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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A recent discussion on the NewGrange list server [1] began with the question, "Is there really anything that a project manager does that is more important than risk management?" As the discussion unfolded, there was a general consensus that a risk-centered perspective would definitely stand any project management in good stead. With that in mind, I would like to suggest a few risk-centered activities that are in keeping with an agile risk management.
I am working on a large project with a group of people on the opposite coast. I visit them once or twice a month for face-to-face discussions. On a recent visit, I learned a lot about improving productivity from some unexpected places.
A friend of mine runs a company that provides remote back-up and recovery. It's a very nice little company that makes money and provides a valuable service to its customers. About a year ago the company piloted its technology at my university. The results were great. They quoted us a price of around US $14 per month per user for automatic, almost limitless back-up with guaranteed recovery of any file within hours. Good stuff.
In my last Advisor (see "Agile: A Set of Methods and Skills or a Leadership Mindset and Culture?" 1 June 2006), I argued that agile methods won't thrive unless the IT leadership mindset and culture is itself agile, and for most agile experts, that implies collaborative leadership.
The commoditization of IT, along with the low success rate of IT projects, has fueled the desire of corporate management to see realistic ROI numbers for IT expenditures. No longer will senior management accept the "We must innovate or be left behind" argument that got previous IT projects approved.
Cutter Consortium recently surveyed 132 organizations worldwide to explore interest in and adoption of various relatively new IT technologies. Dennis Adams, chairman of the Decision and Information Sciences Department in the C.T. Bauer College of Business at the University of Houston (Texas, USA), analyzed the data on IT Trends in 2006, and here are his thoughts on the trend of outsourcing:
An IT management idea that has not outlived its usefulness suggests how improved might be the performance of the IT organization were its members to undergo communications skills training. Put a router in a computer jock's hands and he's happy. Put him in front of a capital planning committee to justify the IT shop's 20% budget increase request and the result might be an audience recommendation to stick with routers.
WinFS is one of a set of frameworks that make up Vista's "Windows .NET Framework Extension" (WinFX). This is a superset of the .NET Framework, which is at the heart of Microsoft's .NET [1]. Alongside WinFS, WinFX also includes Windows Communication Foundation (WCF, previously Indigo), Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF, previously Avalon), and Windows Workflow Foundation (WWF).