Here’s hoping that the new year has begun well! Many of us gained multiple skills during 2020. It may have been forced – we’d guess that’s true for the majority(!), or it may have been a conscious effort to change or improve. Regardless, we hope that the qualities that you’ve accumulated will help you thrive in 2021!
This month’s newsletter is a mixed bag of stories of successful transformations, thoughts on change and some actionable insights on achieving your objectives. We hope you like it!
Aligning Strategy To Execution
Achieving alignment between strategic objectives and their corresponding project or product level execution has always been a challenge. In this article, Mahesh Singh, explains how Upstream Kanban can not only help leadership choose the right path forward but also help the teams closest to the action understand the importance of what they’ve been asked to do.
We recommend watching this recorded webinar that goes into specific details of how Upstream and Portfolio Kanban can help.
Shifting to Agile ways of working
In this interview conducted by McKinsey, the HQ Field Army — the branch of the British Army responsible for the generation and preparation of soldiers on operations around the world – discusses how shifting to an agile way of working enabled them to not only respond quickly to new opportunities, but also gave their workforce the freedom to flourish.
Mary Poppendieck on Why You Should Just Burn Your Backlog
The co-author of the widely read (and highly recommended!) ‘Lean Software Development’ argues that the essential metrics of software must be throughput and capacity. Have a read, and make sure you watch the video at the end where Agile Tour London attendees got exclusive access to Mary and Tom Poppendieck for an hour!
Webinars!
We have a couple of webinars lined up next month. Masa K Maeda, who took Kanban to numerous companies in over 10 countries, will share some of his experiences for successful agility adoption. And Anna Radzikowska, Product Manager of the Kanban Maturity Model, will show you what Discovery Kanban is and how you can apply the concepts of real options and triage to get your customers and your teams into real and meaningful conversations.