Are You Struggling to Scale Your Organization ? Need agility but dubious of process BS/dogma? I share reflective, pragmatic, principled takes on how to approach scaling your organization leveraging the essence (rather than theater) of product operating models, agile practices and frameworks, and business operating systems such as EOS and OKRs.
Don’t Sleep on Portfolio Level Product/Agility
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Most organizations wait way too long to adopt some portfolio-level agility practices. They’ve been told, “You can’t scale what’s broken,” so they wait until they nail agile at the team and product group level. What if fixing what’s broken REQUIRES focusing on the upstream operating models shaping the work and context of these teams? Back in 2012 or so, I met an SVP responsible for a 1000-person delivery organization that was working in a traditional waterfall. Critical Chain optimized waterfall. But still. Component Teams. Heavy coordination and integration costs across multiple products. Build that takes 2 weeks to integrate. Riki and her team ran a very successful and profitable shop. However, they recognized that to satisfy their customers, they often had to accept change out of cycle, which created a constant fire drill. We discussed options. Riki liked starting with visualizing, understanding, and managing flow at the portfolio level, to break the waterfall. We got it going within weeks. (Did I mention Riki and the team were experienced, highly motivated operations-focused leaders? ). It didn’t take long for Flow times to start improving and for “Welcome Change” to be a more reasonable proposition. Over time, we’ve noticed how much “cross-product” work this portfolio delivered and started exploring ways to reorganize around value. We started introducing more and more agility principles and practices (eventually, they did reorganize to stream-aligned cross-product groups focused on the REAL product and leveraged team-level agile ways of working). Here’s the thing – Starting at the Portfolio level gives you as a leader, tons of leverage to make an impact on the product-oriented agility of your organization – by tackling the systemic constraints to Product thinking, Flow, and Empiricism and allowing you to learn and model the behaviors you expect from your people. PS I’m finalizing a free email course where I share my lightweight (agile?) approach for bringing product agility to a multi-product/portfolio context. Yours Yuval "Don't Sleep on Portfolio Agility" Yeret |
Scaling w/ Agility
Are You Struggling to Scale Your Organization ? Need agility but dubious of process BS/dogma? I share reflective, pragmatic, principled takes on how to approach scaling your organization leveraging the essence (rather than theater) of product operating models, agile practices and frameworks, and business operating systems such as EOS and OKRs.
Reader Jonathan asked for some more color on the OKR swamp... Remember the Fire Swamp from Princess Bride? (If you don't, RUN to watch the movie. And consider this spoiler alert - and snooze this email until you're back) Navigating your OKRs often feels like the Fire Swamp. There are so many OKRs that they are all stuck - like the standing, dark, moist water in the Fire Swamp. The exercise of creating them involves wordsmithing agony that reminds you of a Battle of Wits with a sicilian......
What gets measured gets managed. But setting OKRs isn't enough. The flow and traction of OKRs need to be managed as well - otherwise, you'll find yourself in the OKR swamp.Using an OKR Kanban can help you both see the swamp and improve the flow and traction of OKRs. Here's an example - Here are some of my favorite patterns for managing OKR flow using Kanban: Use One OKR Kanban board. It's okay and preferable to see OKRs from multiple departments/teams/groups on the same board. It reinforces...
Hi there. I thought I'd share what is going on behind the scenes ... January started with a flurry of deep work with clients and I'm still trying to figure out how to weave writing on a consistent schedule into these periods. In the future I might use these opportunities to share some classics/reruns. In addition, I've been focused on developing an email course. It's about how to improve organizational traction and outcomes using familiar agility principles and techniques. I've been working...