Business Transformation Requires Transformational Leaders
Leadership and teaming skills are front and center in times of rapid change. Meet today’s constant disruption head on with expert guidance in leadership, business strategy, transformation, and innovation. Whether the disruption du jour is a digitally-driven upending of traditional business models, the pandemic-driven end to business as usual, or the change-driven challenge of staffing that meets your transformation plans—you’ll be prepared with cutting edge techniques and expert knowledge that enable strategic leadership.
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This issue of CBTJ addresses the tactical, operational, strategic, and human reasons that allow technology projects to fail and offers guidance and solutions to mitigate the possibility of failure.
Developing strategy requires all the skills possessed by competent, experienced enterprise architects, plus the ability to deal with uncertainty and ranges of responses. This Advisor explores how you can use scenarios — or stories — to describe various combinations of responses in order to work out the likely outcomes in each case.
Essential team conditions need to be set up well and are tenaciously difficult to fix later. Having the right talent is one such essential condition, but not all organizations are strategically ready for the problems of finding and selecting top talent, accurately understanding what roles that talent will fill, or building up their own leadership competencies internally.
Technology projects continue to fail at an astounding rate, and the number and cost of these failures are stunning. The contributors to this issue of CBTJ refuse to give up and refuse to accept the notion that failure is a feature.
Cutter Consortium Fellow Robert Charette starts off the issue by looking at failure through an incredibly intriguing lens: what if failure is "the desired outcome of an IT project development and that success is inadvertent"? He then proceeds to set the “conditions” necessary for the pursuit of failure. He then goes on to test — and largely confirm — his “cynical theory.”
Ralph Menzano takes us directly into the C-suite through a series of discussions he had with CIOs and other executives about why so many damn technology projects fail. His article probes some of the causes of failure often ignored by the research community.
The authors focus on the role that communication plays in technology project management. They suggest that many conventional problems as well as some more strategic ones can be reduced, if not solved, by developing a communication plan that spans the entire project lifecycle, beginning with the stakeholder communication strategy.
Sridhar Deenadayalan offers a playbook in the form of five keys to a successful technology project. The strength of this article lies in its two-step approach to failure management. Problems are identified, then followed by specific actions, or “keys to success,” to address them.