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.
Subscribe to Arthur D. Little's Culture & Leadership Newsletter
Insight
Everybody loves firefighters. As young children, many of us had the desire to be firefighters when we grew up, but very few ever accomplish that goal. For many, firefighters are the real-world heroes. They rescue our pets and save people from car accidents, burning houses, and many other hazards. They are great at taking care of difficult situations.
While Web 2.0 enthusiasts continue to wax eloquently about the promise and virtues new technologies bring and others, less optimistic, bemoan the negative effects they bring to our brains, I'm not so sure we've been paying attention to even darker forces gathering. A spate of recent events made me shudder. Maybe it's just the times, or maybe it's just me. I'll let you decide.
We’ve just completed the fifth annual Cutter Benchmark Review (CBR) issue on IT budgets (see "IT Budgets on a Roller-Coaster Ride," Vol. 10, No. 7).
The accompanying Executive Report examines the future of business with respect to collaboration, which through information and communications technologies (ICT) results in a flattening of the organizational structure.
The adoption of a new project management methodology as part of our business practices is always somewhat of a gamble. Will it work? Will it be an improvement over the processes we currently have in place? Will the time, energy, and resources that we invest now in implementing it prove worthwhile in the long run? These are all questions each of us as IT and business professionals must consider as we make decisions to move our organizations forward. Keeping operations humming along in the face of change and (sometimes) major budget crunches and keeping business practices current and in line with industry practices and technology progress are perhaps the greatest ongoing challenges we face. In this issue of Cutter Benchmark Review, we discuss one of the most recent methodologies to enter the spectrum of possible choices for systems development: Kanban.
The use of Kanban in software development — is it good or bad?
One particular interest I have as a Cutter Senior Consultant in the Agile Product & Project Management practice is in promoting lean and Kanban principles. So when Cutter invited me to be a contributing author to CBR, I immediately suggested the topic of Kanban in software development, not only because it is a recent lean methodology but also because it is being rapidly adopted worldwide. I am hoping this month's issue of CBR will help us understand why.