Insights

Combining SAFe PO and PM responsibilities with Professional Scrum PO Stances

Scaling Product Ownership with SAFe vs Scrum

Exploring SAFe’s Approach to Product Ownership What is SAFe’s perspective on the Product Owner role? How does it differ from the Scrum Guide? Why is Product Ownership split between the Product Owner and Product Manager in SAFe? SAFe’s approach to Product Ownership draws quite a bit of criticism. As a Professional Scrum Trainer who’s also …

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Agile Company Development

Elevating business scaling constraints through agility

Growing Pains I’ve been helping companies improve their operations for over a decade. A repeating pattern is where a 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 Get Complex Stuff Done You often …

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The Future of Agile Roles != The Future of Agility

These are “interesting” times in the Agile/Scrum community. What IS the future of Scrum? Of Agile? Are we in a phase of disillusionment? What IS the path to enlightenment? 

How will we get rid of the “agile theater debt” accumulated through many years of unsustainable growth of Scrum/Agile adoption? 

Specifically, What is the future of Scrum Masters? Agile Coaches?

Dreams with Deadlines Yuval Yeret OKRs Business Agility

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

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 …

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Fix Your OKRs – Back to First Principles

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 …

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

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Working towards Sustainable Pace in Scrum, SAFe and Kanban

Aiming towards Sustainable Pace “Agile processes promote sustainable development. The sponsors, developers, and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely.” — The Agile Manifesto Principle “programmers or software developers should not work more than 40 hour weeks, and if there is overtime one week, that the next week should not include more overtime.” — Extreme Programming …

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Connecting OKRs, KPIs, OVSs, and DVSs in SAFe® — Scaled Agile

The title of my post may read like acronym soup but all of these concepts play a critical role in SAFe, and understanding how they’re connected is important to success. After exploring some connections, I will suggest some actions you can take while designing, evaluating, or accelerating your implementation. KPIs and OKRs The SAFe Value Stream …

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Iterating faster with SAFe

Here’s a frequently asked question in the SAFe community: What does SAFe say about someone who wants to go faster than two weeks of iteration? I mean, the whole PI concept is based on five iterations of planning. What if a team or organization wants to develop and synchronize faster than two weeks? Is speed going …

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