Blogs

Stream-Aligned Teams and Platform Teams: Harnessing the Best of Both Worlds in Agile Environments

In the modern Agile landscape, organisations are constantly striving to balance their focus on outcome-driven results and output-focused execution.  The concept of a platform team has gained traction in recent years as businesses seek to improve productivity and streamline processes. Stream-aligned teams concentrate on delivering customer value, aligning their work with specific products or services. Conversely, platform teams provide shared services, tools, and infrastructure to…

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Crafting Effective OKRs: Lessons from Poetry and the Importance of Understanding Key Terms

While explaining the fundamentals of poetry may seem straightforward, crafting good poetry requires extensive practice and experimentation. It’s a process of writing numerous poems and constantly refining them to achieve a polished piece. As someone who is not a poet, I can only imagine how challenging and rewarding this journey must be. Similarly, my experience with OKRs has been a journey of discovery and experimentation….

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Understanding Structural Issues in Your Operations Model with OKRs

When it comes to implementing OKRs, it’s important to understand that they need to be aligned with your organisation’s overall strategy and structure. This can be challenging, especially when cascading the objectives down from leadership to the rest of the organisation. In this blog post, we’ll discuss how to identify alignment issues in your ops model with OKRs and what you can do about it….

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Aligning Your Ops Model for Customer Value: Output vs. Outcomes

In the world of business, the term ‘Ops Model’ is often used to describe the structure and processes that an organisation uses to deliver value to its customers. There are two main approaches to designing an Ops Model – aligning it to output or aligning it to outcomes. While both approaches have their pros and cons, it is important to understand that the choice you…

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What is an Ops Model and How Does it Work?

The Ops Model is a framework that revolves around system thinking in complex environments. It is centred on the groups or nodes within the system and the relationships or networks between them. The primary focus of the Ops Model is on the actual processes, frameworks, and ways of working within each of these groups, and how they impact the system as a whole. While understanding…

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Taylorism and the Evolution of Management: The Case of the Spotify Model

When Frederick Taylor published his “Principles of Scientific Management” in 1911, he laid the foundation for the idea of people as an integral part of the production process. Since then, many humanistic views have emerged that recognise people as a unique force in the delivery of work, from Mayo’s experiments with light bulbs to McGregor’s Theory X and Y and Frederic Laloux’s “Reinventing Organisations.” However,…

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Product Ownership, a special type of Chapter

In enterprise Agile models, product ownership and product management play crucial roles in delivering value to customers and driving the organisation’s success. When we overlay this with the chapter model, we can create a structure that ensures a strong dual governance approach that focuses on both people and product aspects. In the context of the dual governance approach within the chapter model, it’s essential to…

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Alignment between your OKRs and your delivery structure

OKRs, or Objectives and Key Results, have become a popular goal-setting framework in many businesses today. The idea is simple: define clear objectives, set measurable key results, and align the entire organization around them. However, implementing OKRs can be a challenge, especially when it comes to cascading them down from leadership to the rest of the organization. According to the OKR manual, objectives should be…

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Aligning Development and Operational Value Streams in Scaled Agile

The Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) specifically addresses the separation of development and operational value streams to optimise product development and delivery processes. Development Value Stream: The development value stream focuses on creating, evolving, and deploying solutions. It encompasses the entire process of ideation, design, development, testing, and deployment of products or features. The aim is to deliver valuable, high-quality solutions that meet customer needs and…

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Can you measure your transformation?

How can you define an appropriate unit of transformation value (UTV) for an operating model transformation? The UTV aims to quantify the overall impact and progress of an operating model transformation by considering multiple dimensions of the transformation, such as efficiency, effectiveness, agility, and innovation. To calculate the UTV, you can follow these steps: Identify Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) relevant to the transformation: Select KPIs…

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