Business Led IT
Seeing and prioritizing what to do with your data has to be a business-led endeavour, and how business and IT groups work together determines success or failure.
As companies succeed and grow, they become more complex. To keep up with customer demand and create new products and services, they organize into specialized groups, such as sales, manufacturing, admin, customer service.
Value delivery begins with a customer request and flows from group to group. Each group focuses on their specialized area, doing what they do best, and hands their work off to the next group in a workflow. Ideally, work flows smoothly, problem-free, and without delay until the customer gets what they want. But in the real world, things change, problems arise, delays happen, and people get blamed.
Individual groups can see, understand and fix problems within their group. But without a big-picture view of how work flows through the organization, broader systemic issues remain unseen and unsolved.
You know you have systemic issues if you suffer symptoms like complaints between groups, too many meetings, growing backlogs, excessive rework, high employee turnover, poor product quality, lengthy project delays, or too much overtime.
Value Stream Mapping – Learn to See the Big Picture
Value stream thinking is a customer-centric mindset for business success. Simply put, a value stream is the sequence of activities an organization undertakes to deliver on a customer request. Value stream mapping is a way to discover and deeply understand how your organization works.
Value stream mapping is a team-based methodology that provides a macro-level view of how work gets done (or doesn’t get done.) It’s a practical and effective way to see and resolve disconnects, redundancies and gaps in workflows. It shows you how to transform so that outstanding organizational performance becomes the norm, and if you’re already at the top of your game, it shows you how to stay there.
Extended ROI – Broaden your ROI Horizon
Extended ROI is a calculation that accounts for the benefits and costs of a decision or investment across multiple areas within an organization.
IT groups often justify investments in direct benefits such as cost reduction, cost avoidance, and productivity gains within IT groups. These benefits can be compelling and well-understood and therefore carry low risk.
IT investments also impact the business in ways such as improved customer satisfaction, increased employee productivity, and increased pace of innovation. But the business impact of technology is more difficult to understand and measure. It requires effective cross-functional collaboration to fully understand how the business can benefit from new technology and gain confidence in promised results.
The value of an extended ROI analysis is in the intelligence that comes from disparate teams, each with their specialized expertise and view of the business, working together toward clearly defined organizational goals. The extended ROI is simply a tool to capture and quantify the magic that results from the collaborative process.
By calculating the extended ROI, organizations can make more informed decisions and better understand the full impact of their investments on the entire organization.
Agile Methods – A Shortcut to Success
Agile methods (or “agile”) are principles and practices that overcome complexity and uncertainty, enabling cross-functional teams to complete projects quickly and successfully. Agile methods originated in lean manufacturing and are now pervasive in technology projects. Agile’s success has led to widespread adoption in every business area.
In complex projects, it’s impossible to create a perfect plan at the outset and follow it to completion. There are too many unknowns that you can’t foresee until well into the project, and requirements can shift due to changing business conditions, lack of clarity from your internal or external customers, or better ideas that emerge as you make progress.
In an agile environment, project leaders start with clearly defined requirements and outcomes but don’t fully describe how the team will accomplish its goals.
Teams work in short, iterative cycles called “sprints” to complete small chunks of work. Each sprint begins with a planning meeting, where team members identify the work they will finish during the sprint. At the end of each sprint, the team holds a review meeting to demonstrate the work completed and gather feedback from stakeholders. This feedback guides the next sprint, which begins with another planning meeting.
An agile project management approach focuses on delivering high-quality products or services through frequent iteration and continuous delivery. It is a flexible, adaptive approach emphasizing collaboration, visibility to stakeholders, quality and speed.
