Want to Accelerate Change? Slow Down and Observe Team Dynamics

Posted by in IT Management

Originally presented at SIM Connect Live 2019 (“Make Winning Normal: Maximizing Agility with High-Performing Teams”), the following concepts offer a new way for IT organizations to implement disruptive technologies and innovations at scale:

The Pace of Change and the Adoption Curve

The pace and complexity of new technologies and innovations have only been increasing over the past years and show no sign of letting up. We consistently hear the following questions from IT leaders:

  • How do I maintain a competitive advantage while keeping up with the pace of change?
  • How do I ensure my organization can effectively adopt new technologies?

One way to address these questions is by examining the Adoption Curve as described by Geoffrey Moore. The Adoption Curve details the distributions and tendencies of a population as it adopts an innovation.

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The Power of The Sprint in Managing Team Performance

Posted by in IT Management

During a sprint, many Scrum teams focus on action items, story points, ceremonies, and sprint length. They often overlook the importance of the sprint itself to the team’s potential productivity.

Sprints are relevant to performance because a team’s effectiveness evolves over time, and a sprint is a block of time—each usually 1 to 4 weeks in duration. With each sprint, team members participate in Scrum ceremonies and deliver work together. The ceremonies alone don’t turn a group of strangers into a team, but they can serve as shared experiences that help members feel more and more comfortable with each other.

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Making Empowerment Stick

Posted by in IT Management

Let me know if this sounds familiar: You talk about empowerment with your staff, at skip levels, and at town hall meetings. It’s a concept you reinforce over and over again within your organization. And yet you still observe teams asking for permission in situations where you want them to make decisions and drive actions. You still find yourself as the bottleneck, giving tactical approvals on topics you don’t feel require your input.

There’s a good chance you’re the reason a culture of empowerment hasn’t taken hold.

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Girl Scout Advice for Supplementing Age-Old Management Practices with Digital Principles

Posted by in IT Management

When I was a Girl Scout, I learned how to succeed in organization-wide digital transformations. (Everyone got that IT leadership badge, right?!)

We were taught to:

Make new friends but keep the old.
One is silver and the other’s gold.

This universal advice applies now as we “scout” in the digital age. It’s important to value the old strategies for success—the fundamentals that kept your organization alive before its digital transformation—while seeking out new ones to apply in the current industry climate. 

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So What? The Big Takeaways After Reading the Digital Transformation Report

Posted by in IT Management

For the CIOs’ Perspectives on Digital Transformation study, IT leaders from a wide range of industries and organization sizes were asked about the nature of their ongoing digital transformations, progress along their journeys, challenges, and more. Based on their responses and our experience with clients, we have drawn the following conclusions about the state of digital transformations in 2018.

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Launching a Center of Excellence | Downloadable Executive Field Guide

Posted by in IT Management, IT Services

A Center of Excellence—such as an OSM (Office of Strategy Management), PMO (Project Management Office), IT Governance, Continuous Improvement, or similar task force—is usually established to achieve one or more of the following core objectives within an organization:

  • Implement and popularize a best practice
  • Add a new capability, function, or technology
  • Improve utilization of (or return on) an asset
  • Upgrade employees’ skillsets

Download this Executive Field Guide as a .pdf

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Risk-taking

The Risk-Taker CIO Paradox

Posted by in IT Management, IT Projects, IT Services

Leadership requires taking risks. But technology must work reliably. How do IT leaders square these two realities?

CIOs are driving organizational strategies now more than ever. The more a CIO’s success is tied to business outcomes, the more risk they assume. Traditionally, CIOs have been responsible for KPIs like uptime and system availability to support internal productivity and operational efficiency. But suddenly—now that all industries are becoming digital—there is much more at stake.

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