Measuring Value to Enable Improvement and Agility
With markets and customer needs constantly changing, organizations need information and evidence that helps them adapt quickly to new challenges and opportunities to deliver greater value and achieve true business agility. Yet often, organizations that use Agile product development techniques use traditional management approaches, expecting leaders to set firm long-term goals and manage progress toward them with dashboards of static metrics.
That is why Scrum.org created the Evidence-Based Management™ (EBM) framework, which is an Agile approach to help leaders guide their teams toward continuously improving customer outcomes, organizational capabilities, and business results. EBM focuses on customer value and intentional experimentation to systematically improve an organization’s performance and achieve its strategic goals.
In the Professional Agile Leadership™ – Evidence-Based Management (PAL-EBM) one-day course, participants learn what EBM is and how to apply it through hands-on, activity-based learning. Through a series of exercises, participants learn techniques that support a more agile mindset:
- Use empiricism to set and achieve strategic goals, managing the unknown and complexity through experimentation and adapting goals along the way.
- Create a cultural environment using clear goals, appropriate measures, and trust to enable self-management and autonomy.
- Shift the conversation away from measuring progress purely through team performance metrics toward a focus on customer-centricity and improving customer outcomes.
- Drive operational improvements by using four Key Value Areas (Unrealized Value, Current Value, Time to Market, and the Ability to Innovate) as lenses for evidence-based decision-making.
I typically teach the PAL-EBM to help organizations launch/improve an OKR program since EBM provides the right foundation for a successful implementation of an alignment framework such as OKRs. It’s also commonly used to help evolve from a “feature factory” to an organization that is more focused on outcomes and empiricism. As such its a classic Scrum.org class to use in an environment that isn’t necessarily aligned with professional scrum – for example an organization using SAFe.
I typically include both an OKR training module and an implementation strategy session to the base PAL-EBM workshop.
I’m interested in bringing in the PAL-EBM workshop for my team