Would You Follow This Advice?

According to a recent Harvey Nash / KPMG survey, businesses are increasingly looking to CIOs to improve customer experience and to deliver capabilities which grow new revenue from both new and existing customers.

At the same time Gartner is touting a model of 4 strategies to do this, summarised in the diagram below.

However, I have a problem with this as a strategic tool. To my mind, it is very bottom up and not very illuminating beyond stating the fact that you can exploit various tools. It does not actually connect with business value or scenarios that businesses may find themselves in. It would appear to drive the kind of thinking which says "I've got 4 hammers, what size nail do I need to solve this problem", rather than "what is the real problem? do we actually need to do anything? what are our options? how would we best address this quickly, to appropriate quality (& value) and can we do it economically?" Digital Strategy should be about "how do we deliver new and unique value?" not about "here's some solutions, let's find a problem to fix."

Agile Is Not New, But It is Useful

Agile advocates are often quite quite siloed in their thinking, many having had little other experience of delivering projects than bespoke software development projects. Many of them are not even aware of the historical trends before the publication of the Agile Manifesto or that they are in fact just participating in an evolutionary trend, rather than a revolutionary approach. Agile owes much to Rapid Application Development or RAD (its immediate predecessor). Often, I have heard them musing about applying Agile to other technologies and industries and wandering whether it is possible. At the same time they miss the fact that DevOps, which extends Agile, is based on manufacturing theory (Total Quality Management, Just-In-Time and Flexible Automation).

Actually, project managers who subscribe to the AgilePM approach, will often use the organisational aspects of agile to run their projects and the approaches used in RAD were not new either. Prototyping was a feature enabled in manufacturing by the use of CADCAM to rapidly design and produce prototypes and Engineers have always been taught that Design is an iterative process. The concepts of Design Thinking originate from academic papers produced in the 1960s, and address many of the technique aspects of Agile including multi functional product teams and evolutionary prototyping and development of innovative products.

But if you want to see Agile organisational constructs such as sprints in action, go to a shipyard. almost all modern shipyards practice modular shipbuilding approaches. They split the overall design into modeles which are constructed and outfitted. These are combined to form blocks, which are then further outfitted. The blocks are then moved to the construction berth, combined and integrated. Work is usually organised around 1 to 2 week production units (although sometimes 4 week ones are used). Testing is continuous and progressive as systems and compartments are completed. Test conditions are part of design. (Does this sound Familiar?). 

Although this practice evolved in the late 60s in Japan and gradually spread, it was in fact learnt from high rise building construction, with each floor of office or hotel blocks treated as a sprint.

Likewise, filming has a similar approach. Up front sketches are used to design each scene. Some work is done with cameras, lighting and film to workout the best combinations to achieve the cinematic affects required (a little similar to preliminary UI design). Scenes become the sprints and are filmed iterativelly to produce what can be afforded and so on. UAT is done with test audiences.

So Agile is not new, it's just slightly tailored to software development, and just like some of the other approaches used elsewhere, it's based on producing a right quality product with the minimum of fuss.

Is Your Enterprise Digital Ready? - Summer Time Reading Recommendations

Sometimes it is better to make sure that other people think that they had the idea first. As Information Professionals are not always believed when they try to persuade their business colleagues that they need to change their ways, if they are going to get the best out of their Digital Strategies and Investments.

The truth is that there are some fundamental issues to address which separate Good or Average performing companies from Excellent ones when it comes to exploiting IT or Digital investments and transformations. Proponents of Digital Strategy, Agile and DevOps often raise them, but due to the fact that these issues are being raised in a technological context, non IT colleagues tend to either listen and not hear or just dismiss them as the mad ravings of techno boffins.

Key among these are:

1. Having a "Real Business Strategy" based on deep market insight and how to disrupt or exploit it in your favour;
2. Working as a Team within a healthy Business Culture;
3. Adopting Design Thinking to help empathise with customer needs, really understand what you are trying to address and then to creatively address options and iterate design to create elegant and well targetted solutions rapidly, whilst embracing leraning from failure as a critical part of the approach;
4. Systems Thinking to understand the end-to-end process, identify and manage critical business bottlenecks and organise around product or work delivery, instead of hierarchical functional silos.

A large part of this is really concerned with taking an ego-less multi-functional team approach to addressing what is really needed and then pursuing continuous delivery, automation and improvement in small steps. 

Fortunatley there are some great business books on some of these subjects which evryone should be encouraged to read as they address the issues from a more general business perspective and introduce the key concepts that all the Digital Geeks are so keen on.

My recommendations are:

Good Strategy Bad Strategy is a great expose on how to do Strategy properly. Most readers will recognise many of the bad examples which are lacerated by Richard Rumelt (one of the leading fathers of Business Strategy) in what is a fairly easy and entertaining read.

Winning Teams Winning Cultures  - addresses a lot of the key issues in building a positive enterprise culture. This comes from Larry Senn (of Senn Delaney a culutural change consultancy) and Jim Hart who are long time practitioners in the field of cultural change. It's an interesting book, because just like democracy it is difficult to bomb culutural change from 40,000 feet into an organisation. It requires authenticity, long term commitment and sytematic sweating by the management team to achieve.

The Human Constraint - the author (Angella Montgomerry) takes the principles advocated by Demming and Goldratt and updates them to apply to all businesses (not just manufacturing) in the practical adoption of system thinking and the Theory of Constraints to business in general.

Finally there are plenty of sources on Design Thinking available on the internet. The UK Design Council publishes the Double Diamon model which provides a simple model for explaining the process. I recently saw a great webcast by Ileana Stigliani, fom Imperial College Business School, on the subject Unleash Innovation Through Design Thinking

(see: https://www.ivyexec.com/professionals/classes/details/unleash-innovation-through-design-thinking ).