Agile

Why do organizations tend to pull back budgets for exploration and opportunity discovery when they fail to meet their revenue goals, despite having aggressive revenue targets moving forward?

When uncertainty creeps into the core business, the natural reaction is to stay away from it. But this is actually 'risk-taking'. Isn’t continuing to execute the way 'it’s always been done' in the face of uncertainty a path to failure?

 It does not have to be a resource intensive endeavor. The goal is to bust assumptions and cut through biases to gain new knowledge, mitigating risk and improving efficiency in delivering the desired outcome. The likelihood is that teams will also discover insights that point to new growth opportunities.

The debate that has raged on since the pandemic; personal productivity. Brant would argue that being in the office does not make someone more productive than working from home. In this podcast from a recent LinkedIn Audio event, Brant Cooper will go over how to maximize personal productivity by the use of a KANBAN board.

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Surviving and thriving in the digital world does not mean merely implementing technology. It also requires instilling new mindsets at all levels in the organization. The way people work needs to align with the speed, complexity, and uncertainty of today’s economic activity while solving real-world problems that benefit customers. The path forward is to create RAD organizations: resilient to endless disruptions, aware of changing market conditions, and dynamically adapting to create real value.

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Brant Cooper discusses what innovation truly means and why so many organizations fail at it. It often means something different to varying members of the organization. It needs to be defined by the organization, then shared with everyone.

While “innovation” might be one method of achieving priorities and goals, having an innovation mindset is required no matter the pursuit. The innovation mindset is characterized by behavior reflecting learning and exploration. It’s how to deal with uncertainty.

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Whether discovering a new value stream for a still-to-be-launched product or seeking to improve existing value creation in the face of new uncertainty, the task may seem daunting. The Value Stream Discovery Loop and Moves the Needle is available to help. The tool provides an intuitive progression to enable both value stream discovery and optimization.

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A product’s value stream provides an opportunity for organizations to identify inefficiencies, redundancy, bottlenecks, and other types of waste in their processes. Unlike most company cost-cutting efforts, mapping, analyzing, and improving the value stream leads to increased customer satisfaction, loyalty, reduced costs, and increased profitability, without sacrificing value creation.

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Tracing the origin and evolution of Product management to understand how we got here and what's next to continue to drve business impact.

In this uncertain economy, businesses planning for the year ahead, will very likely include re-orgs. While re-organizing parts of the business might improve some efficiencies, it’s often disguising leadership problems rather than real productivity issues.

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The end result is a bias toward making people work harder, not smarter. If you’re looking for a true solution to more efficient workflow, then re-orgs should be thought of from the bottom-up, not top-down. Empower the bottom, so your organization can react to changes to its environment, which generally occur at the edge, not the center. Agile teams define work needed. New information is relayed to the top. Leadership alters strategy, communicates plans, and allocates resources.

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What’s so interesting about KPIs and OKRs is every few years there’s a new framework for metrics, but essentially, they’re always about outcomes. So, what are the desired outcomes?
We want more customers. We want happier customers. We want more revenue, more growth, and more market share.

That's going to keep the bosses happy and their bosses happy. And ultimately, will make investors and Wall Street happy. The challenge is when we’re down levels from those mega-desired outcomes, we don't feel like we can influence them too much.

Dividing your company into execution (delivery) mode vs exploration (discovery) mode, as recommended by the multi-named mythology of “ambidextrous organizations,” “dual operating systems,” or “dual innovation,” will prevent you from competing efficiently in the digital age. There are 4 simple steps to create operating mechanisms for dual track teams, i.e., teams that are responsible for execution also explore.

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What does it mean to be agile and how do you scale it within your organization? In a truly agile environment, individual performance must be tied to team performance relative to its mission. Of course, the devil is in the details. What is a mission?

Brant Cooper, NYT bestselling author and founder of Moves The Needle dives into all of this and more.

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When you scale based upon functions, you are likely reinforcing silos. You end up cascading tasks that one hopes align with organizational priorities.

Mission-based organization of the company, rather than carving work up based upon function is more impactful. In the end, most teams will look the same, as if they were carved up by function, but only because the mission dictates that. In other words, if a team has a mission that requires building particular software product functionality, the team will likely be composed of all software developers. On the other hand, if a mission requires a team to investigate what functionality will increase customer engagement, functions other than developers would be required. Learn how Moves The Needle has helped companies with mission-based organization.

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