Matthew E Edgar

“Agile organizations must adhere to the same values as agile teams: • Delivering value over meeting constraints • Leading the team over managing tasks • Adapting to change over conforming to plans Executives and managers need to lead their organizations in living these values and taking actions based on them—and one of the critical areas on which they need to take action is measuring performance in ways that encourage their organizations to embrace agility.”
― Jim Highsmith, Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products

“At the end of every scientific paper there is a familiar coda: more research is needed, more research is needed. What, I wondered, if we added a new coda: more action is needed. It need not be discordant with the first.”
― Michael G. Marmot, The Health Gap: The Challenge of an Unequal World

“When applying agile practices at the portfolio level, similar benefits accrue: • Demonstrable results—Every quarter or so products, or at least deployable pieces of products, are developed, implemented, tested, and accepted. Short projects deliver chunks of functionality incrementally. • Customer feedback—Each quarter product managers review results and provide feedback, and executives can view progress in terms of working products. • Better portfolio planning—Portfolio planning is more realistic because it is based on deployed whole or partial products. • Flexibility—Portfolios can be steered toward changing business goals and higher-value projects because changes are easy to incorporate at the end of each quarter. Because projects produce working products, partial value is captured rather than being lost completely as usually happens with serial projects that are terminated early. • Productivity—There is a hidden productivity improvement with agile methods from the work not done. Through constant negotiation, small projects are both eliminated and pared down.”
― Jim Highsmith, Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products

“It is wrong to suppose that if you can’t measure it you can’t manage it—a costly myth.”
― Mark Schwartz, Adaptive Ethics for Digital Transformation: A New Approach for Enterprise Leaders