radiate information from concept through to customer value realisation. Fin and Haydn observed correctly that the incorrect application of Scrum is commonplace, and I also believe from my experience that flow is the tip of the spear, reducing the number of products, initiatives, backlog items in progress, as long as we talk to external customers to collect feedback the way Fin and Haydn say we must.
John Coleman
John ColemanAgile Strategist
In Flow, Haydn Shaughnessy and Fin Goulding provide a clear road- map for establishing the business agility needed to compete in today’s complex environment of digital transformation. Through practical real-world examples and drawing on their considerable depth of corporate experience, the authors provide invaluable concepts and tools to establish a culture of value based on customer centricity.
Rob Smart
Rob SmartSenior Fellow US Nuclear Infrastructure Council and Former Dean of Walgreens University
Another great set of tools for the CIO/DTO toolbox. I'm a big fan of the "Wall" concept, as it promotes a high degree of collaboration and awareness without the technology getting in the way.
Abe McIntosh
Abe McIntoshInternational CIO/CTO/CISO Transformation Executive
In the race for agile transformation somebody has to spell out what the enterprise looks like once many more people are empowered. At last, in Flow we have that document and with it the start of a movement for a new way to work. Shaughnessy and Goulding use very practical examples to show us how self-organising, empowered teams can go about co-designing the best way to get work done. Innovation becomes Flow, the enterprise becomes agile.
Peter Hinssen
Peter HinssenCO-founder Nexxworks and Author of The Day After Tomorrow
Goulding and Shaughnessy provide a method to move from doing digital to being digital. They have identified the shortcomings of the industrial era model and have developed an inspiring philosophy that blends people, process and innovation in a manner that will have people nothing short of rushing to work each day. They recognise that work in the digital age is essentially a form of self-expression directed towards the condition of the customer.
Ade McCormack
Ade McCormackInternational CIO, Advisor and Speaker
Flow and Flow Academy offer tremendous value to anyone looking to transform the way their teams and organisations work. Thought provoking guidance that challenges me to rethink everything
Jim Dolce
Jim DolceVP Technology Strategy, FujiFilm North America
It's not often I find a book that I pick up a book and say "Those guys can talk the talk and walk the walk"! In Flow you get a common sense blueprint for doing an Agile Transformation from scratch, out of the box and in a very visual format. Buy this book, learn from this book and then start experimenting in your organisation. This will give you better communication, visibility of work and also keep you focused on the human factors in your Agile Transformations.
Scott Sievwright
Scott SievwrightAgile Coach, Royal Bank of Scotland
Ever wondered why your Agile journey has not delivered the outcomes you were looking for? Fin and Haydn take you beyond the process, planning and control thinking of the past in this practical toolkit laying out how to execute on digital transformation. Do however be prepared to re-think some old habits! Flow is all about creating the right culture for change through real empowerment, team diversity and interactive visual engagement and constant feedback loops.
Mark Simons
Mark SimonsDirector AquValue and Cloud Specialist
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About Flow Academy

Flow Academy

Flow Academy is an Irish innovation and transformation practice based in Dublin and Cork. Our successful careers as agile practitioners gave us the inspiration to create the company

It is led by Fin Goulding (former SVP at Visa USA in San Francisco, CTO at lastminute.com and Paddy Power plus International CIO at Aviva Plc) and Haydn Shaughnessy (platform, ecosystem and innovation expert who has been an advisor to global organisations including Nike, Coca Cola, Kimberly Clarke, SWIFT and BP and has written for Forbes, Harvard Business Review, Wall St Journal)

Haydn and Fin have been working on transformations for most of their careers. They offer unique insights into transformation not just because of their wide experience. Haydn has a background in R&D, innovation and business applications while Fin is a regular on the global top 100 CTO/CIO lists

Work on Flow as a framework for transformation began in 2013 with Fin’s role at Paddy Power, which gained a reputation as one of the most transformative companies in Europe. From six releases a year, the company moved quickly to 50 a day, pioneered value-based work design and lighthouse projects for re-platforming. At the same time, Haydn was pioneering platform and ecosystem strategy and developing a new value delivery framework

Since 2015 Haydn and Fin have brought the separate strands of their work together to fill out the missing parts in business agility and change. Bringing the perspectives of the business and IT together has allowed them to move the debate about business agility and transformation onto a new level

Their most important insights, gained from working with clients around the world, led them to the Transformation Sprint as a way to simplify change and build a stronger learning experience for leaders

Flow Academy creates thought leadership and tools to support companies in the transformation process has advised and trained clients in Europe, the USA and increasingly Asia.

Copyright © Flow Academy Ltd 2020

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