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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Insight

The Internet changes everything. Okay, now that we're through the obligatory opening for every article these days, let's focus on the key issue for business-IT alignment -- change is changing. We can no longer think of change in the traditional vein of stuff-happens- and-today-it-happens-faster.

The key to a successful outsourcing project lies in the buyer's ability to negotiate an effective contract and manage a working relationship that will change and evolve over the life of the project. The goal of the accompanying Executive Report is to start you thinking about strategies you can employ in the negotiating process to ensure a successful working relationship with your outsourcing vendor.

To effectively manage an outsourced software development effort, you must have a set of measures that can (1) accurately predict and monitor the cost of the software deliverable, and (2) measure the value of the service provided to the customer. The key to this is establishing an accurate cost-per-unit-of-work measure.

We can all recall situations where we've told ourselves, "I should have known better." In most cases, our mistakes probably didn't cost us much -- a few hours listening to a pitch about buying a time-share in Florida or getting a bunch of junk e-mails. When selecting a vendor for an IT outsourcing project, however, mistakes can have a great deal more impact.