Key to Content
📃 = Long form article
📌 = Quick Thought
📺 = Video
📢 = Podcast
Business Agility via greater focus on Business Outcomes
📃 Business Retrospectives — A structured method of retrospecting on and improving the impact of initiatives on business metrics.
📃 Measurement Debt — A lack of measurement culture, practice, and infrastructure combine to obscure the impact of impact of initiatives on business metrics. What can you do about it?
📃 Deliverables Aren't Outcomes — My take on the strange habit of referring to deliverables as outcomes.
📺 Overcoming Business Inertia — Digital transformation is sometimes limited by business inertia (old ways of working on the business side). More specifically, it limits our ability to plan and execute market iterations of products and hurts business results in the process. At the board level, it limits the ability of board members to appreciate complexity when assessing digital transformation plans. This talk describes the problem and suggests ways to overcome it.
📃 Alignment Maps for greater IT-Business alignment — An information radiator to connect the work on features and enhancements to business objectives.
Product & Customer Centricity
📃 Project to Product — The definitive article on progressing towards greater product and customer centricity.
📌 Product-Centric or Customer-Centric? — Shouldn't an org be customer-centric rather than product-centric?
📃 How "project to product" affects portfolio management — What happens to project portfolio management when there are no projects.
📃 Business Capability Centric Organization — An early take on moving away from projects.
Hierarchy for the Digital Age
📃 Cleararchy — organizing hierarchy for the digital age. A realistic alternative to Sociocracy, Holacracy, Teal, etc.
Organizational Agility
📃 Has COVID-19 killed Co-Location? — Is co-location really about physical proximity or organizational distance?
📢 Podcast on Agile Org Design — Explores IT reorganization from a structural angle. We discuss how to differentiate between organizational activities and outcomes and forming teams accordingly, how to execute streams of work that cut across different product-centric teams and the role of project and program managers in product-centric IT.
📃 InfoQ interview — Interview Q&A about the book, Agile IT Org Design
📃 Three Principles of Agile Org Design — InformIT asked me to write about the core principles in the book.
📃 Org-chart debt: A nasty off-balance-sheet liability — Tech debt is bad, organizational debt is worse.
📃 Digital Brings IT Home (a strategic rollback of outsourcing) — My prediction in 2015 of how the digital imperative will force enterprises towards greater in-house tech capabilities.
📃 Can GICs/GCCs (Global In-House Centers/Global Capability Centers) Transform For Real? — Global Capability Centers claim they are no longer about lower cost IT. They claim they are centers of excellence and innovation. Have things really changed?
📃 Lean isn't some new, improved, Agile — Written at the time when the Lean Startup book and its numerous offspring were all the rage. Later, the Big3 of strategy consulting took on the mantle of Agile and the buzz around Lean faded away.
📃 Agile Org Design vs. Bimodal/Two-Speed IT. — Martin Fowler explained why Bimodal/Two-Speed were flawed notions peddled by a strategy consultant and a research house much before they came around to realizing and deprecating it. He offered the treatment of the topic in my book as a sensible alternative.
📌 The granddaddy of shared services — If shared services are bad in a product development value stream, they are worse as a corporate entity.
Agility in Software Delivery
📃 Scaling Agile: Problems and Solutions : One of the cases described in the article was later described in a 📺 talk organized by the National Payments Corporation of India.
📢 Podcast on anti-patterns of agile development
📌 What happens when business asked IT to build a bridge.
📌Let's not be Agile about it — A reader's reaction to a passage in the book that talks about the use of the slogan, "Let's be agile about it."
Enterprise Architecture Strategy
📢 The Price of Reuse
Explores pros and cons of reuse of software solutions across market regions. For any large, multinational enterprise, there’s a dilemma at the heart of their software architecture. Centralization promises to save costs, providing a standardized template for how to do things and not waste effort reinventing the wheel. But local markets have unique characteristics, whether that’s customer behavior, regulations or the competitive landscape. Given this, what's the price of reuse?
Listen to it here.
📃 Ownership of Code and Systems in Product-Mode
Strong ownership or collective ownership or internal open source: How to think about this topic when moving from project to product. Read this section of the more comprehensive paper about operating in product-mode.