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
The myth surrounding agile projects goes something like this: a small team of developers who can handle any coding task (database, business logic, user interface, middleware, etc.) works hand-in-hand with the end user who talks with the development team about the details of the work requirements. The small-team-filled-with-generalists model may work for some small projects, but it doesn't scale.
As companies become comfortable using agile methods, larger and larger projects are being undertaken. While the myth, "agile is only good for small projects," is being proved wrong every day, there are still a number of issues that need to be addressed in order to scale agile -- in two dimensions, up and out.
There's a challenge brewing in the trenches. It's tense, yet full of opportunity. It is bottom-up and top-down. It's personal -- and organizational. It's about power and control. It's therefore complicated and potentially very, very nasty. But, ultimately, it's about survival: we will change, or we will die.
"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means." -- Inigo Montoya, The Princess Bride
In a meeting today with a client, people were talking continually about how the IT organization and business have to improve their collaboration. The business feels a considerable amount of pain about the lack of collaboration with IT, and IT in turn is feeling some pain collaborating with the business during a transition to agile.
Training and awareness initiatives within organizations are like the dust bunnies hiding under your bed that you never want to think about. However, business leaders would be wise to realize that there is not a more effective information security and privacy defense than informed and aware personnel, as Part I of this three-part Executive Update series shows.