Moving the Needle With Lean OKRs

Moving the Needle With Lean OKRs
Author: Bart den Haak
Publisher: Business Expert Press
Total Pages: 387
Release: 2021-11-05
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1637421168

Leaders in the digital era are faced with breaking into new markets, disrupting existing ones, and doing so with more precision than ever before just to keep up with their competitors. To innovate more quickly, to rapidly experiment with ideas and technology, to pivot seemingly overnight, you need to have a system in place that can help you execute your most ambitious strategy. While OKRs (Objective and Key Results) have made huge waves recently, practical implementation of OKRs remains elusive for many. Lean OKRs are the evolved version of the OKR strategy execution tool that has powered the transformational journeys of giants like Google and Facebook. It is the lightweight method that turns good ideas into great execution, heightens employee engagement, aligns teams, and achieves measurable, breakthrough results. Lean OKRs presents insightful anecdotes, creative exercises, clear figures and step-by-step models. Designed as a comprehensive guide, it covers everything from theoretical roots to practical execution, including company-wide strategy alignment and emotional management. Applicable to small companies as well as large organisations, Lean OKRs drives innovation through behavioral changes, empowering and motivating teams through focused daily OKR practices that are simple to put into action. Practical and to the point, this book integrates a unique combination of structural and leadership strategies, resulting in a new approach to OKRs that conquers the hurdles experienced by most business leaders today.

New Perspectives and Possibilities in Strategic Management in the 21st Century: Between Tradition and Modernity

New Perspectives and Possibilities in Strategic Management in the 21st Century: Between Tradition and Modernity
Author: Martínez-Falcó, Javier
Publisher: IGI Global
Total Pages: 532
Release: 2023-07-28
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1668492636

The field of strategic management is facing new challenges, as two phenomena, sustainability, and information and communication technologies, have altered the classic pillars of business strategy. These far-reaching changes require companies to make rapid adaptations in order to achieve optimal situations, which can no longer be developed as they did in the past. To help academics and managers understand the new fields of study and research within strategic management, Javier Martínez-Falcó, Assistant Professor at the University of Alicante, has written a groundbreaking book, New Perspectives and Possibilities in Strategic Management in the 21st Century: Between Tradition and Modernity. This book is an essential guide for reflection and critique, offering insights into the new currents and challenges of the discipline, shedding light on the modernization of strategies in the corporate world. It addresses the renewal and future directions of the field, covering topics such as sustainability, circular economy, green innovation, and information and communication technologies, including blockchain, big data, artificial intelligence, and IoT. The book serves as a must-read for academics, academic students, and policymakers interested in gaining a deeper understanding of current issues impacting deliberate business planning and organization. It also serves as a valuable support material for undergraduate and master's business students, providing a comprehensive understanding of the new fields of study in the discipline. This book is an excellent addition to any academic collection and offers a thought-provoking perspective on strategic management.

Measure What Matters

Measure What Matters
Author: John Doerr
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 322
Release: 2018-04-24
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 052553623X

#1 New York Times Bestseller Legendary venture capitalist John Doerr reveals how the goal-setting system of Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) has helped tech giants from Intel to Google achieve explosive growth—and how it can help any organization thrive. In the fall of 1999, John Doerr met with the founders of a start-up whom he'd just given $12.5 million, the biggest investment of his career. Larry Page and Sergey Brin had amazing technology, entrepreneurial energy, and sky-high ambitions, but no real business plan. For Google to change the world (or even to survive), Page and Brin had to learn how to make tough choices on priorities while keeping their team on track. They'd have to know when to pull the plug on losing propositions, to fail fast. And they needed timely, relevant data to track their progress—to measure what mattered. Doerr taught them about a proven approach to operating excellence: Objectives and Key Results. He had first discovered OKRs in the 1970s as an engineer at Intel, where the legendary Andy Grove ("the greatest manager of his or any era") drove the best-run company Doerr had ever seen. Later, as a venture capitalist, Doerr shared Grove's brainchild with more than fifty companies. Wherever the process was faithfully practiced, it worked. In this goal-setting system, objectives define what we seek to achieve; key results are how those top-priority goals will be attained with specific, measurable actions within a set time frame. Everyone's goals, from entry level to CEO, are transparent to the entire organization. The benefits are profound. OKRs surface an organization's most important work. They focus effort and foster coordination. They keep employees on track. They link objectives across silos to unify and strengthen the entire company. Along the way, OKRs enhance workplace satisfaction and boost retention. In Measure What Matters, Doerr shares a broad range of first-person, behind-the-scenes case studies, with narrators including Bono and Bill Gates, to demonstrate the focus, agility, and explosive growth that OKRs have spurred at so many great organizations. This book will help a new generation of leaders capture the same magic.

