Evidence Based Management
Which of the following measures would help you understand the potential market for your product?
All of the above. A) Net Promoter Score (NPS). B) Market Share trends. C) Quarterly revenue trends. D) Usage Index. All of these measures will help you to understand the needs of potential customers.
You want to improve your team's Ability to Innovate. Which of the following actions might help?
All of the above. Establish "No Meetings" days to help increase focus. Improve the cross-functional skills of your team. Reduce the number of product variants. Feedback: All of these actions will enable the team to focus on value-added activities by reducing overhead and distractions.
You want to improve your team's Ability to Innovate. Which of the following actions might help?
All of the above: Establish "No Meetings" days to help increase focus. Improve the cross-functional skills of your team. Reduce the number of product variants.
Your CEO thinks your organization needs to deliver more quickly. There is no shortage of opinions about how you should go about this. Some managers think they need to hire more people, some engineers think the answer is automation. You can't pursue every idea, and some ideas may not be worth pursuing. What could best help you understand the problem and where to improve?
Create a Value Stream Map to understand the current process and its bottlenecks. Feedback: Value Stream mapping will help you understand your process and will highlight opportunities to eliminate waste and wait-time. Analyzing utilization may help you understand wait-time, but not the reasons behind it. Hiring more people may actually slow-down your delivery process.
Your product's sales are falling behind competitors, but you don't know why. Which Key Value Areas would give you the best insight into what to do next?
Current Value. Unrealized Value. Feedback: Focus first on whether or how your product delivers value to customers, as well as whether your customers have unmet needs that your competitors are more effectively meeting.
Your company is considering investing in a large agile transformation. What should you measure to know if your initiative is successful?
Customer outcomes. Successful agile transformation should increase business value, which can be measured by customer happiness; all other measures are secondary.
True or False: When many agile teams are working on different products, they should create a common status reporting dashboard of work performed in order for management to understand the status of each team.
False Feedback: Understanding progress against goals provides the best insight into a team's progress, not arbitrary measures like work performed or performance against a schedule. The teams could work together to develop a common way to share their goals and what they achieve in each planning period against those goals.
The main benefit of following an agile approach is to deliver solutions more quickly.
False. Delivering faster is of no benefit if the solution does not meet the customer or user's needs. The main benefit of an agile approach is that it provides an opportunity to inspect the value that customers experience and adapt based on that feedback.
A good strategic goal must be specific, measurable, actionable, realistic, and time-bound.
False. In a complex world, a good strategic goal is specific and measurable, but does not need to be actionable, realistic, or time-bound. It should not be assigned to people or a team as performance measures. Goals may change over time as the organization learns more.
The Evidence-Based Management framework helps you to:
Improve your ability to deliver value. Evidence-Based Management helps you to improve the value that your organization delivers to customers.
Your company has many unique variations of the same product that it sells to different customers. Maintaining all these versions leaves you no time to improve the product. What measure(s) should you examine to help you to improve your ability to deliver value?
Innovation Rate. Spending most of your time maintaining different versions of a product is a clear sign that technical debt may be limiting your ability to innovate.
Product A is the main driver of both revenue and profit for your company; it has very happy customers (high Current Value) and low Unrealized Value. Product B is relatively new; it has low Current Value and high Unrealized Value. Both Product Owners of the two products are requesting significant additional funding to improve their products. What do you do?
Invest funding in Product B, because it has more future potential for the company. Customers are happy with Product A as it is; adding more features may actually decrease customer satisfaction. The best time to invest in new products is when you have a secure source of profits from existing products.
You have many customers on older releases who express frustration that they cannot adopt your latest releases as fast as you release them. At the same time, you are in a competitive market and you feel that you need to stay ahead of competitors. With every new release, you are spread more thin because you also have to fix defects and make enhancements to older releases. What should you do in response?
Pause developing new features to make upgrading easier and less risky. Improving the upgradeability of your product will help your customers to obtain more value from the product. If they can't use new releases, they can't obtain any value from them.
Product A has a very high Net Promoter Score (NPS) and high market share. Product B has low NPS, low market share, but is in a growing market in which no other competitor has significant market share. Which product should you prioritize in funding?
Product B. Feedback: Product A's customers are well-satisfied; additional features may actually lead to lower satisfaction. You should fund the Product with the greatest opportunity to close the customer's gap between current and desired outcomes.
You would like to improve your ability to respond to new market opportunities. Which measure would NOT help you to understand how to improve your responsiveness?
Revenue per employee. Revenue per Employee will not help you understand how you can be more responsive.
Which statement describes the best way to learn from experiments?
Running one experiment on the product at a time is the best way for you to understand how the results you observed affect your desired outcomes. Feedback When you run more than one experiment at once, you will not be able to tell which experiment caused the result you observed. Running multiple experiments on the same product at the same time does not help to reduce the cost and complexity of testing new ideas.
Measuring the number of times per day a team switches tasks or is interrupted will help you to better understand which Key Value Area?
Time to Market. Feedback: Interruptions and task switching cause a team to lose focus, which results in less value being produced per interval of time, which is another way of looking at their Ability to Innovate. It could potentially affect Time to Market because interruptions cause loss of focus which can lead to delay.
A benefit of using an agile approach is decreasing non-value-added waste.
True. Non-value-added waste reduces the ability of an organization to deliver valuable outcomes to customers.
True or False: A benefit of using an agile approach is managing business risk more effectively.
True. Unmanaged risk can reduce the long-term ability of an organization to deliver value to its customers.
You release your product to customers once every month, which is better than any competitor. Most of the features you deliver are simply minor changes or corrections to existing features, but customer satisfaction remains low. What Key Value Area should be your primary focus to improve the competitiveness of your product?
Unrealized Value and Ability to Innovate. Although the Scrum Team is working hard, it is not focused on the most valuable product capabilities. In order to improve, it needs to be more focused on delivering value and reducing non value-added work. The Scrum Team may also not understand what would be most valuable to customers. The Scrum Team also should explore what they are doing now that might better satisfy customers.
Your company's product has been through multiple releases. It is not meeting revenue expectations. What measure will help you understand the problem?
Usage Index. Understanding how your customer is using your product will help you to understand how you can better serve their needs, which will help you to improve the product's performance.
Team A has a velocity of 30 with a Product Backlog of 120 points ordered by business value as perceived by stakeholders. Delivery is expected in 5 Sprints. Will this project deliver the anticipated impact?
We do not know. Feedback: None of the information provided gives you any insight into the value the product delivers.
Team A has an average velocity of 30. Team B has an average velocity of 42. Which team is delivering more value?
We do not know; velocity is not a measure of value. Velocity only measures effort, not value.
Your executive sponsor visits the executives of an important customer. During the visit, they communicate to her what they believe is an important feature for your next product release, and your sponsor promises it will be in the release. Your team builds and delivers the feature as promised. Over the next three months, your measures of the usage of the feature show that it has not been used. When you ask users from this important customer "why?", they indicate that they did not need the feature and their executives don't really understand the needs of their users. Do you communicate this to your executive sponsor?
Yes. If you share what you learned from the release with the sponsor, it may help them improve their ability to ask probing questions with customers. Feedback Even the most knowledgeable stakeholders can act on incorrect information. It's important for them to learn to ask probing questions, and to be open to new information.
