Most companies have typically used “projects” as their unit of focus for budgeting, planning, team creation, and work organization. When taking an end-to-end organizational agility perspective, projects are a very poor unit of focus. Projects are fleeting — they have start dates and end dates. To achieve our goals for full business agility, we instead need to organize around and align with a more long-lived, stable unit of focus. Good example units of focus would be products, capabilities, value streams, and customer journeys.
This presentation will illustrate the problem with using projects as the unit of focus. It will then define the characteristics that constitute a good unit of focus. Each of those characteristics will be explored in detail. Along the way, Ken will discuss his experiences helping many large companies around the word with their agile journeys and will illustrate examples of how these companies choose their unit of focus and what kind of results they achieved.
Ken Rubin is the author of Amazon’s #1 best-selling book Essential Scrum: A Practical Guide to the Most Popular Agile Process. As an agile thought leader, Ken founded Innolution where he helps organizations thrive through the application of agile principles in an effective and economically... Read More →
