Inventions & Innovations
Sometimes well-known, tried-and-tested solutions aren't available for a particular situation or they are not enough. At such times, I invent solutions for clients who are enterprising enough to try them out. And I keep evolving the inventions based on learnings from the field and the feedback of my clients. Some are described in my book, Agile IT Org Design, published by Pearson in 2015.
Here are some of the more substantial and recent ones.
It is no longer enough to claim that you are investing in digital technologies, cloud, or AI. Investors and CFOs need to see impact on business results. Many organizations are witnessing lackluster impact on business metrics despite a lot of effort in terms of new initiatives. Whether you use OKRs or not, Business Retrospectives will help you introduce lightweight forecasts and measurements of benefits delivered by initiatives, even in situations where there are multiple contributing factors. Business Retrospectives help:
Business leaders prove and improve the benefits-performance of change (or run) initiatives, digital or otherwise..
CFOs and similar execs allocate funds based on objective criteria of performance.
Address attribution: A business metric moved but what initiatives and external factors contributed how much to the movement?
Read further.
In the world of projects and programs, it is easier to manage dependencies because their prioritization and scheduling can be centrally orchestrated. When we move away from projects and programs (for good reason), we need a way of managing dependencies without central orchestration. DependEasy provides an algorithm and a technique to simplify prioritization of dependencies among semi-autonomous teams while at the same time, optimizing throughput. Here's a short video on this topic.
Get in touch if you'd like to explore this further.
Alignment maps are organizational information radiators that help visualize the alignment of ongoing work with business outcomes. They help in two ways. Bottom up, they help development and operations team members understand how their work contributes to the big picture. Top-down, they help sponsors of initiatives understand how all the activity in the trenches is meant to contribute to the objectives they have approved funding against. Read more.
KPI trees (or graphs) take it further. My version of KPI trees helps improve shared understanding even further by clarifying the relationship between product or service analytics, intermediate business metrics, and ultimate financial metrics. They are especially useful when you have multiple factors influencing a key business metric. My clients across industries (media, travel, retail) have benefited from them.
Get in touch if you'd like to improve alignment and outcome-orientation at your organization.
Do you suffer from a culture of ingrained hierarchy that shows up even during the rectruitment process. It might be why you are unable to attact and/or retain millenials and Gen-Zers. Cleararchy could help. It is a formulation for organizing hierarchy in the digital age and an alternative to idealistic formulations such as Holacracy and Teal organizations. Find out more here.