Leverage Evidence-Based Management, a scientific method, to enable organizations to achieve goals under conditions of uncertainty.

Organizations often believe in the certainty of their plans and see every deviation from the plan as a sign of failure. They view the organization as a machine for creating and executing plans instead of looking at it as a responsive organism, attentive to the changes in its environment. In a world of uncertainties, organizations need to be capable of reinventing themselves every day based on new information.

In Unlocking Business Agility with Evidence-Based Management, authors Patricia Kong, Todd Miller, Kurt Bittner, and Ryan Ripley use the framework developed by Scrum.org called Evidence-Based Management (EBM). EBM is an empirical approach that helps organizations use experimentation and rapid feedback to progress toward goals. This path is not always obvious or straightforward, but that is a benefit: in a complex and changing world, the path toward goals will always be uncertain. EBM helps organizations use new data to adapt their plan toward their goals.

Throughout the book, the authors present stories and experiences that illustrate how EBM can be applied to set better goals and then leverage empiricism to achieve those goals using feedback, learning, and evidence. This definitive guide will help your organization identify its true purpose, improve its ability to reach goals, and build a culture of trust, transparency, and growth.

• Clarify goals and demonstrate value, success, and progress using agile metrics
• Progress toward goals in uncertain and rapidly changing circumstances
• Embrace empiricism and experimentation to find solutions for complex problems
• Find real-world anonymized case studies on how to articulate goals and measurements in a way that fosters self-management and business agility

Table of Contents

Chapter 1. Finding Purpose

Chapter 2. Using Empiricism to Progress Toward Goals

Chapter 3. Becoming (More) Effective

Chapter 4. Managing and Overcoming Expectations

Chapter 5. Separating the Signal from the Noise

Chapter 6. Applying EBM at the Product l evel

Chapter 7. Applying EBM at the Portfolio l evel

Chapter 8. Applying EBM at the Organizational l evel

About the Author

Patricia Kong helps organizations thrive in a complex world by focusing on enterprise innovation, leadership, and teams. She is a people advocate and fascinated by organizational behavior and misbehaviors. She is co-author of The Nexus Framework for Scaling Scrum (Addison-Wesley, 2017).

Todd Miller has practical experience as a Scrum Master, Product Owner, Software Developer, and Agile coach on a variety of technical and creative projects across a multitude of industries. He has been a professional Scrum trainer with Scrum.org since 2016.

Kurt Bittner has been delivering working products in short, feedback-driven cycles for more than 40 years, and has helped many organizations do the same. He is particularly interested in helping people form strong, self-organizing, high-performance teams that deliver solutions that customers love, and helping organizations use empirical feedback to achieve customer outcome-focused goals.

Ryan Ripley is a Professional Scrum Trainer with Scrum.org, and has experience as a software developer, manager, director, and Scrum Master at various Fortune 500 companies in the medical device, wholesale, and financial services industries. He is the host of "Agile for Humans," the top agile podcast on iTunes. He recently co-wrote Fixing Your Scrum: Practical Solutions for Common Scrum Problems (Pragmatic Bookshelf, 2022).