The Better Managed Development (BMD) method provides you with a user-friendly, transparent and data-driven approach for sustaining cultural and other outcomes. Supercharge the effectiveness of your career and leadership!
The industry has struggled with deliberate cultivation, measurement, and sustenance of long-term, evergreen perspectives like Security, Maintenance, and yes, Culture. A fundamental issue with this conversation is the (over)use of the word “Culture”. This presupposes that Culture is a monolith. As a result, thoughts around the subject are stripped of critically necessary nuance and detail.
The Better Managed Development method is the technology industry’s first dedicated framework that provides for:
Designing flexible and evolving playbooks for achieving cultural aims – technical and non-technical alike
Providing guardrails for managing cultural strategy and tactics at scale
Enabling the monitoring and measurement of cultural performance at scale, in support of making data-driven decisions at the management and non-management levels
Clear and transparent messaging about the company’s cultural priorities and the specific investments that management is making towards achieving them
Adopted from the healthcare industry, an Outcome refers to a long-term perspective that is not marked by a set status or fixed state. An Outcome is used to encapsulate a long-term, ongoing aim that is expected to yield value over the span of time. Outcomes are ideal for encapsulating the sustenance of “unending” strategic aims, e.g. “Employees are encouraged to grow continuously personally and professionally”, “Maintain a Mean Time to Resolution of Under 6 Hours” or “Engineers are encouraged to test their own code in an automated fashion”. A unique property of Outcomes is that they are not marked by an end date or completion status.
A unique property of Outcomes is that they are not marked by an end date or completion status.
An Outcome is the highest level of “deliverable” to which every other unit of enterprise delivery should be connected. This makes it compatible with more tactical deliverables like Todos, Epics, Stories, Milestones, and Objectives. This way, we can have Outcomes added to frameworks like Objective – Key Results (OKR), to obtain OOKR.
A Capability is an organizational skill or advantage that your enterprise can put toward delivery of value. The ability of your organization to marshal resources toward a singular skill is foundational to cultural competency at the enterprise scale. A Capability could be technical e.g. “Site Reliability Engineering” for the capability to maintain the uptime of business systems.
It could also be non-technical e.g. “Skill-set Engineering” for the ability to build and match individual skill-sets to the needs of the business, or “Developer Experience” for the ability to maintain a work environment conducive to the smooth and joyful functioning of development teams.
A Component refers to People, Processes, and Tools that can be combined in different ways to yield Outcomes.
Components could be grouped into capabilities so that the “Security” Capability for example will comprise of the specific People, Processes, and Tools that are essential to that purpose.
Your ability to combine Components and Capabilities in deliberate formations gives you an extremely powerful mechanism for managing your enterprise cultural strategy. The possibilities are immense!
Compose Outcome playbooks and design patterns can be shared within your enterprise
With these patterns, you can be sure of alignment between different teams and managers on how to achieve your cultural aims
This will also yield broadly applicable standards for tracking those Outcomes
Clear messaging of your org’s cultural aims and investments
Build a full-picture perspective of your organization’s “Culture” by putting all your Cultural Outcomes in One Place
Capture signals from your Outcomes’ components as a measure of the state of your Org’s “Culture”
Where Agile is concerned with ongoing rapid delivery of software, BMD builds on the agile process by focusing on longer term outcomes surrounding the people that deliver software. Where Agile is sometimes focused on the outcomes, BMD is focused on the inputs and people that deliver great software. If the ingredients are right, the output stands a greater chance of being successful.
We developed BMD based on 2 decades of software engineering experience, both bad and good. We’ve seen first hand the business and strategic advantages of an effective engineering culture. Our experiences across Fortune 100 companies and startups, our hands-on experience within the Agile methodology and hands-on experience as software engineers led us to this point. While a young framework, it has been successfully deployed at SMBs in the DC tech market
BMD starts with the Outcome. What would your leadership like to be true on a long-term basis? "We want to maintain a high level of collaboration within our teams", "We want to sustain a Mean Time To Resolution (MTTR) of less than 2 hours". From the Outcome, work your way back to the Capabilities that you believe would support the Outcome, then which Components. Or you could just try out our platform to automate the whole thing:)
Objective Key-Result is a great framework for managing delivery of aspirational results. However, it's still limited to a fixed term. Objectives and Key Results necessarily must end - either with a completion percentage or status - they are required to end. Outcomes don't have such constraints and are ideal for maintaining a long term strategic perspective. This way, you can connect your OKR, Goals, Milestones, Todos and any other deliverables to Outcomes.
Try OOKR for a change!
While we originally conceived and honed this framework within the technology industry, Outcomes and BMD are broadly applicable in any industry where a long-term perspective is valuable. After all, we borrowed the concept from the Healthcare industry to begin with
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