After doing some mini design thinking interviews at all levels of an organization to uncover hidden issues, the authors propose an 8-step value stream mapping exercise to help team members all get on the same page.

As IS executives, you negotiate constantly — whether it be externally with vendors, contractors, or other partners, or internally with different managers, departments, your project teams, or your direct reports. Some of these negotiations are formal, but most are informal, involving day-to-day interactions at work. These negotiations are consequential, determining your budgets, deliverables, schedules, availability of equipment or services, and other factors that influence your success. Unfortunately, many IS professionals never get exposed to negotiation skills and strategies as part of their education and training.

This on-demand webinar looks at the processes and practices that support business agility from the perspectives of value innovation and product portfolio management. You’ll discover why “crossing of the Rubicon” is a useful metaphor to describe the challenge of rolling out an innovation that fundamentally changes the way an organization works, and why to achieve truly transformative changes, you’ll need to reevaluate skills, priorities, resources, and power.

Being capable to react to change with agility is a key requirement for all companies onboarding digital business models or digital products and processes. And when it comes to competing and staying relevant, agility is becoming a necessity. Large companies, however, appear to face a plethora of challenges with balancing agility and stability. Here in Part II of this two-part Advisor, we answer the question of how to learn and adapt after the pilot launch of an end-to-end Agile process and provide concrete examples of how large corporations have overcome imminent obstacles.

A big cause of failure for large organizations is the attempt to apply one of the many off-the-shelf Agile models. These typically work well for small companies, but not so much in large corporate settings. In Part I of this two-part Advisor, we explore the first half of a four-part framework to scale and customize a tailored Agile approach that caters to an organization’s specific requirements, beginning with assessing your needs in the understand phase. We then describe how picking building blocks from the many Agile concepts available will shape a working model according to the needs of your enterprise.

Robin F. Goldsmith discusses the application of proactive risk management techniques in software testing and development. He observes that many of the risks encountered in software are largely predictable and explores why busi­nesses still manage to fall foul of them and how the real processes employed in our organizations can differ starkly from how we presume them to be. Goldsmith goes on to discuss how a more proactive approach to risk identification at the early stages of a project often saves time and money later.

The team is the fundamental unit of organizational work, not the individual. But the ways we manage our teams — and thus our talent — often set us up for systemic gaps and increasing challenges (versus continuous improvement) over time. Today’s executives face two ongoing complex problems: business strategy and people leadership. The invisible nature of these talent issues makes solving them a strategic need through HR capacity building over time.