The Next Agile Frontier – Agile Company Development

By |2023-05-11T19:31:50-04:00April 13, 2023|Business Agility|

Dealing with common business challenges through agility I’ve been helping companies improve their operations for over a decade. A repeating pattern is where a very successful company is facing growing pains affecting its ability to scale to the next level. Some examples of the challenges I’m called in to help with: Losing the Ability to Innovate You often see companies that grow successfully to the point where it seems their ability to innovate stalls. When you look deeper, you see them [...]

Exploring the Connection Between Business Agility, OKRs and Private Equity – Interview w/ Yuval on the Quantive Dreams with Deadlines Podcast

By |2023-01-10T14:30:14-05:00January 10, 2023|Business Agility, Media, OKRs, Private Equity|

If you're here, you might be interested in OKRs. If so you should check out the Dreams with Deadlines podcast published by Quantive (formerly Gtmhub). I was delighted to accept an invitation to come on the podcast to discuss OKRs, Business Agility, Agile, Evidence-based management and the connection to increasing value creation e.g. in the Private Equity space. Check out the podcast here or in the embedded audio below. Dreams with Deadlines Podcast Interview with Yuval Yeret We discuss the role [...]

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Fix Your OKRs – Back to First Principles

By |2022-12-10T12:00:40-05:00December 7, 2022|Agility, Business Agility, Evidence-based Management, OKRs|

Context OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) have become the latest management framework to suffer the fate of becoming popular too quickly, to the point where in many organizations, OKRs are a theater/charade with little useful substance or benefits. That’s a shame because OKRs have huge potential if used effectively. So let’s go about fixing your OKRs!  Why OKRs Let’s start with the basics. What are OKRs even about?  OKRs aim to help you execute effectively on what matters most (your [...]

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Agility / Evidence-based Management and their role in improving returns in the Private Equity…

By |2022-12-02T13:05:21-05:00September 27, 2022|Business Agility, Evidence-based Management, Private Equity|

In this article, I’ll explore the need for and the attributes of an agile business operating system related to Private Equity (PE) portfolio companies. It hopefully helps leaders of such companies and PE professionals focused on the operations side expand their perspective on what “Agile” and “Agility” mean in their world and how they can help them improve returns realized in their investments.Dealing with common business challenges through agilityI’ve been helping companies improve their operations for more than a decade now. [...]

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Improving Focus and Alignment by Organizing around OKRs and managing OKR Flow

By |2022-12-03T17:11:09-05:00November 29, 2021|Agility, Business Agility, OKRs|

Improving Focus and Alignment by Organizing around OKRs and managing OKR FlowToday, I wanted to share two quick observations about OKRs.Too many teams working on each strategic OKRI encounter many organizations that use OKRs. Too many of them have this crazy matrix where the high-level OKRs — those that aim to achieve the organization’s strategy — map to too many teams/functions in the organization. This creates a need to cascade the OKRs, create sub-OKRs, or other techniques which eventually create a larger and larger distance [...]

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Organizing around Outcomes with OKRs and Scrum

By |2022-12-14T17:20:01-05:00November 22, 2021|Agility, Business Agility, OKRs, Scrum|

Aligning Scrum Team Topology to Strategy with OKRs and Product GoalsYeah, I know. Could I squeeze more buzzwords into the title? I guess I could include Digital Transformation, Cloud, AI, and Machine Learning for effect. But seriously, I wanted to share some insights around how to align your Scrum Teams to your strategy leveraging OKRs and Product Goals.Driving Change Using OKRsWe maintain performance by tracking the health of Key Performance Indicators(KPIs). We use Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) to drive performance change. [...]

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Using Scrum for Improving Operations

By |2022-12-05T08:40:45-05:00March 30, 2021|Business Agility, Scrum|

I’m encountering more and more people that are trying to solve different kind of problems with Scrum: People designing Consumer Goods Accounting professionals focused on Revenue Accounting Marketers of many kinds Healthcare professionals. I’ve been having some interesting discussions with them that I thought I might share. One of the key questions I start a conversation about Scrum with is Why — Why do we need Scrum? What problems are we looking to solve with it? Next we typically explore Where/When — Where would [...]

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Entrepreneurial Operating System® / Traction®- How does it relate to Agile/Scrum?

By |2023-01-12T09:46:01-05:00January 18, 2021|Business Agility, OKRs|

I’m hearing from more and more companies that are using the Entrepreneurial Operating System® (EOS®) and are also looking at or practicing Agile e.g., using Scrum. In discussions with these companies, two key questions surface time after time: My teams want to use Agile/Scrum — is that aligned with the fact that we’re using EOS® in the organization? My teams use Agile/Scrum; can we use EOS®? The short answer is that Agile and specifically Scrum and EOS®are mostly complementary. EOS®, as well [...]

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When do CMOs/Marketing Leaders consider Agile Marketing?

By |2022-12-14T17:25:58-05:00July 11, 2017|Agile Marketing, Business Agility|

In our first post in the series about Scaled Agile Marketing we looked at whether you even need Agile Marketing. In this post we talk about the typical triggers that cause marketing leaders to take a serious look at Agile Marketing.Scaled Agile Marketing is typically needed as part of a real Agile Marketing transformation — an attempt to achieve a significant change in how marketing is operating. Agile Marketing at the team level is something that can happen bottoms up or in [...]

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To Infinity and Beyond — Achieving Organizational Agility

By |2022-12-14T17:26:48-05:00June 28, 2017|Business Agility|

Agile Development — Just A Starting Point Towards Organizational AgilityFor many people Agile is “Agile Development”. They use agile to improve the effectiveness and agility of software organizations. For these people scaling agile typically means developing even larger programs/products with an agile development approach.Scaling Sideways Towards Business AgilityScaling agile has another meaning — scaling sideways and handling a wider swath of the technology value stream:First, the process of exploring options and selecting initiatives to focus on and to budget.Then, identifying the right products or features. [...]

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