Specialized support
Even if your organization doesn’t usually rely on outside expertise, certain targeted services can accelerate changes and reduce their risk.
You may be looking for someone who is easy to work with, impartial, and attuned to your specific circumstances. If that sounds appealing to you, keep reading…
Leadership advisory to level up your value delivery
Are you working on taking product management, development, and delivery to the next level?
Could the changes be more effective and efficient if you worked through your ideas, strategies, and plans with an independent, no-nonsense expert?
Work personally with Gil Broza, author of Deliver Better Results. Meet with him on demand or on a cadence, on your own or with colleagues.
In each session, Gil will help you think through issues, explore potential consequences of decisions, and put your best foot forward. Based on your preference, he’ll provide expert advice, coach you, or act as a sounding board. Privacy and confidentiality are guaranteed.
This service is different from classic executive, leadership, or Agile coaching. It’s laser-focused on optimizing your efforts to level up your technology organization.
Every month, there will be one session, or more if you need them. On-demand sessions will be scheduled at least a day in advance; urgent ones may be scheduled on shorter notice, subject to availability. Each session is 30, 45 or 60 minutes long.
The service, designed as a retainer agreement, is for 6 or 9 months with a renewal option. It maximizes your outcomes several ways:
- You’ll receive advice when you need it, instead of only in prescheduled meetings.
- You’ll benefit from contextual advice, not theory, because Gil will get to know you and your specific situation.
- You’ll be able to discuss concerns and problems that you’re not comfortable sharing with colleagues.
- Even a low budget goes a long way with this cost-efficient arrangement.
“Gil provides us with clarity and strategic guidance when we face significant questions: Is this project adequately defined? Is there an optimal approach to structuring the work for this particular initiative? Are we prioritizing project completion or merely keeping ourselves busy? Our series of carefully chosen sessions with Gil have enabled my team and me to gradually transform our way of working.”
– G. F., Director of R&D
Interested in an introductory chat and discussing options?
Organizational mindset workshop
(“What do we want to be like going forward?”)
You know the importance of articulating the vision, mission, and goals and aligning everyone to them. There’s another important matter to determine and align to: your organization’s mindset, which is the high-level choices people make at work.
Dangerously, this matter is often missed. Usually, an organization’s mindset is implicit, inconsistent, or not quite fit for purpose. What happens then? Deliverables are less than effective, teams are underproductive, and improvements don’t last.
The solution: the leadership team needs to be intentional and explicit about the organization’s mindset. The two key parts of it are values and beliefs — what the work systems optimize for and why.
That’s what we facilitate in the two-hour organizational mindset workshop. The team will articulate and discuss many perspectives, concerns, and opinions. They’ll walk away with explicit statements of values and beliefs they feel good about adhering to and aligning the staff to. Participating in this workshop will also strengthen their relationships and increase their sense of joint responsibility.
If you’re looking to take the first step toward working better, let’s talk!
Customize a truly agile way of working
Would being agile with your next major undertaking be important, but the situation is complicated? Using a popular framework or cobbling together “best practices” can be risky or ineffective.
Instead, let us help you customize the best agile way of working for your context and needs. We’ll work with the key players on designing an appropriate workflow, effective team topology, and relevant practices. We’ll also help you facilitate a successful kick-off to start the new way of working with high energy and clarity.
If you’d like the way of working to be truly fit for purpose, let’s talk!
Case study
Custom Agile implementation
Check out this case study to see how we helped a bank’s technology group successfully deliver a challenging 8-figure program by customizing a flow-based Agile approach.
Make the best plan to fix or improve value delivery
Do you need to take product development or solution delivery to the next level, or to get it unstuck, on your own? We can recommend an effective and efficient way for your situation. (Spoiler alert: it’s almost never a matter of process, tools, or adherence to a framework.)
We’ll start by assessing the entire value delivery system, examining such aspects as culture, leadership approaches, management practices, team dynamics and ways of working, interactions across roles and silos, technical practices, and psychological safety. Instead of looking for compliance with specific processes – which a tool could tell you – we analyze the choices your people make, assess their effectiveness in your context, and uncover the root causes of gaps. We only need a few days for this and no more than an hour of any person’s time.
We’ll recommend a practical roadmap and high-value actions toward your desired goal. We’ll identify challenges and discuss mitigation strategies. In the following weeks, we’ll continue the conversations to co-create your plan of action.
“We asked Gil to help us figure out how our talented, passionate team could become a cohesive unit. He only spent two days with us, but people were blown away by how spot-on his observations were, and how he made people very comfortable discussing even the most uncomfortable topics. Using his findings and recommendations, we are now working collaboratively on putting together a roadmap to becoming a better, more effective Agile team. This engagement was well worth the investment!”
– Andrei Cornienco, VP Software Engineering & Infrastructure, Pethealth
If you’re ready to level up your way of working, let’s talk!
Facilitate a large collaborative event
Collaboration isn’t just for day-to-day work. Bring your people’s wisdom to bear at critical junctures, such as drawing lessons from recent events, roadmapping a new initiative, or improving processes.
The key here is to hold events that get everyone – not only management – to do the thinking, collaborating, and deciding. Such events are rarely longer than a day. While they involve a large number of people, they are well worth the investment if done effectively and efficiently: beyond achieving their official outcome, they send the message that collaboration and ownership are real.
We will collaborate with you on planning a successful session: purpose, agenda, invitation, deliverables, process, etc. And if you prefer, we will facilitate it for you (such events must be led by experienced facilitators).
“As the organizer of a three-day event, one of the best decisions I made was to have Gil facilitate a substantial portion of it and coach me through the rest of it. Thank you for helping us build the foundation for reaching our next level, and making it easier to continue this interaction throughout the year even if it is over Zoom.”
– Rod Recker, Product Management and Engineering Director, Twinmotion (an Epic company)
If you’re looking to maximize the ROI of your event, let’s talk!
Adopt Agile concepts in a non-software team
Do you lead a non-software team and see potential in using Agile concepts? Not sure what’s a good way to get started?
While Agile is applicable and beneficial to many kinds of work outside of software development/IT, its implementation there may look quite different. In fact, some popular practices (such as sprints and user stories) and frameworks (such as Scrum) may not be suitable for you. You need an implementation that fits your work and your people.
For a small investment of time, we’ll take your team through the right conversations, guide and advise at critical junctures, and help you design a practical, effective, and sustainable implementation. We can do all that without ever mentioning software development or examples from it (which would probably confuse or alienate people).
We’ve used our approach for successful implementation in various departments, such as: marketing, finance, talent acquisition, architectural design, plastics R&D, and TV show selection and development.
Interested to learn how our approach maximizes your success with Agile? Let’s talk.