Unlocking Business Agility with Evidence-Based Management: Satisfy Customers and Improve Organizational Effectiveness

by Patricia Kong, Todd Miller, Kurt Bittner, Ryan Ripley

Overview

Leverage Evidence-Based Management, a scientific method, to enable organizations to achieve goals under conditions of uncertainty.

Organizations often believe in the certainty of their plans and see every deviation from the plan as a sign of failure. They view the organization as a machine for creating and executing plans instead of looking at it as a responsive organism, attentive to the changes in its environment. In a world of uncertainties, organizations need to be capable of reinventing themselves every day based on new information.

In Unlocking Business Agility with Evidence-Based Management, authors Patricia Kong, Todd Miller, Kurt Bittner, and Ryan Ripley use the framework developed by Scrum.org called Evidence-Based Management (EBM). EBM is an empirical approach that helps organizations use experimentation and rapid feedback to progress toward goals. This path is not always obvious or straightforward, but that is a benefit: in a complex and changing world, the path toward goals will always be uncertain. EBM helps organizations use new data to adapt their plan toward their goals.

Throughout the book, the authors present stories and experiences that illustrate how EBM can be applied to set better goals and then leverage empiricism to achieve those goals using feedback, learning, and evidence. This definitive guide will help your organization identify its true purpose, improve its ability to reach goals, and build a culture of trust, transparency, and growth.

• Clarify goals and demonstrate value, success, and progress using agile metrics
• Progress toward goals in uncertain and rapidly changing circumstances
• Embrace empiricism and experimentation to find solutions for complex problems
• Find real-world anonymized case studies on how to articulate goals and measurements in a way that fosters self-management and business agility

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Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780138244576
Publisher:	Pearson Education
Publication date:	10/31/2023
Series:	The Professional Scrum Series
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	6.95(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.54(d)

About the Author

Patricia Kong helps organizations thrive in a complex world by focusing on enterprise innovation, leadership, and teams. She is a people advocate and fascinated by organizational behavior and misbehaviors. She is co-author of The Nexus Framework for Scaling Scrum (Addison-Wesley, 2017).

Todd Miller has practical experience as a Scrum Master, Product Owner, Software Developer, and Agile coach on a variety of technical and creative projects across a multitude of industries. He has been a professional Scrum trainer with Scrum.org since 2016.

Kurt Bittner has been delivering working products in short, feedback-driven cycles for more than 40 years, and has helped many organizations do the same. He is particularly interested in helping people form strong, self-organizing, high-performance teams that deliver solutions that customers love, and helping organizations use empirical feedback to achieve customer outcome-focused goals.

Ryan Ripley is a Professional Scrum Trainer with Scrum.org, and has experience as a software developer, manager, director, and Scrum Master at various Fortune 500 companies in the medical device, wholesale, and financial services industries. He is the host of "Agile for Humans," the top agile podcast on iTunes. He recently co-wrote Fixing Your Scrum: Practical Solutions for Common Scrum Problems (Pragmatic Bookshelf, 2022).

Table of Contents

Foreword by Ken Schwaber xi

Foreword by Dave West xv

Preface xix

Introduction xxvii

Chapter 1: Finding Purpose 1

Rediscovering Purpose 3

Goals 4

How Goals and Measures Influence Behaviors 7

How to Rediscover Purpose 10

Closing Satisfaction Gaps Creates Value 11

Customer-Focused Goals Enable Autonomy and Purpose 14

Improving Strategic Goals 17

Ask “Why?” to Uncover the Real Objective 17

Refocus “Internal” Goals on What Customers Need to Experience 19

Think About How You Will Measure Progress Toward Your Vision 20

What to Watch For 21

Moving Forward 22

Chapter 2: Using Empiricism to Progress Toward Goals 23

Understanding Value 25

Progressing Toward Goals in a Series of Small Steps 27

Taking Small Steps Toward Goals 29

Steering Toward Goals 32

Adapting Goals 34

Adapting Tactics 36

The Real Purpose of Goals Is to Foster Conversations 36

Losing the Plot and Finding It Again 37

What to Watch For 38

Moving Forward 39

Chapter 3: Becoming (More) Effective 41

Value Is Essential, but Frequency Matters Too 42

It Is Not Delivery Speed That Is Important; It Is Feedback Speed 44

While Focusing on Speed, Do Not Lose Sight of Value 45

Speed Is Not Enough; Teams Must Also Be Effective 46

Too Many Things at Once 48

Where Should Teams Start? 50

Beware the Efficiency Trap 51

Balancing Speed and Effectiveness 52

Cutting Corners: Sometimes Necessary, Sometimes Fatal 53

What to Watch For 55

Moving Forward 56

Chapter 4: Managing and Overcoming Expectations 59

People Who Largely Seek to Validate Expectations Are Often Disappointed 60

Transforming “Bad News” into Just “News” 61

Letting Go of Expectations 64

Expectations Can Be Stubbornly Held 65

Replacing “Meeting Expectations” with “Seeking Goals” 68

Stakeholders and Transparency 69

How to Define and Categorize Stakeholders 70

Escaping the “Echo Chamber” 73

Diverse Perspectives Counter “Groupthink” 76

What to Watch For 77

Moving Forward 78

Chapter 5: Separating the Signal from the Noise 81

Identifying Signals 82

Interpreting Evidence from Signals 84

Dampening the Noise 85

Bias Creates Noise 88

The Customer Is Not Always Right 90

Objectifying Narratives 92

Getting Unstuck 94

Making Decisions 96

What to Watch For 97

Moving Forward 98

Chapter 6: Applying EBM at the Product Level 99

Mind the (Satisfaction) Gap 100

When You Find Yourself in a Hole, Stop Digging 101

Not All Ideas Are Valuable 103

Replacing False Certainty with Experimentation 104

Using Strategic Goal Mapping to Form Experiments 106

Products Are Vehicles for Running Experiments About Value 108

Sometimes Teams Lose the Thread and Need a Reminder 110

Running Experiments and Measuring Results 111

Inspecting Results and Adapting Next Steps 114

Customer Experience Is Not Always About More Features 117

Sometimes You Must Say No 120

What to Watch For 121

Moving Forward 122

Chapter 7: Applying EBM at the Portfolio Level 123

Maximizing Output Does Not Maximize Value 124

The Problems Start with Misfocused Goals 126

Revenue and Profit Are Important, But They Are Poor Goals 127

Reconnecting Investments with Customer Outcomes 128

You Can't Have It All at Once 129

How to Measure Outcomes 130

You Do Not Know What You Do Not Know 131

How to Choose Between Bets 132

Make Small Bets 133

Kill Bad Ideas as Quickly as Possible 135

Propose Experiments 138

Evaluate Proposals 139

Make Sure All the Cards Are on the Table 140

Keep Teams Intact, and Bring Them Work 140

Separating Budgeting from Funding 141

Run Experiments 141

Evaluate Progress Toward Goals 141

What to Watch For 144

Moving Forward 145

Chapter 8: Applying EBM at the Organizational Level 147

Why Change Efforts Fail 148

To Initiate Change, Give People a “Why” 149

Assess Where the Organization Is Today 150

Empowerment Takes Trust, Transparency, and Time 152

Benefits of Empowering Teams 153

Measuring Empowerment 154

Growing Empowerment 155

Inverting the Organization to Support Empowerment 156

Reducing Context Switching 157

Growing Self-Sufficient Teams 158

Aligning Supporting Departments 160

Setting and Adapting Goals 163

Most Goals Can—and Should—Change 163

What to Watch For 164

Moving Forward 165

Index 167