What's your thoughts on Evidence-Based Management ?

Agree with Sergio that the idea of EBM is not new and seems to be yet another re-discovery of human ways of working. It is not bad if younger generations discover stuff and are proud of being revolutionary, but older guys smile.

German general von Moltke wrote about 1860 that ‚no plan survives the first contact with the enemy‘ and described ‚mission-based tactics‘ which were used successfully by the German armies in WWI and WWII, the US army deployed it in the 1960s. Mission based tactics basically describe what we call agile today, are based on evidence found as we go and create value.
Not saying that Moltke was the first, Alexander the Great seemed to have used similar ways of working.

We could learn a lot from military. Another example is that there is no merit in strategy planning and handing it over to operations (which leads to 80% of strategy ‚implementations‘ fail, according to PMI Pulse).
What is the strategic plan of a fire department? There is none, they develop and prepare a bunch of strategies and find out what works in every single case.

From frameworks to whatever works.

Dear Rami
Interesting your question
Thanks for sharing

It is a management approach applied in software development and other business sectors.

I believe it is still a recent approach that does not allow me to have an opinion formed

@Keith has stated the "master key" with his comment. Scrum framework like other agile based method are evolution of the same methods that were created for object orientation then the basement is software/system engineering. Today object orientation goes unnoticed but it was the "break" in software field that allows all we used today. I know that because I worked with today "cellebrities" in the OOSPLA each year. With that said, evidence-management is not new and it is not created by Scrum, it is taken from practices that are there in software from long time ago (you can go to Tom Gilb work for example). I am using it and I help lot of organizations (including my actual work place) to use and implement it from years. Trying to continue adding information organizational governance frameworks/metods like "stage gate" use it. Knowledge management systems (systems is not synonim of software systems) and today callend big data in convination with AI helps a lot to create and environment to leverage what somebody call "evidence management". The important thing when you implement it at organizational level is try to make people do not feel that you are acting as a "police woman/man" in the process to collect evidences then the evidences are created in a "natural" way.

Dear Rami
I have a proposal to make you:
- Share with us more information about Evidence-Based Management

It seems to me an interesting approach.
To what extent is it limited to academia or applicable to organizations?

Dear Rami:
I could only find these 5 principles
Is it these principles that you refer to?

1. Face the hard facts and build a culture in which people are encouraged to tell the truth, even if it is unpleasant.
2. Be committed to fact-based decision making, which means being committed to getting the best evidence and using it to guide action.
3. Treat your organization like an unfinished prototype - encourage experimentation and learning by doing.
4. Look for the risks and disadvantages of what people recommend - even the best medicine has side effects.
5. Avoid basing decisions on untested but strongly held beliefs, what you have done in the past, or the uncritical benchmarking of what winners do.

Evidence-based management is less about how we manage knowledge but more about what we do with the analyzed data from our projects. As the 7th edition will be more principles than practice-based, my assumption would be that this is not included in detail, but any coverage of adaptive lifecycles would need to reference the importance of an empirical approach.

Agree with Sergio that the idea of EBM is not new and seems to be yet another re-discovery of human ways of working. It is not bad if younger generations discover stuff and are proud of being revolutionary, but older guys smile.

German general von Moltke wrote about 1860 that ‚no plan survives the first contact with the enemy‘ and described ‚mission-based tactics‘ which were used successfully by the German armies in WWI and WWII, the US army deployed it in the 1960s. Mission based tactics basically describe what we call agile today, are based on evidence found as we go and create value.
Not saying that Moltke was the first, Alexander the Great seemed to have used similar ways of working.

We could learn a lot from military. Another example is that there is no merit in strategy planning and handing it over to operations (which leads to 80% of strategy ‚implementations‘ fail, according to PMI Pulse).
What is the strategic plan of a fire department? There is none, they develop and prepare a bunch of strategies and find out what works in every single case.

From frameworks to whatever works.

"It is not bad if younger generations discover stuff and are proud of being revolutionary, but older guys smile."

I am going to use that phrase in the future.

Luis

It is not a recent approach at all but as Sergio mentioned, everyone develops Evidence Based KVA’s or KPI’s based on their experience. I just found this 11 pages guide from scrum.org to be a very brief but powerful one.

I was going through it while studying for my PSPO II Exam.

RK

Dear Rami
Thanks for this comment

After your question, I went looking for more information about Evidence Based Management.
Thank you for catching my eye on this management approach.

And I found those principles and wanted to validate with you

90s of the last century, in your opinion, an old approach?