Agile Strategy Management

Your strategic initiatives are constantly under fire due to the evolving nature of markets, technology, laws, and government. To ensure your strategy succeeds, it must remain flexible while confronting these shifting challenges. Agile Strategy Management: Techniques for Continuous Alignment and Improvement explains how to achieve this flexibility by building agility into the initiation, development, implementation, and governance of your strategic initiatives. The book details what it takes to initiate, develop, implement, and govern a healthy strategy that delivers the benefits expected by all stakeholders. It presents insights gained by the author’s organization over the last 25 years helping their clients achieve success with their strategic initiatives. Filled with real-world examples and case studies, it illustrates wide-ranging situations where the author’s company helped clients reach important business objectives. Readers can use the book to look up examples that describe the various ways to use agile methods and techniques for critical business functions, including: Scope definition of strategic initiatives Stakeholder identification Team building Project and program quality management Change management Procurement of resources Solution development, implementation, and quality management Strategy governance In this book, you will find guidelines that explain how to establish internal organizations for change and how to ensure these intermediate organizations stay motivated until final solution delivery. Presenting success stories as well as major blunders, the book can help you avoid many of the pitfalls that other organizations have experienced while governing their strategic initiatives.

In a world of rapid and unpredictable change, the problem with strategic planning is that if you follow your plan through to the end, you will get exactly what you used to want. What you need is a framework for planning and implementing a strategy that is agile enough to adapt to a dynamic environment but focused enough to deliver. That framework is the Dynamic Balanced Scorecard. The original Balanced Scorecard system has proven the most popular, successful and enduring framework for strategy execution over the last 25 years. Comprising a Strategy Map and a scorecard of KPIs, targets and initiatives, the framework helped organizations distil a strategy into actionable components and measure progress towards a strategic vision, while also implementing and monitoring the actions that drove change. However, for all its success, the Balanced Scorecard system now needs to evolve for the digital age. Until now, building the system, rolling it out enterprise-wide and adapting it to external changes has been a lengthy process. While the fundamental principles of the system are still sound and relevant, it needs to become nimbler and more responsive. The book provides a step-by-step guide to agile strategy management: from formulation to implementation to learning and adapting. For each of the steps, the book explains how Dynamic Balanced Scorecards, fit for the digital age, are built and deployed.

In a very real sense, Michael Lodato has been working on this handbook for over 45 years - starting in 1968 when, as a new CEO of a small consulting company, he attended a seminar on strategic planning at UCLA. The resulting strategy helped run the company but also served as the first template for his strategic planning methodology. Over the years, as a result of working on real issues, faced by him as an executive and client corporations, the template expanded to add tactical planning and features to handle changes in the business environments that may be coming or have already occurred, to quickly assess the impact of such changes on success, and to adapt to the new realities by making changes to its strategies, tactics and processes in time avoid bad results In short, he added agility to the template that is the substance of this handbook. This is not a text book or a book on strategic management theory. It is a step-by-step, here's-how-to-do-it guide to achieving agile strategic management. All of this growth in the strategic management processes came, not as an academic activity. It is written for people who do, or aspire to do the work of strategic management. As you learn about the processes and read stories about how they have applied to a wide range of situations, think through how you might apply them to the situations, issues and opportunities you face. They are intended to help you unleash the talent that resides in your team and organization. The resulting methodology includes processes that guide all the work of strategic management at all levels: from strategic, through tactical, and down to individual action items in such a way that there is a strong interdependence among them.

This book examines agile approaches from a management perspective by focusing on matters of strategy, implementation, organization and people. It examines the turbulence of the marketplace and business environment in order to identify what role agile management has to play in coping with such change and uncertainty. Based on observations, personal experience and extensive research, it clearly identifies the fabric of the agile organization, helping managers to become agile leaders in an uncertain world. The book opens with a broad survey of agile strategies, comparing and contrasting some of the major methodologies selected on the basis of where they lie on a continuum of ceremony and formality, ranging from the minimalist technique-driven and software engineering focused XP, to the pragmatic product-project paradigm that is Scrum and its scaled counterpart SAFe®, to the comparatively project-centric DSDM. Subsequently, the core of the book focuses on DSDM, owing to the method’s comprehensive elaboration of program and project management practices. This work will chiefly be of interest to all those with decision-making authority within their organizations (e.g., senior managers, line managers, program, project and risk managers) and for whom topics such as strategy, finance, quality, governance and risk management constitute a daily aspect of their work. It will, however, also be of interest to those readers in advanced management or business administration courses (e.g., MBA, MSc), who wish to engage in the management of agile organizations and thus need to adapt their skills and knowledge accordingly.