Lean Knowledge Management

Lean Knowledge Management
Author: Roger Forsgren
Publisher: Business Expert Press
Total Pages: 157
Release: 2021-10-19
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1637421346

“The new world is one based on knowledge. Lean KM offers a practical approach to Knowledge Management, filled with historical references and interesting stories. It brought back wonderful memories of NASA.”—Dr. Edward J Hoffman, Former NASA CKO and Director of the NASA Academy of Program, Project, & Engineering Leadership (APPEL), CEO Knowledge Strategies LLC Lecturer, Columbia University, Information and Knowledge Strategy (IKNS) Lean Knowledge Management Helped Change NASA’s Culture and It Can Do the Same for Your Organization. NASA suffered three human spaceflight tragedies and Lean Knowledge Management was a major tool that helped NASA management implement massive cultural changes. Traditional knowledge management is too often regarded as overly complicated or a wasteful bureaucratic exercise, but Lean Knowledge Management can become a critical component for your organization to operate effectively, efficiently and safely. Lean Knowledge Management simplifies the process by: Clearly defining your organization’s key employees, Filtering the enormous amount of internal “information” into “critical knowledge”. Utilizing a myriad of resources to get this critical knowledge to the people who need it most - the very people that can make your organization successful. Repetitive mistakes and failures can cost an organization millions of dollars in lost revenue, scrap, and even lawsuits. Lean Knowledge Management strips away the academic jargon and implements a practical, cost-effective, organic program emphasizing lessons of the past. Knowledge is free! Your hard-earned corporate knowledge is right in front of you, why risk losing it and having to pay for it all over again? Knowledge is power! Lean Knowledge Management is a structured plan to harness that power for your organization.

Objectives and Key Results

Objectives and Key Results
Author: Paul R. Niven
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 229
Release: 2016-09-06
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1119252393

Everything you need to implement Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) effectively Objectives and Key Results is the first full-fledged reference guide on Objectives and Key Results, a critical thinking framework designed to help organizations create value through focus, alignment, and better communication. Written by two leading OKRs consultants and researchers, this book provides a one-stop resource for organizations looking to quantify qualitative goals and ensure each team focuses their efforts to make measureable progress on their most important goals. You’ll learn how OKRs came to be and how leading companies use them every day to help teams and employees stretch their thinking about what’s possible, build their goal-setting muscles and achieve results that reflect their full potential. From the basic framework to a detailed dissection of best practices, this informative guide walks you through real-world implementations to help you get the most out of OKRs. OKRs help employees work together, focus effort, and drive the organization forward. Key results are used to define what it means to achieve broad, qualitative goals, and imperatives like “do it better” are transformed into clear, measureable markers. From the framework’s inception in the 1980s to its popularity in today’s hyper-competitive environment, OKRs make work more engaging and feature frequent feedback cycles that enable workers to see the progress they make at work each and every day. This book shows you everything you need to know to implement OKRs effectively. Understand the basics of OKRs and their day-to-day use Learn how to gain the executive support critical to a successful implementation Maintain an effective program with key assessment tips Tailor the OKRs framework to your organization’s needs Objectives and Key Results is your key resource for designing, planning, implementing, and maintaining your OKRs program for sustainable company-wide success.

Project Management for Banks

Project Management for Banks
Author: Dan Bonner
Publisher: Business Expert Press
Total Pages: 158
Release: 2021-09-14
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1637421125

Project management processes have been intertwined within every fabric of human evolution including advances in communication, farming, construction, medicine, law, architecture, physics, and economics to name a few. At each evolutionary stage, there was a project manager who was studying the how and why of everything, trying new techniques, and documenting trials, errors and successes until a specific craft was mastered, thrusting progress forward in an upward trajectory that has been carved into human history. There are countless books and articles that focus on the practice of project management. What makes this book different is the focus placed largely on the project management processes for United States (U.S) bankers. This book starts with a look at the historical progression of project management processes but quickly focuses the material on project management processes for bankers, heavily leaning towards project managers in United States (U.S.) banks. The book also looks at the bank regulatory agencies that govern U.S. banks, regulations critical to the U.S banking system, and concludes with an overview of U.S. banking technologies and the management of a U.S. banking customer call center. The book provides a comprehensive perspective on the U.S. banking project management processes, the regulatory agencies that govern and influence those processes, how technology, and more specifically, the development and use of artificial intelligence, will create a shift in the evolutionary trajectory of U.S. banking practices, and how U.S. banking project management practices will be at the core of how quickly and how successfully this evolution unfolds.

