In this article, I’ll explore the need for and the attributes of an agile business operating system related to Private Equity (PE) portfolio companies. …

Aiming towards Sustainable Pace “Agile processes promote sustainable development. The sponsors, developers, and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely.” — The Agile Manifesto Principle “programmers or software developers should not work more than 40 hour weeks, and if there is overtime one week, that the next week should not include…

The title of my post may read like acronym soup but all of these concepts play a critical role in SAFe, and understanding how they’re connected is important to success. After exploring some connections, I will suggest some actions you can take while designing, evaluating, or accelerating your implementation. KPIs and OKRs The…

Here’s a frequently asked question in the SAFe community: I wanted to understand what SAFe says about someone who wants to go faster than 2 weeks of iteration? I mean the whole PI concept is based on 5 iterations worth of planning. What if a team/organization wants to develop and…

INVEST in effective SAFe PI Objectives Could the INVEST criteria Bill Wake came up with for evaluating User Stories help us come up with effective PI Objectives in SAFe as well? I think a good PI Objective should be: – Independent — meaning ideally it could be delivered and evaluated on its own without any dependency…

Improving Focus and Alignment by Organizing around OKRs and managing OKR Flow Today, I wanted to share two quick observations about OKRs. Too many teams working on each strategic OKR I encounter many organizations that use OKRs. Too many of them have this crazy matrix where the high-level OKRs — those that aim to achieve the organization’s strategy — map to too many teams/functions in the organization. This creates a…

Aligning Scrum Team Topology to Strategy with OKRs and Product Goals Yeah, I know. Could I squeeze more buzzwords into the title? I guess I could include Digital Transformation, Cloud, AI, and Machine Learning for effect. But seriously, I wanted to share some insights around how to align your Scrum Teams to your strategy leveraging OKRs and Product Goals. Driving Change Using OKRs We maintain…