Agile Strategy is a practical guide for managers responsible for setting the strategic direction of their organisations in increasingly dynamic markets. Through its frameworks, tools and real-world examples, it explains how to transform business performance through greater organisational agility. LEADERSHIP AND MANAGEMENT STRATEGY BUSINESS TRANSFORMATION Why do we need a new book on strategy? The pace of change is increasing, and strategic management is not keeping up. More than one in four (28%) strategic initiatives fail to meet their original goals and business intent[1], with insufficient agility identified as one of the top three barriers to successful strategy implementation[2]. The square peg of traditional strategy — vision, mission and blue-sky exercises; the separation of strategy from “implementation” — no longer fits the round hole of increasingly dynamic markets. It is time for a new approach. How is Agile Strategy different? Agile Strategy distinguishes itself from other strategy and agile books currently available in that it is: Designed for large organisations: Much of the writing on agile techniques addresses start-ups or small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), which operate under very different constraints and freedoms. Agile Strategy is written for large organisations who want to be more agile. Commercially-led: The approach is not a lightly airbrushed business rewrite of agile software development practices, but rather a fundamental rethinking of commercial and operational business practices. Practical: It is anchored in innovative and robust concepts but designed as a practical “how-to” guide: a book for practitioners, written by a practitioner. Results-focused: Whilst addressing a broad range of organisational topics, the book is grounded in the definition and delivery of measurable business benefits. Why should I read it? Agile Strategy offers four key benefits to its readers: A clear framework ("RADAR") A single, easy-to-grasp guiding principle: The Horizon Measurable benefits A practical approach I hope you not only enjoy reading about this innovative new approach, but also go on to realise the full potential of your organisation by implementing it. Good luck! Ralph Fernando [1] Project Management Institute (2017) Pulse of the Profession [2] The Economist Intelligence Unit (2017) Closing the Gap: Designing and Delivering a Strategy that Works"

Ten skills for agile leadership Complex challenges are all around us—they impact our companies, our communities, and our planet. This complexity and the emergence of networks is changing the practice of strategic management. Today’s leaders need to understand how to design and guide complex collaborations to accelerate innovation and change—collaborations that cross boundaries both inside and outside organizations. Strategic Doing introduces you to the new disciplines of agile strategy and collaborative leadership. You’ll learn how to design and guide complex collaborations by following a discipline of simple rules that you won’t find anywhere else. • Unleash the power of true collaboration • Learn and master the 10 skills of agile leadership • Apply individual skills to targeted situations • Introduces a new discipline of leadership strategy Filled with compelling case studies, Strategic Doing outlines a new discipline of leadership strategy specifically designed for open, loosely-connected networks.

The global higher education sector has changed dramatically as universities continue to face unprecedented challenges associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. Many are struggling to navigate this crisis while maintaining high-quality course delivery, ensuring strong student recruitment numbers, and providing clear communication to staff and students. Issues have emerged at an exponential rate, and coping with the pandemic has been particularly difficult for universities as they serve several functions, such as being educational institutions as well as major employers. Leadership and Management Strategies for Creating Agile Universities reflects on the challenges that higher education institutions have faced during the pandemic and the associated projected socio-economic impact yet to be felt. It also considers how different universities have addressed the challenges so as to learn what has and has not worked and speculates what future implications exist for the vision of a new higher education sector in a changing world. Covering topics such as developmental leadership, IT governance, and lifelong learning, it is ideal for policymakers, industry professionals, academicians, researchers, governors, decision makers, teachers, and students.

Agile Practice Guide – First Edition has been developed as a resource to understand, evaluate, and use agile and hybrid agile approaches. This practice guide provides guidance on when, where, and how to apply agile approaches and provides practical tools for practitioners and organizations wanting to increase agility. This practice guide is aligned with other PMI standards, including A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK® Guide) – Sixth Edition, and was developed as the result of collaboration between the Project Management Institute and the Agile Alliance.