Putting things in Order

At Ordinal Group we help you put things in order.  Our decades of experience combined with our knowledge of process and best practices help companies become more productive and efficient.

Ordinal Group offers consulting in a variety of specialized fields, most heavily focused on technical product strategy, change management, and learning and development.  Ordinal Group works closely with clients to understand their areas of concern and helps them find effective and pragmatic solutions.

Agile and Product Management

You’ve successfully implemented Agile.  Your development teams have never been happier or more efficient.  Your teams are humming, and the throughput is outstanding.  But at the business level it’s a bit of a mixed bag:

  • Customer satisfaction isn’t rising, even though improvements are rolling out more quickly
  • You’re still chasing your competition’s feature set, even though you seem to be delivering more updates than they are.
  • The failures are “small” and “fast”, but the successes are harder to quantify.

At this stage many companies become frustrated with Agile.  They feel that it’s not delivering the promised gains.  But the problem may not be Agile, it may be that your product management organization didn’t fully make the shift to an Agile environment.

Agile development improves the pace of delivery, and it increases the speed with which new products and features are launched or added to an existing product. This is not necessarily the same as saying that Agile increases the speed at which customers are satisfied. That responsibility lies with product management.  If your product strategy is off-target, Agile won’t improve your overall results.  All Agile does in this case is let you get bad results faster.

In many ways Agile development exposes weaknesses in product management by increasing the speed at which these flaws are delivered to the marketplace. The increased cadence of development places a real burden on product managers and product owners.  Product managers that lack good product management discipline often become overwhelmed and consumed by the urgency of Agile development.

A strong product strategy process is vital to success in this environment.  It provides clarity, improves communication, and increases the speed of decision. Let Ordinal Group help you get your product strategy on track.

Helping companies navigate change

Ordinal Group specializes in helping companies manage through change.  Change is unavoidable and disruptive.  But companies that effectively manage change are able to create a lasting advantage.

Change is opportunity, but change can also be disruptive if not handled correctly.  In order for businesses to achieve their highest potential they must drive change through the organization with the least disruption possible.   Ordinal Group can help.

About Ordinal Group

Kent Johnson, Co-Founder

Kent Johnson is an expert in product management for technically advanced products which are early in the product lifecycle.  His experience in setting strategy for products in an evolving marketplace requires a disciplined and repeatable process for evaluating customers, markets, and technology.  This discipline is especially suited to supporting an agile development process, where the product owner’s role functions best when backed by a well-considered product strategy.

Mr. Johnson also has experience developing products and solutions that leverage the technologies for data collection, storage and analytics.  He has helped many companies establish a cohesive strategy and technology plan for data in this fast-growing field.

Mr. Johnson has nearly 20 years of professional experience in Enterprise-sized companies, medium businesses, and startups.

Elizabeth Johnson, Co-Founder

Elizabeth Johnson is an expert in human performance management and has worked to improve the performance for companies across a broad spectrum of work environments. Her experience at creating effective learning and development curriculum in technical and complex environments coupled with her organizational development and change management expertise makes her well suited to help companies navigate complex issues which impact personnel performance.

Mrs. Johnson has served as both internal and external consultant to large and medium sized businesses that put a premium on organizational and individual performance.  She is able to use her expertise to establish an appropriate goal state, a strategy for performance improvement, and if necessary create training curriculum to address any knowledge, skills, or abilities gaps.

Mrs. Johnson has 20 years of experience in human performance management and received her MS in Industrial and Organizational Psychology from Kansas State University.

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