AGILENOMICS™ Newsletter – April-May 2020
VALUE-SIDE THINKING BY AGILENOMICS™ BETA LAUNCH
Focus group completed in May 2020. Updates and Market Launch in June.
In our previous Newsletter, we made the following announcement: On March 20th, 2020 the first online course modules were released into the production environment of our website, www.agilenomics.net.
While this statement remains true, we opted for a smaller BETA focus group to take the course and get certified, before launching a formal marketing and advertising campaign. We took this approach for several reasons:
- We believe complete feedback loops are a pillar of Continuous Improvement.
- This is also the same pre-market beta-testing model used by several other industry offerings.
- User Experience with this first course is extremely critical, as it will lay the foundation for three other courses following at the heels of this one.
We assembled a panel of peers and professionals to act as our first live group of candidates for the AGN-PR (AGILENOMICS™ Practitioner) certification. The panel consisted of both Agile and non-Agile professionals, in order to ensure that the simplicity of our message transcends specific knowledge. When we say “Practicality. Common-Sense. Bottom-Line Agile”, our intent is to promote concepts and examples that everyone can understand.
The results have been extremely valuable in formulating a picture of what minor adjustments are required prior to full market launch (a.k.a. a full promotional campaign, given that the courses are actually online right now).
There are some sections that required a bit more clarification or minor design changes, but the preliminary feedback about the content, the educational value of the course material itself and most importantly the UNIQUENESS of these courses has been very promising. As a matter of fact, we are most pleased with the latter comments about uniqueness, because this feedback fully justifies our vision to differentiate our courses by focusing on the set of gaps that we are tackling.
“Bottom-Line Agility” is not widely understood or taught in the market. It’s not just about gaps, it’s also about mindset. The timeless quote attributed to Benjamin Franklin – “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” – describes the mindset behind tackling these gaps … we believe education and awareness can lead to a reduction in future instances of the case studies that we highlight in our AGILENOMICS™ courses.
OTHER NEWS
OUR SECOND AGILENOMICS™ ONLINE COURSE IS IN FINAL EDITING AND REVIEW, TARGETING A JULY LAUNCH.
We are pleased to announce that our second AGILENOMICS™ course “Revisiting the PMO in an Agile World” has been drafted and will undergo recording and final editing during the month of June. We fully expect market launch in July.
In order to understand the difference between a Transformation and a Process Optimization, we need to take a step back in time. In the 1990’s MBA courses would teach a concept known as Business Process Reengineering (BPR). Over time, and especially after 2005, the word Transformation appeared to dominate the industry. Whether BPR was replaced by the word “Transformation” in an exact or partial swap is something we leave to the academic researchers to conclude, but the important thing to note here is, both BPR and Transformation are different from Process Optimization.
Due to historical and other reasons, there has been an observed lag in the Legacy Project Management role adopting an effective agile mindset and helping transform traditional project portfolio management into an Agile state of governance. The goal of this course is to provide a foundation that combines mindset transformation requirements with a practical toolset that practitioners can apply in their environment.
This new course will be comprised of 11 Topics:
- PMO Relevance in Agile – Answering the Legacy Question
- The PMO as an Agile Portfolio Facilitator
- Striving for Predictability – Project Plans vs. Roadmaps
- Agile Roadmap Governance – Predictability for Teams & Roadmaps
- Agile Roadmap Governance – Prioritization
- Agile Roadmap Governance – Sequencing
- Agile Roadmap Governance – Value, ROI, & WIP Feedback Loops
- Agile Roadmap Governance – Visualizing the Roadmap
- Long-Term Cost Governance – Preserving Project Value and ROI
- Innovative Governance – Prioritization and Transparency for Leadership Tasks
- Differentiating Utopian, Business, & Bottom-Line Agility
The last topic is our formal response to contemporary industry evolution in the area of “Business Agility”. We understand that a single industry-accepted detailed definition of Business Agility (similarly to the Agile Manifesto) is still under discussion by industry experts. We do accept that there are general guidelines and areas of focus for Organizations to increase their “Business Agility”. However, as far as specifics are concerned, we are not interested in attempting to propose yet another detailed definition. Instead, we accept the idea that a “Utopian state of Agility” is still everyone’s goal, and “Business Agility” is part of a Utopian state. Our entire course offering focuses on visible “gaps” that we see in front of us, and which prevent us from attaining an ideal or “Utopian Agility”.
Our approach has been and will continue to be an approach from the perspective of “Bottom-Line Agility”. Whether or not some or any parallel or cross- over concepts exist between “Bottom-Line Agility” and whatever the industry concludes as a definition for “Business Agility” is not material. Real gaps exist today, and as a result we need solutions right away.
The PMO is just as thirsty for a structured approach to evolving into an effective Agile Project Portfolio Facilitator as any other team or individual that has been struggling with the process gaps that prevent them from attaining a state of “Utopian Agility”.
We are expecting positive feedback from the market as our online course attempts to bridge some of these gaps. As always, one topic will be free of charge as a “sample”, and the course will also come with an exam and certification, visible on the student’s LinkedIn profile.
