This engagement model is appropriate for internal improvement initiatives and Centres of Excellence. Whether you are leading as a manager, coach, improvement lead or external contractor, you provide a service to your organisation. Tools like this one are really effective.
Understand the current situation and opportunities.
Managers and workers know the problems that exist. Working with an empathetic and objective 3rd party makes it easier to prioritise what really matters.
Define specific outcomes that make a measurable impact.
Measure what matters then nobody has to guess what may work. Whether it's revenue, retention, or defect rate, data is the key to controlling product development.
Coach, educate, advise, and support staff.
Achieving product-market fit is a process of countless small questions, experiments, and decisions. Staff are more confident of success if they can count on regular support from experts during the first iterations.
Support to maintain commitment to strategic goals.
Once a product performs in the market it becomes a cost centre to be managed. The 3rd party lens reminds management its strategic drivers and the measures needed to reach that position.
In the standup, we had a (brief) team discussion about tracking progress. I reacted against Jira because a) I dislike the user interface as it's a collaboration killer, and b) we aren't a software development or IT support team. Standup game visualises progress Three weeks later, team members Sam Thomas and @HughHadfield demonstrated this way […]
There is a workplace evolution underway, lots of people are signalling it. Dan Pink came-up with the label ‘Motivation 3.0’ in Drive; Jurgen Appelo followed suit with ‘Management 3.0’; and many of us speak of a move towards a Lean or Agile enterprise. Earlier this year, Frederic Laloux published Reinventing Organisations in which he not […]
We have some mid-tier consultants in at the moment who are "focussing on culture." Since we don't separate culture from delivering value to customers, I asked what that meant in practice. Apparently: "A generic scheme of manoeuvre could involve a diagnostic that looks at things like empowerment, psychological safety, collaboration, purpose, customer centricity… then based […]
