Practical Agile Management — Working on my Book

I’m working on a book to support the development of my approach to operational agility, called Practical Agile Management.

Here is an excerpt from the Strategic Planning chapter:

‘When you think about agility from a technology and product perspective you must realize that the people who fill your Product Management or Product Owner roles are not always thinking strategically when deciding what to work on. Rather they are tactical in their approach because they are focused on ensuring their teams have work to do, whether that work delivers value is not something they are necessarily concerned with, primarily because they have not been provided strategic objectives and outcomes from which to work. They lack an anchor from which to assess value.

If you have heard the term, feature factory, this is what we are referring to. Your teams are churning out features that are not aligned with the strategic direction of the organization or with real customer needs. You are not maximizing your investment in product development when you can’t quantify the strategic value of these features.’

I’ll be adding more content as a preview to the book in the coming weeks.

Practical Agile Management expressly engages the very group that has been ignored by virtually every agile transformation effort. Without engaging management to take on the heavy lifting required to update your organization’s business processes, you will not attain any agility. Not that your organization won’t continue to have success, however, agility is a defense against future risk, not necessarily a way to make you more successful.