All too often organizations look at the relationship between autonomy and alignment like this.

They think of it as a competition between the two: more team autonomy means sacrificing focus and organizational alignment; more alignment means less autonomy and increased command & control. As Stephen Bungay writes in The Art of Action, this conflict is a misconception. The two ideals are not in competition with each other but should exist in unison. Alignment through transparency enables increased autonomy.

Making this happen requires a combination of an organization-wide Agile mindset and a tool that truly supports it. To date, planning and collaboration tools fall into one of two extremes, either fully supporting and encouraging alignment (i.e. JIRA) or giving teams total autonomous freedom to work the way they want (i.e. Trello).

Favro bridges this gap and facilitates both alignment and autonomy. Organization leadership, product owners, and program managers get the overall alignment, progress tracking and predictability they need, while at the same time product teams can work the way that best suits them in a board-based tool they enjoy using.

It’s not magic. The combination of alignment and autonomy in equal measures is achieved with Trello like usability and flexibility, paired with the power of backlogs, program/portfolio level collections and powerful on-demand apps and integrations. Teams are no longer isolated or overwhelmed by functionality that they don’t need. The work of multiple teams is aggregated up through all levels of the organization, while simultaneously overall vision and goals are made transparent to everyone.

Read this in-depth How to and get started with Favro now.