Your path to business agility
A few years ago, I embarked on a mission. At the company I was working for, my plan was to build high performing product teams. In the middle of that journey, just as we started to make progress, life threw us a curveball – COVID. Much to our surprise, in our pursuit of remote flow...
In my earlier post, Testing to Improve Flow Means Happier Teams, I talked about how a lightweight test may shine a light on one or more experiments to start with. Let’s explore how one can improve team flow by creating an environment where experimentation can take place and where real change is possible. A quote...
Listening to conferences, webinars and podcasts, it’s easy to find organizations that have made significant wins on the project to product journey. It’s also easy to gloss over the significant challenges that were overcome along the journey when you’ve only got 45 minutes to tell a story that took two+ years to unfold. The journey...
Often organizations can be overwhelmed when thinking about continuous improvement primarily because it’s just that … continuous. It’s easy to lose focus and momentum while on this journey because the day to day effort doesn’t bring about incredible change. This is even more true the longer the journey goes. A key to keeping momentum is...
Early on in a project to product journey, people often feel compelled to “do it right”, which leaves them stalled on the start line. It’s impossible to imagine any organization getting it “right” the first time. I strongly encourage you to consider the improvements you make to be “experiments” with a hypothesis that you can...
In my last blog, I emphasized how a compelling reason to change is a fundamental precondition for starting a project to product journey. In this blog, I take that a step further and discuss three key characteristics that your organization should create as they take their first steps. Start small It’s critical to generate early...
Functioning in silos instead of cross-functional value streams, funding scope/projects instead of capacity, leadership collecting metrics on utilization instead of value delivered – many organizations are realizing that their current ways of organizing aren’t enough to stay competitive in a rapidly changing world. While they know they need to change, there’s not a lot of...
There are many ways to assess the perceived viability or potential effectiveness of a proposed experiment. Teams can determine the options to improve flow, but it may not be clear what aspects of their work to address. While it’s best to start and get feedback as quickly as possible, a lightweight test may shine a...
Organizations that can tap into the power of user feedback have seen enormous improvements in ROI over the past decades. It started with Agile via iterative deliveries of user value on a set cadence, usually every two to three weeks. As top-performers (those that understood and embraced Agile fundamentals) began to separate from their competitors,...
Organizations often struggle to balance top-down direction vs. team autonomy. Too much top-down directive and teams can quickly feel micromanaged, becoming discouraged and disengaged. Leaders, meanwhile, struggle to allow complete autonomy, fearing the sheer increase in variation between tools, processes and practices will make it impossible to collaborate and manage products across the organization. There...
