business change

Many organisations embarking on an enterprise-wide transformation to agile working, struggle to sustain or scale the benefits they initially achieve. The journey towards agility is a marathon, not a sprint, and it requires continued commitment, at all levels of the organisation, to ensure agile ways of working stick.

The first six to 12 months of introducing agile throughout an organisation will result in visible improvements in speed to market, productivity, efficiency and employee engagement.  

Large corporates are, at best, 30% efficient in delivering change. From launching a loan product to landing a new bakery range on a supermarket shelf, big organisations are failing to deliver change at pace and realise value from it.

One leading credit card provider told us they’d last delivered a major new product eight years ago. ‘We were the leader in the market,' said the project manager. 'However, others have caught up and now we’re struggling to respond.’

'It takes us two years to do what our competitors can do in two months.' MD - FTSE100 organisation

Business improvements and customer experience are topics that are very close to my heart. Driving business improvements is my core capability. Delivering better customer experience through improvements is something that I am passionate about.

Technology has given us the ability to measure everything, and we’ve become hooked like addicts.  Is all this measuring helping us or hurting us?  The paradox in measuring is that you can see measured improvement when you stop measuring.  But how will you know?

One of the things that makes leadership such a tricky subject is that it is all about behaviour. It is about what you do every single day.

What you say matters but if it is undermined by your behaviour it becomes irrelevant.

This is why I am a strong believer in the concept of leadership by example.

It is the behaviour that is demonstrated by the leadership and the behaviour that they tolerate amongst their people that creates the organisation’s culture.

You’ve probably heard it said that change is the one constant in business currently, and that’s true, it’s also true for our lives outside of work.

Many people will say they don’t like change, it makes them uncomfortable or it’s something they fear, but if you break things down a little, you’ll find that we all deal with change on a daily basis.

Would you rather have an employee move internally or move out of the organization?

Over the past 6 months I have seen many instances where organizations have failed to take advantage of opportunities; lost market-share; put their brand at risk; or wasted resources; resulting in loss of revenue and/or additional costs.
Given that August is a quiet month, it has provided me with time to reflect on some of the problems that I have experienced and them with you so that you might learn from some of these outcomes.
So here goes: