Strategic advice to leverage new technologies

In this on-demand webinar with Cutter Consortium Senior Consultant Dr. Patrick Haibach, you’ll find out how RPA is augmenting the workforce in a variety of companies. You’ll learn the ways organizations are using the bot-technology. And you’ll discover what the next era of automation will look like.

One important indicator of just how far along in the adoption cycle a new technology (or practice) is depends on whether organizations have developed detailed plans or roadmaps for its adoption and dissemination across the organization. In this Advisor, we share some preliminary results from our ongoing customer experience (CX) management survey that offer some insight into current and future trends pertaining to the establishment of enterprise CX strategy plans.

Many IT shops often manage dozens and hundreds of active projects. This project-planning work tends to be distributed well beyond a central project management office. There are only so many project managers in the world, and there are often too many project plans to create and manage. To help both our project managers and those in IT (or elsewhere) who operate as project managers without the deeper training project managers often have, we have drafted a rubric that make clear what we are looking for in a project and a project plan.

We have found the keys to using Agile methods in firmware development to be focus, flexibility, collabo­ration, tools, and teamwork. In addition, all participants (customers, product managers and owners, systems engineers, digital designers, hardware and software engineers) need to embrace the approach and work together as a team to get the job done as rapidly as possible. In this Advisor, we explore seven major issues that may come up during the product development cycle while putting Agile methods into action.

Most organizations simplify their implementation of methodologies. The quantity of knowledge in a given methodology is greater than its applied usefulness, so much of the methodology remains, probably very safely, as shelfware. In other more malignant cases where the leaders wish to see more rigor from their staff, the methodology can become overburdening. In statistical project management (SPM), we simplify the project management approach by eliminating many concepts that the dominant project management methodologies consider central. While I caution you to err to the side of adopting a lighter methodology rather than a thicker one, that choice is a local one and yours to make. The SPM ontology is presented in this Executive Update provides you with options.

In digital businesses, fragmentation is a design decision to deal with the fluidity of the business processes and business boundaries. It’s important to understanding the consequences in terms of the energy it takes to keep information con­sistent across a fragmented data landscape. Once you can accept that the beastly nature of working with information is created by your own actions and is an inherent part of the collaboration process that makes information work for you, you can finally start to for­mulate solutions.

Blockchain (in its current and future iterations) will certainly impact various industries and governmental applications. But we will likely derive additional oppor­tunity and value from the convergence of block­chain with other emerging technologies. Data currently created and available from IoT devices, for instance, may very well benefit from some variant of blockchain. Capturing informa­tion from trusted devices and storing it in a distributed model accessible for monitoring and real-time analysis for use by AI packages could dramatically alter the speed and quality of delivery of services and/or reaction.

Product development is challenging for both business people and engineers; one challenge is knowing which features to add and when to stop adding more features. Iterative development solves this problem. With short and repeated development cycles, the product grows. This Advisor seeks to demystify a common myth that surrounds Agile product development: the myth that only the most complete feature set will do.