Magdalena Firlit logo
Magdalena Firlit logo

Evidence-Based Management – what is this? Part 1

I was inspired to write this article by you, my dear customers and students! Many of you were asking me about Evidence-Based Management; for some of you, I serve as a consultant to help you implement the framework in your organizations.

Let’s start from the beginning, thus a definition.

What is Evidence-Based Management?

This an empirical framework to explicitly use the current, best evidence in management and decision-making.

Evidence-Based Management is used in several complex domains like medicine (Evidence-Based Medicine), education, software development, product development, business, marketing, research & development, and others.

Scrum.org’s Evidence-Based Management (EBM) framework is


“… an empirical approach that provides organizations with the ability to measure the value they deliver to customers and the means by which they deliver that value, and to use those measures to guide improvements in both.”

From Evidence-Based Management Guide

The purpose of the framework is to make better decisions based on facts, on what we already know, on evidence. 

Organizations search for evaluating their success and focusing on investments in areas that will bring the highest possible values. The framework might help to achieve a greater product or organizational goal.

EBM consists of 4 key-value areas. Each of these areas has a specific set of measures (exemplary).

Current Value – reveals the value that the product delivers to customers, today. [1]

Time-to-Market – expresses the organization’s ability to quickly deliver new capabilities, services, or products.[2]

Ability to Innovate – Expresses the ability of a product development organization to deliver new capabilities that might better meet customer needs.[3]

Unrealized Value – Suggests the potential future value that could be realized if the organization could perfectly meet the needs of all potential customers.[4]

Which Key-Value Area is the most important? We need to look at all four Areas. They are related to each other. We are not able to reach a high current value without the others. 

The organization may also consider adding their specific measures that are not explicitly included in the EBM Guide. For instance, in some business domains measuring page views, unique users or conversions make sense, in others entirely not. By extension, the organization or product defines its relevant measures.

More advice on how to start with EBM you may find in the second part. Coming soon.


[1] Evidence-Based Management Guide, Jan 2019, Scrum.org

This article was written by a human, me, not AI.

Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

More To Explore

illustration for the article

Different Ways to Know your Customers

Product Owners must know their customers to succeed in today’s competitive markets. There is a common agreement among experts involved in product management about it. A lot has been said about this topic. In this blog post, I discuss the different ways to know your customers. To make it more practical, I share some tools to ease application in the work environment.

Read More »

Business Value in Agile Organizations

Recently, I have been talking about customer value a lot. This perspective has been shared here. It is time to share some thoughts about business value for organizations. This paper is a continuation of the previous one, where I mainly focused on customers. It is widely known that companies exist to make money, satisfy shareholders,

Read More »
lk;

How to measure the success of the Agile Transformation?

Organizations have been taking their efforts toward Agility for many years. Some of them seem to be successful in this field, and some of them are not. So, how to measure the results and benefits of this effort?   This question is often asked when I discuss the results or ongoing endeavors of the Agile

Read More »