Category: Change Management

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Agile Transformation Change Management

Agile Change Management

The business world has arguably seen more disruption in the last nine months than in the last nine years, bringing new and urgent demand for change. Initiatives are being launched by the dozen, adoption can’t happen fast enough, and the stakes are higher than ever. In the midst of a Covid-induced recession, and with some industries on the brink of extinction, change isn’t about fine-tuning — it’s existential.

But traditional change management — often characterized by heavy process, lengthy timelines, and clunky rollouts — won’t cut it right now. As organizations fundamentally rethink their product and service portfolios, reinvent their supply chains, pursue large-scale organizational restructuring, determine on the fly how to operate in a virtual world and rebuild to correct systemic racism from the ground up, the type of change management required in this moment is quick, agile, and (in many cases) virtual.

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Change Management Innovation Organizational Improvement

Brilliant Leaders Embrace the Rule of One Percent

It’s really hard to make massive gains in skill, performance, and talent, especially overnight. But it’s fairly easy to make small changes every day. So if you’re pursuing major improvements, leverage lots of small, easy wins instead.

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Change Management Organizational Improvement Process Improvement

Think local to stay ahead of the competition

As we move into the new decade, Forrester is identifying forces that will require organizations to rethink the one-size-fits-all model and move to an approach that shifts the balance to more local-specific services and delivery.

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Agile Transformation Change Management Organizational Improvement

Agile Transformation? Choose the Right People.

Agile methods can accelerate product development and process improvements. They can also help engage an organization’s most valuable employees, deepening their connections and experiences in ways that pay off for the company in the long run. But agile teams are not stand-alone entities; they’re embedded in broader collaborative networks. By taking that reality into account, leaders can design them so that they make the most of talent inside and outside teams, avoid overload and burnout, avert potential disruptions, and achieve their objectives better and faster.

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Change Management Systems Thinking

What Is Strategy?

Today’s dynamic markets and technologies have called into question the sustainability of competitive advantage. Under pressure to improve productivity, quality, and speed, managers have embraced tools such as TQM, benchmarking, and re-engineering. Dramatic operational improvements have resulted, but rarely have these gains translated into sustainable profitability. Gradually, the tools have taken the place of strategy.

That shift led to the rise of mutually destructive competitive battles that damage the profitability of many companies. As managers push to improve on all fronts, they move further away from viable competitive positions. Operational effectiveness, although necessary to superior performance, is not sufficient, because its techniques are easy to imitate. In contrast, the essence of strategy is choosing a unique and valuable position rooted in systems of activities that are much more difficult to match.

It’s important to trace the economic basis of competitive advantage down to the level of the specific activities a company performs. In many cases, making trade-offs among activities is critical to the sustainability of a strategy. Whereas managers often focus on individual components of success such as core competencies or critical resources, managing fit across all of a company’s activities enhances both competitive advantage and sustainability.

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Agile Transformation Change Management

Agile at Scale

When implemented correctly, agile innovation teams almost always result in higher team productivity and morale, faster time to market, better quality, and lower risk than traditional approaches can achieve. What if a company were to launch dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of agile teams? Could whole segments of the business learn to operate in this manner?

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Change Management Personal Improvement

Stop making New Year’s Resolutions.
Create a Start-Stop-Continue Plan Instead.

Real change requires more than just doing something new. It also involves stopping what doesn’t work and continuing what’s already working well.

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Agile Transformation Change Management Innovation

Embracing Agile

Over the past 25 to 30 years, agile innovation methods have greatly increased success rates in software development, improved quality and speed to market, and boosted the motivation and productivity of IT teams. Now those methods are spreading across a broad range of industries and functions and even reaching into the C-suite. But many executives don’t understand how to promote and benefit from agile; often they manage in ways that run counter to its principles and practices, undermining the effectiveness of agile teams in their organizations.

From their work studying and advising companies that have successfully employed agile methods, the authors have discerned six crucial practices for capitalizing on agile’s potential: (1) Learn how agile really works; (2) understand when it is appropriate; (3) start small and let passionate evangelists spread the word; (4) allow teams that have mastered the process to customize their practices; (5) practice agile at the top; and (6) destroy corporate barriers to agile behaviors. They expand on each, providing executives with a practical guide for accelerating innovation and profitable growth.

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Agile Transformation Change Management Process Improvement

Best Practices for Instant Messaging @ Work

The benefits of instant messaging tools like Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Zoom have become quickly obvious. There’s just one problem: We’re still figuring out how to properly, and professionally, communicate via IM. Organizations should begin to adopt best practices, such as carefully choosing which systems to use, ideally ones already favored by employees; setting ground rules around personal messages; respecting work-life balance by creating norms around appropriate response times; and encouraging face-to-face communication as well.

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Change Management

Why Every Sales and Marketing Team
Needs a “Boundary Spanner”

In almost every successful technology implementation, there is a very special profile of the person leading the effort. This Most Valuable Player of technology implementations is a boundary spanner. Boundary spanners cut across business and technology in their experience. They have empathy for the commercial mindset (“Get it done. Produce results”) as well as the IT mindset (“Design for long term. Control risk.”) Although our experience is with sales and marketing, we suspect this leader profile is critical in other domains as well. This article explains what boundary spanners do, how they do it — and how organizations can create more of them.

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