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I am often asked how to create better goals. This comes up at the team level, and it also comes up for the wider organization. When we are dealing with complexity, there is no one right way, no perfect template, and no best practice.

Professional Agile Leadership – Evidence-Based Management (PAL-EBM) is the newest course in the Scrum.org portfolio. To prepare the launch and our trainer community for this one-day workshop, we ran several train-the-trainer events. I enjoyed participating in one of those, and I am glad to share my experience with you.

When I’m describing the Key Value Areas (KVAs) of Evidence-Based Management, I find Time to Market is often misunderstood to mean “just go faster.” We need to scrub off the scent of “we know what we need to do, we just need to do it faster.” In complexity, goals and execution have a lot of unknowns, and things emerge as we do the work. So, we will be unsuccessful if we choose to follow a plan, even if we do it faster.

We've all had challenges with various stakeholders coming to us with a whole bunch of different information and wanting a whole bunch of different things. Who do I listen to? What’s most important?

Does an organization live in the present or in the past? The answer seems obvious: of course in the present! But what if organizations are living in the past? How that night be the case and what can bring the organization back to the present? Let's dive deeper into this questions.

When (Patricia Kong - Product Owner of Enterprise Solutions at Scrum.org) taught me how to combine the chocolatey-goodness of Evidence Based Management with the hazelnutty-goodness of Hypothesis Driven Delivery, I was ecstatic! "AHA!", I says to myself.

I need your advice to solve a personal problem...

Let's explore lessons from three of my success stories and two failures so you don't make the mistakes I made.

Gathering the metrics for Evidence-based Management in software organisations can be a strenuous task and I have a number of customers that are fretting on what to collect and from where.

The most recent evolution of the Evidence-Based Management Guide (EBM) introduced three kinds of goals...

For organizations in the midst of an agile transformation, the question “how do we know if/when we’re agile?” is pressing.

Professional Scrum Trainer, Sahin Guvenilir, discusses measuring value, improving outcomes, and using the best available evidence to decide the next steps against a Strategic Goal.

Technical debt seems like a topic that resides completely in the domain of a Development Team. They are responsible for delivering a potentially releasable Increment after all. But might there be more to it for a Product Owner?

Part I of this Evidence-Based Management (EBM) blog post series covered a general introduction to show how evidence-based management can be a powerful instrument when being used in agile transformations.

Katas and patterns go hand in hand and so does the Agile Transformation Kata (ATK) harmonize very well with the organizational change patterns published for example by Mary Lynn Manns and Linda Rising in their book  More Fearless Change.

Just to set the scene, I haven’t figured this out yet. I can tell you my story, in all its ugliness. It’s based on a real story, but it’s changed significantly from reality to protect the innocent. I hope you still find my account useful.

The term Agile Transformation is often mingled together with a series of other things, for example a business transformation or a digital transformation. These are however very different things.

Imagine for a moment what frequently asked questions around agile transformations look like. Which questions do you hear most often as it seems agile transformation has been a hot topic lately?

For executives and for change agents who deal with executives in large contexts ...

An executive is a person who owns the strategy or sets the direction of travel or sets justifications for spending. This exec could be the Product Owner for a chunk of the organization.

A few weeks ago I headed out to the Scrum.org offices in Boston to participate in training to hone my skills as an Evidence-based Management Consultant.