Tag: organizational change

One of the most common sources of org debt is the knee-jerk reaction. Every time something goes wrong, we immediately jump to create a constraint to prevent future mistakes. So we institute a new role, rule, or process. As a result over a decade or two, a one-step process becomes twenty steps. Or five different […]

All organisations are perfectly aligned to get the results they get. —Stephen R. Covey, Educator and Author My first blog post on untangling your organisational hairball describes six focus areas to increase organisational agility. The first is to be highly aligned. As the Cheshire Cat remarked in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, “If you don’t know […]

You show me a successful complex system, and I will show you a system that has evolved through trial and error. —Tim Harford, Economist Read any contemporary article on organisations and within the first few sentences the word, “agile” appears at least once. Some articles suggest achieving agility with a new target operating model (TOM), […]

Many companies have found that a cloud center of excellence (CCOE) can accelerate their migrations to the cloud and broader digital transformations. These CCOEs take many forms, which is appropriate because each company has unique challenges to overcome. Nevertheless there are certain patterns and antipatterns for using a CCOE. In this blog post, I’ll try […]

IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) has changed IT for the worse. OK, now that I have your attention, let me be fair: ITIL has benefited many aspects of IT (e.g., help desks, infrastructure management, service delivery, etc.) by bringing structure, standards, and consistent, repeatable processes to what was previously a free-for-all. The problem is that IT […]

Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software. —”The 12 Principles Behind the Agile Manifesto” In the early days of my career, the success of my IT projects was measured by delivering on time, within budget, and with sufficiently good quality. “Sufficient” often meant that hundreds of […]

“If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader.” —John Quincy Adams I have been privileged to meet executives from every sector, many with the newer title of “CDO.” The “D” usually stands for Digital or Data. Here’s my observation from seeing great CDOs in […]

We’re taught as managers that rigorous analysis and due diligence are a critical part of our jobs. There’s certainly comfort in spending the time to deeply analyze decisions before we make them. I don’t mean to question that received wisdom, just to point out that there’s a trade-off. Good managers need to do “the right […]

Your cloud migration was off to a good start: you set out with a clear plan, used the “Six Rs” to segment your workloads by the different strategies of moving to the cloud, and have closely tracked core metrics like number of applications migrated. However, your stakeholders have become increasingly doubtful as to whether the […]