Agile in cycles

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Agile methods are a grand bargain with the sponsor and with the portfolio manager:

In trade for latitude to encourage and accept change, the agile project manager delivers the best value possible for the allocated investment

And so, one is encouraged to ask: how does the investment for  best value -- aka: optimum capital allocation -- get envisioned and planned?

Enter: Planning cycles!

Yes, but ....

The customer (user) determines value, so how does that dynamic get cranked in ... (out yonder, beyond agile interations where, close in,  the customer dynamic is well understood)?

After all, consider: the portfolio leader must come to grip with dynamics that may affect strategic optimization and value maximization. Customer-directed value may well:

•  Introduce unanticipated “creative destruction”, or “destructive innovation”
• Affect carefully crafted portfolio coherence and coupling
• Change commitments on the business and project scorecards, and
• Affect stakeholder KPI’s

 Throughput is the big test .... throughput is what counts in the end after all the creation and innovation

Eliyahu Goldratt and Jeff Cox, writing in their business novel “The Goal”, made popular the concept of throughput when they set down their ideas for the Theory of Constraints. Throughput—a particular focus of agile methods—is defined as:

Throughput is that which is valuable to customers and users for which they are willing to pay and willing to adopt in their operations.

In agile methods, planned throughput is adjusted after each cycle or iteration. This table summarizes agile throughput.

Agile throughput
Customers	Throughput is what customers buy and use
Stakeholders	Throughput improves the business scorecard
Project	·   Each agile iteration produces throughput ·   Each iteration consumes resources, and … ·   Depletes the business balance sheet
Business	Throughput restores business balance sheet over time

Need more? Chapter 11 in my book "Managing Project Value" will give you all you can handle.

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See when there is no light

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One idea -- among many -- on the qualities of leadership:

"A leader hears when there is no sound and sees when there is no light."

James Colvard

Perhaps so.
But that certainly leaves the rest of us 'in the dark', to say nothing of the 'sound of silence'.

A leader with such extrasensory sight and sound better also be a good visionary translator and enunciator, because that leader will have to be the author of all the stuff managers will need to see and hear and visualize -- no one else can really do it.

Command presence
But, of course, that leader is going to need more than a good story board. 'Command presence' is what is needed to attract the crowd and lead them to the promised outcome. I suggest you can only get so far with a directive style; you're going to need believers -- the faithful -- who will stick with you until they too can see "it" and hear "it"

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Read in the library at Square Peg Consulting about these books I've written
Buy them at any online book retailer!

Read my contribution to the Flashblog