Want Organizational Agility? Change What Management Measures (Part 4)
Johanna Rothman, known as the "Pragmatic Manager," offers frank advice for your challenging problems. She consults with leaders and teams to help them learn about practical and possible options. They can then decide how to adapt their product development. Her most recent book is "Project Lifecycles: How to Reduce Risks, Release Successful Products, and Increase Agility." See www.jrothman.com for all her books.
I already said that organizational agility requires adaptability and resilience. And that organizational agility is not a simple change in approach, but requires a culture change from management competition to management collaboration. Then I said the “obvious”—that organizational agility requires small planning, fast decisions, and frequent replanning.
This article is about the measures to encourage those cultural changes for enterprise agility to take hold and thrive. While I say “project manager” in this article, these ideas also apply to program managers and any titled leader in the organization.
I’m not going to examine the financial measures that many organizations need, such as revenue, customer retention, and possibly capitalization versus operational expenses. (My dear readers: If you want one of those articles, please let me know in the comments.)
Instead, let me address why traditional activity-based performance measures don’t work for organizational agility.
Why Traditional Metrics Don’t Work for Organizational Agility
Many managers have to manage their “personal” performance measures. Some organizations frame those as MBOs (management by objectives), KPIs (key performance indicator) or OKRs (objectives and key results). However, all of these possibilities are supposed to be organization-wide…
Please log in or sign up below to read the rest of the article.
|
"Laughter is the shortest distance between two people." - Victor Borge |
