Published August 2020
Note from the author: This is an e-book on developing the core abilities to level up your business. Scroll down to the bottom of this page for an index of links to chapters and sections. If you have feedback, I’d love to hear it: send to kaufie@hey.com
It seems like everyone has caught on. More organisations than ever are adopting the progressive values associated with the Agile movement; they want to empower employees, rapidly respond to change, connect to the customer and continuously improve. The values these things relate to may be associated with Agile, but they go beyond movements and classifications - they are simply a way to create more innovative, responsive and happy places to work. You don’t need to officially “Go Agile” to sign up to them; just take action and use them in decision making.
The desire to do this is real, but there’s often a mismatch between the talk and action. Senior managers sometimes struggle to relinquish the often illusionary control that traditional project management provides. They may be unclear on how to measure progress in this new environment, or content to provide lip service to values without really seeing a need to change.
I wrote this book to help leaders and managers understand what they should be measuring to adopt these values, and in doing so develop what I call ‘Core Organisatonal Abilities’; Orient, Respond, Communicate and Learn. Every organisation has different challenges and therefore will need to be stronger in different areas, just like the abilities of athletes will differ according to sport. It’s up to you to work out which to dial up based on the opportunities or challenges you’re facing.
The layout of this book is as follows: The first chapter looks at the ‘metric’ terminology, clarifying some of the terms and the way that they’ll be used. Chapter 2 outlines what we should be measuring in organisations adopting Agile values and paints a picture of what the Good, the Bad and the Ugly are when it comes to metrics. Subsequently we’ll look in detail at the four fundamental variables to measure in large modern organisations. In Chapter 3: Orient, we see how to measure progress towards a goal and do forecasting. Chapter 4: Respond, outlines how we can measure the true metric for Agility, our ability to respond to change. In Chapter 5: Communicate, we look at how to measure openness, safety and transparency to enable communication across the organisation. Then in Chapter 6: Learn, we discuss measures of organisational learning. Finally Chapter 7 brings this together and concludes.
I hope that this book helps you gain clarity on what abilities you need to refine, and how you will measure and develop them.
Release date TBC.
Release date TBC.
Release date TBC.