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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 …
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?
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 …
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 …
Improving Focus and Alignment by Organizing around OKRs and managing OKR Flow
Today, I wanted to share two quick observations about OKRs. Too many teams working on each strategic OKR I 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 …
Fixing OKR Theater Using Scrum
The OKR Theater I encounter many organizations that are trying to improve the alignment between strategy and execution with the OKRs framework (Objectives and Key Results). There’s good intent there, but more often than not I see anti-patterns like: OKRs that look more like tasks than strategic objectives — especially by the time they reach working teams OKRs …
4 Key Flow Metrics and how to use them in Scrum’s events
In the Kanban Guide for Scrum Teams and the Professional Scrum with Kanban workshop, we introduce 4 key flow metrics that we believe Scrum teams can use to improve their flow: Work in Progress (WIP) The number of work items started but not finished (according to the Scrum Team’s definition of “Workflow”). Note the difference between …