One of the big Agile mantras is “Deliver Value Sooner”. They get all excited when I tell them about the client whose Agile discipline was, well, not disciplined at all. But they doubled their financial benefit purely by delivering value sooner. It’s like a before and after diet picture. We love looking at it, but are the results typical? I assert that they can be, but you need to break down the need for big-bang results.
Being excellent at turning ideas for change into the outcomes we want - and at market-speed - is core to every enterprise’s choices, changes and results.
Change Portfolios must be goals-driven, dynamic, extroverted and efficient. Traditional portfolios - initiatives-driven, static, and often introspective - are becoming constraints on enterprise performance. It’s time to innovate, transform, and build on the platform they created.
For many bosses, the employee’s transition to negativity comes for no apparent reason. However, a common complaint I hear from dissatisfied employees is that they do not get creative freedom. They suggest creative solutions that would yield better results, but get told “No.” They feel caught in the “but we’ve always done it this way” trap. Creativity is essential for your employees’ work to have meaning. With meaning, they are more engaged, which means less absenteeism, better teamwork, better service, and increased productivity. To foster creativity, try the following:
I was talking to a friend the other day and, as usual, asked how it was all going. She said it'd been busy at work, very busy in fact and for all the right reasons, but it had meant that she’d had to put an out of office on her Email to say that she may be a while responding and for people to phone if it was important. One such person, who had been waiting and chasing for a response, cheekily found a slot in her diary and chanced their arm for a chat. She accepted.
Regardless of how many organisations espouse a core value of integrity (e.g. Accenture, Adidas, Alibaba, Amex, Coke, Huawei and Tencent etc.) cases of individuals and organisations breaching common ethical standards continue unabated (Volkswagen and diesel emissions, DJI and supply chain fraud, Changchun Changsheng Biotechnology and rabies vaccine quality or Renault-Nissan and Carlos Ghoson’s alleged financial misconduct ). Organisations, rightly, are seen as serving the societies in which they sit and breaches of trust consequently are devastating – destroying significant brand value.
One of the constant urban-myths about the Business Analyst role is the common assumption/assertion (invariably by non-BAs) that all we do is ‘run meetings’. I’ve heard this a few times during my career and it really exercises me. There is a lot more to the BA role than that; in fact there is a lot more to running meetings! As part of my current role I devise a lot of training material and someone recently asked how I go about running a meeting. It wasn’t until I was asked that I attempted to document my thought processes and it proved surprisingly more difficult than I imagined!
In the quest of uplifting capabilities, better serving our customers, improving the bottom line or acquiring market share, organizations have a mix of projects and programs to help achieve those business outcomes.
Some projects are scored as critical and complex. Different organizations have different methods of scoring what is critical and complex and what is not. Some organizations would have a clear and mapped out defined scoring system of what is critical and what is not, and some would settle for a subjective measure.
What on earth does having your ducks in a row mean anyway? Does it mean everything is ship shape and Bristol fashion? And what the hell does that mean?
It’s funny how things trigger your creative juices isn’t it … someone made the following comment in my Change Management and the Brain article post in the ACMP Group … “Great article. It's the reason I did qualitative research on using storytelling as a means of sustaining organisational change” so I replied “Storytelling is great and that much better when you have some great stories to tell. I think that might be the subject of another article” … thanks for the inspiration Monica.
Corporate Innovation Program is the buzz word these days, and for very good reason. The awareness and action of many companies responding to change is getting better because “innovation” a must-have agenda for top management and high-level discussion including nations alike. The focus of innovation has “awakened” in the last few years, so much so that the word leadership has become low-key. I, for one, advocate leaders, with a big title, if they couldn’t innovate their days are numbered or they should be shown the door. Run!