Yeret Agility - Business/Organizational Agility in the Trenches

How Vendors Can Apply Customer Centricity When Organizing Around Value

A lot of our clients are technology vendors that struggle to use the SAFe Operational Value Streams “out of the box”. Here, I explore how such a B2B vendor should organize around value when building products that are used to support its customer’s business operations.This article was originally posted in the Scaled Agile blog.Organizing Around ValueLots of organizations are organized around functional silos — such as business, system engineering, hardware, software, testing/QA, and operations. These structures exist because they support specialization and allow [...]

By Yuval Yeret|2022-12-03T17:10:36-05:00November 29, 2021|SAFe, Scaled Agile|Comments Off

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

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 [...]

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

Organizing around Outcomes with OKRs and 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. [...]

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

Fixing OKR Theater Using Scrum

The OKR TheaterI 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 teamsOKRs used to micro-manage teams and individuals rather than empower and enable them.Too many OKRs that are set without any respect/consideration of the ability to actually deliver them in [...]

By Yuval Yeret|2022-12-03T17:11:41-05:00November 22, 2021|OKRs, Scrum|Comments Off

Scrum — The Leader’s Perspective

Are you leading Scrum Teams? Are you a leader in an organization that’s leveraging Scrum? Hopefully, you’ve read the Scrum Guide to gain an understanding of the framework your teams are using and to understand your role in it.You probably feel a bit left out though… The Scrum Guide doesn’t explicitly call out the role of the Leader but successful implementation of Scrum definitely requires leadership.The Scrum Guide describes the leadership required by the Product Owner, Scrum Master, and Developers.In [...]

By Yuval Yeret|2022-12-03T17:11:57-05:00November 22, 2021|Leadership, Scrum|Comments Off

Handling scope change during a SAFe Program Increment (PI)

How do we handle Scope Changes in a SAFe Program Increment?A question about handling scope changes in SAFe was posed recently on a forum I’m participating in (The SAFe Community Forum). This is a question posed regularly in training and on ARTs I’m coaching so I thought I’d provide my thoughts here.How do you handle a scope change in a program increment? Specifically when it comes to switching one feature for another? And what’s the impact on PI Objectives and [...]

By Yuval Yeret|2022-12-14T17:20:10-05:00May 4, 2021|Agile, SAFe|Comments Off

Using Scrum for Improving Operations

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 [...]

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

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

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 [...]

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

Comparing Nexus and SAFe — Similarities, Differences, Ideas

I’ve been asked several times now about Nexus and SAFe — what are the similarities, differences, etc. If you’re not familiar with either Nexus or SAFe I recommend taking a look at the Nexus Guide and the SAFe whitepaper first.Nexus and SAFe — Similar ConceptsLet’s start with similarities — There are quite a few of them as you can see:Nexus — ARTThe Nexus group of teams is very similar to the Agile Release Train (ART) construct. In both SAFe/Scrum it is a self-managing team of self-managed teams with a [...]

By Yuval Yeret|2022-12-14T17:20:23-05:00January 14, 2021|Nexus, Scaled Agile, Scrum|Comments Off

SAFe Program Dependency Board Retrospective

Learning from the SAFe Program Dependency BoardThe SAFe Program Board or Program Dependency Board is a key artifact used in PI Planning and Execution. The ART Teams and Stakeholders used it to align, anticipate risks, and adapt the plan accordingly.This “inspection and adaptation” of the plan based on insights from the Program Dependency Board is “first loop learning” — making changes in the plan based on what we see.Deeper Learning from the Program Dependency BoardWhat we rarely see, though, is deeper learning [...]

By Yuval Yeret|2022-12-14T17:20:43-05:00September 17, 2020|SAFe|Comments Off