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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A major player in the transportation and logistics industry recently conducted a digital shift over an extended period. The program was initiated by the IT department, with the clear goal of making the organization more digital and finding its digital equilibrium. This introduces a key question: is the IT department really the best place to start when it comes to digitalization?
Tools and methods can work in some contexts but not others. If you have your own principles and mindset, then you can adapt or create your own methods and tools to fit your context. Once we realized this, we made a mental leap from a focus on methods and tools to a focus on principles and mindset.
Although many organizations have developed digital strategies, far fewer have managed to implement them successfully. As we explore in this Executive Update, creating a “sense of urgency” is often seen as a top challenge for digital transformation due to general unawareness of the opportunities and threats to the core business. Furthermore, many organizations consider a lack of skills and competencies as major challenges on their digitalization journey.
As we explore the idea of “making a digital shift,” it’s important to examine the ways to keep up the momentum and stay on track in managerial, not technical, terms. The premise is that, as with a paint job, meticulous preparation is essential to success. From the earliest days, partial successes and outright failures litter the history of digital shifts, with write-offs running into 10 figures on some government projects.
The myth surrounding Agile projects goes something like this: a small team of developers who can handle any coding task (database, business logic, user interface, middleware, etc.) works hand-in-hand with the end user who talks with the development team about the details of the work requirements. The small-team-filled-with-generalists model may work for some small projects, but it doesn’t scale. The problem has been with confusing two parts of the traditional development problem: collaboration and specialized skills.
In this Advisor, we take a closer look at another type of important COVID-19 data: secondary data, which can help with future pandemic predictions.
This edition of The Cutter Edge discusses why disruption is needed to keep agile alive and relevant, identifies five key factors essential to delivering value and realizing a digital shift, and more.
The Industrial Agile Framework is a framework for applying Agile to physical product delivery. It pulls together everything that’s needed to design and mass produce a product, beginning with an idea and including design, components, supplier considerations, manufacturing, and everything in between. With Industrial Agile, you can change directions while working on product development and you don’t have to go back to square one. And, as with Agile for software, inspecting early and often means finding and fixing errors before they become excessively costly. At the end of their recent webinar on the Industrial Agile Framework, Cutter Consortium Senior Consultants Hubert Smits and Peter Borsella responded to some questions that you may be wondering about as well.