Business Transformation Requires Transformational Leaders
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Over the last four to five years, I've worked with a significant number of product companies (software, hardware/software, and software services, for example, on-line banking) in implementing agile development and project management practices. More often than not, these agile transitions are viewed by management as a "development" transition and not a management transition.
Cutter Consortium recently surveyed 132 organizations worldwide to explore interest in and adoption of various relatively new IT technologies. Cutter Fellows Tim Lister and Lou Mazzucchelli analyzed the data on IT Trends in 2006, and here are their thoughts on the topic of outsourcing:
We often encounter CIOs with a common complaint: business executives demand more business impact and less cost from IT. When we explore the issues with these CIOs, we discover that the problem is more fundamental: the IT organization has been incapable of communicating IT's business impact to business executives. That is, other than IT's cost (the cost of IT borne by the business units), the IT organization has not (credibly) communicated the impact and value of what they do to the business executives who pay the bills.
There have been a lot of "studies" on job migration and outsourcing over the past five years that try to position outsourcing as something political: outsourcing creates jobs; outsourcing is the inevitable consequence of globalization; outsourcing will destroy the US labor force. But what's really going on? How do we avoid the spin that proponents and critics of outsourcing present every time the topic comes up?
This is, by my records, my 100th Trends Advisor (O.K., I'm compulsive about some things). Over the last four years or so, I have weighed in on a large number of topics, so this seems like an auspicious time to look at the bigger picture: what are the major threads (concepts/trends) that are affecting the business/IT world today? Here's my short list:
Fifty years ago this month, on 30 June 1956, there was a mid-air collision between a United Airlines DC-7 en route to Chicago from Los Angeles and a TWA Lockheed 1049 Super Constellation en route to Kansas City, also from Los Angeles, over the Grand Canyon, that killed 128 passengers and crew (for more details, see the complete story).
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.
Knowledge transfer represents a critical stage in the transition phase of a business process offshoring (BPO) project. Often, the offshore service provider (OSP) staff, although skilled, might lack specific expertise unique to the specific business processes they will oversee.