Agile Teams & Performance Appraisal

It is that part of the year for a lot of people at various organizations where managers provide feedback and rate individuals on their performance during the previous year. I am sure we have seen the “Bell Curve” at some point in time of our work lives or may be part of school grading systems (Some schools also use the bell curve to grade students).

Through my experience in Lean & Agile I have come to believe that Lean & Agile values more:

- Cross functional Teams as against functionally silo teams.
- Self-organizing Teams as against directed teams.
- Empowered Teams as against Teams working under command and control.
- High Performing teams as against top performers.

I have always looked at the above as the Manifestos for High Performing Agile Teams.

A lot of organizations are still challenged with the superficial problem of how we fit Lean and Agile teams on “The Bell Curve”.  Ideally I would like teams to be graded rather than individuals and this should work provided team members are fine to be graded as teams.

If you have tried something similar or are already thinking about it I would like to learn from your experiences in solving this problem.

Please share your thoughts.

Lean Startup: Reduce time to market time & cost.

What is a Lean Startup?

Definition from Eric Ries, Founder of Lean Startup Movement is simple and concise.

“A Human institution designed to create new products and services under conditions of extreme uncertainty. Nothing to do with size of the company, sector of the economy or industry”
                                                                                         - Eric Ries, Founder of Lean Startup Movement.

"Lean Startup" is a system for developing a business or product in the most efficient way possible to reduce the risk of failure.

It is an approach for launching businesses and products that treats all product and business ideas as assumptions (or hypotheses) that must be validated by rapid experimentation in the marketplace.  The approach relies on scientific experimentation, iterative product releases, and customer’s feedback to generate validated learning.

If you need some more info hop to http://theleanstartup.com/

So now that we have some context into Lean Startup and if you are planning to launch a new technology product or are worried about time to market on your existing products, I would like to share an interesting case study how Lean Startup helped a product launch:

- Reduce time to market by 40%
- Reduce cost by 32%.
- Improved Quality by 55%
- Improved Business value by 40%

This Webinar is a walk-through of a "Live Product" built using Lean Startup & MVP approach that proves quantitative gain in time, cost quality & business value.

Webinar - Lean Startup: Reduce 40% go-to-market time & cost on your next product launch

This Webinar is a walk-through of a "Live Product" built using Lean Startup & MVP approach that proves quantitative gain in time, cost quality & business value.

The webinar would focus on the following topics:
- Concerns while new product development & How Lean Startup addresses these questions / challenges
- What is Lean Startup
- Lean Startup vs Traditional Approach
- Innovation and speed through MVP and Continuous deployment
- Aligning Product Launch, Marketing and Sales in Lean Startup approach
- Introducing Customer Engagement in the product life cycle
- Reduce time & cost by almost 40%
- Increase product quality and business value by 50%
- Case study - showcasing Lean startup benefits
- How Lean Startup can be applied in Enterprises