Scrum for Teams

Scrum for Teams
Author: Dion Nicolaas
Publisher: Business Expert Press
Total Pages: 188
Release: 2018-09-14
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1948198444

Scrum is an agile framework for completing complex projects. This book gives examples, tools, and tricks to do Scrum well. For each trick it is explained why it helps. The practices themselves may be worth trying, but by understanding why it works the readers will be able to come up with their own ideas that work better in their organization and situation. All the practical examples in this book have helped someone, some where to become a part of a better Scrum team. Scrum’s motto is: “Inspect and Adapt”; change small things one at a time and see what works. Scrum is not done by project leaders or managers, but really by the teams—to succeed in an organization, the teams must do Scrum well. If the teams do Scrum well, the whole organization will benefit from it. Scrum helps a team self-organize, which fits in well with developers, who usually don’t like to be micromanaged. At the same time, Scrum can scale: Self-organized teams work together well, and one manager doesn’t have to manage all the people. The lessons from this book help Scrum teams develop into autonomous, proud, and independent teams. Often teams fail to become powerful enough to change the organization, so they cannot perform to their full potential. A good team can lead the stakeholders into trusting them. They will then make plans based on the team’s release planning instead of making roadmaps out of thin air, and thus make the organization much more predictable.

Moving the Needle

Moving the Needle
Author: Joe Sweeney
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 261
Release: 2014-11-17
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1118944089

A detailed system that will help you achieve your professional and personal goals Moving the Needle provides both the "kick in the pants" and the game plan many of us need to break out of the rut and get moving to achieve our goals. CEOs, vice presidents, professionals, military personnel, and even college students frequently express frustration at the entrenched status quo, in which initiating progress feels like moving mountains. This book lights a path toward continual improvement, helping readers first find a direction, then make the key transitions that jumpstart forward progress. This highly practical guide outlines a change process that can be applied to professional or personal goals, giving readers a concrete plan for making big things happen. Rather than blindly shooting for the moon, readers will formulate a solid, systematic, actionable plan that can only result in progress. In today's tenuous business climate, employers and employees alike can be glued to the ground, unsure of the path they should take, or whether they have the freedom to move forward. Moving the Needle helps readers clarify their current position, identify their optimum position, and formulate a workable strategy for getting from here to there. Find what "moving forward" means for your career and life Shake off the doldrums of routine and establish a culture of innovation Improve performance on a consistent basis, at every level Break the inertia and get moving in the right direction Stagnation is diametrically opposed to progress. Moving forward requires a vision, a plan, and the impetus to get things done. Those who sense that big things can happen need to get clear, get free, and start Moving the Needle.

Research Handbook on Project Performance

Research Handbook on Project Performance
Author: Vittal S. Anantatmula
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
Total Pages: 315
Release: 2023-03-02
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1802207619

This engaging Research Handbook presents a fresh look at how to improve project performance for the project sponsor, client and end user using a number of empirical research studies. Focusing on project performance concepts and methods, the Handbook provides a fresh look at successful project completions, achieving project objectives, on-time or ahead of time project completion or delivering within budget.

Project Control Methods and Best Practices

Project Control Methods and Best Practices
Author: Yakubu
Publisher: Business Expert Press
Total Pages: 175
Release: 2022-09-29
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1637423004

If you want to know how to reduce financial wastage and cost overrun on projects and the applied best practices to enable project success, then this book is for you. This book reveals the many challenges of project control in practice and then provides practical good practices to overcome them. This is done by presenting a robust project control framework that includes several good practices to mitigate project control inhibitors and enhance the entire project control process. The core project control techniques and methods in practice and how to design an enabling environment for effective project control are also explained. The aim of this book is to expose the readers to several good practices which they can then apply confidently to enhance the success of their projects.