How will the PAL-EBM course help executives and leaders pursue increased agility?
Scrum.Org have developed a course known as Professional Agile Leadership with Evidence-based Management (PAL-EBM) to help leaders pursue increased agility and agile capabilities.
How?
In agility, one of the key mantras is focus.
Focus. Focus. Focus.
In scrum, for example, you have a product goal which provides the team with focus. Each sprint has a sprint goal, which reinforces the need to focus, and the scrum values are all aligned with helping teams and leadership to focus on delivering the most valuable work.
Kanban, another agile framework, also encourages teams to focus by limiting work in progress and enabling work to flow effectively throughout the entire system.
It is as much about deciding what you are not going to do as it is about deciding what to do.
Lots of agility coaches and consultants from product development, agile environments, and so forth all agree that prioritization is key. Deciding what you are going to focus and being ruthless about delivering that value.
Deciding what you are going to do, what you are not going to do, and how each item ranks in terms of priority and desired objectives.
Challenges of having a singular focus.
Everything in moderation.
You can’t have a singular or exclusive focus too much because it could lead you into unproductive avenues or unhelpful practices. For example, if you have a singular focus on milking the metaphorical cow that you currently have, you are prone to disruption.
You are vulnerable to disruption from competitors who do have a finger on the pulse of market and customer changes, behaviours, and emerging requirements.
If you are too focused on speed, also known as velocity in agile, you are prone to delivering features that may not deliver value to customers, and you often see a reduction in product quality.
If our goal is simply to be productive and efficient, we lose sight of being effective.
We aren’t making an impact in the market nor are we creating value for customers and end-users, we’re just delivering stuff and keeping the accountants happy that resources are delivering to capacity.
If your focus is primarily on innovation, you lose sight of great execution.
You could:
- Focus on eliminating technical debt.
- Focus on acquiring the right tools.
- Focus on perfecting techniques and best practices.
- Focus on developing innovative features.
But, if you don’t have any customers, it doesn’t help you at all.
So, a singular focus can prove just as ineffective as chasing down every opportunity.
You could be chasing down unrealized value relentlessly yet lose sight of delivering value in the areas that your customers, and the organization, need strong execution.
Evidence-Based Management
The key is to achieve the right balance.
- How can you milk your current metaphorical cow effectively?
- How can you learn quicky and focus on what matters most?
- How can you become more effective?
- How can you optimize flow efficiency?
- How can you increase velocity without losing capability?
- How can you reduce time to market but deliver valuable products?
And so forth.
The PAL-EBM workshop helps leaders understand the Evidence-Based Management framework, but it also helps agile leaders align on strategic goals, the right direction of travel for the organization, and how to organize teams effectively around value creation and delivery.
- What is the direction of travel for the next 6 to 9 months?
- What is the short-term focus for the next 3 months?
- What are the primary goals that need to be achieved?
- What are the metrics that will inform whether you are successful?
The PAL-EBM helps executives and leaders discover a lack of balance that may be present in the organization, and helps you develop a pragmatic plan that allows you to recover that balance.
A practical, actionable workshop that helps you avoid being disrupted by competitors, identify what the most valuable steps you could be taking, and how to focus on the areas that are going to deliver the highest returns on investment for your organization.
If you’re curious about the experience, visit the Professional Agile Leadership Evidence-based Management course page.
About John Coleman
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