What’s happening when we’re reaching the right customers and meeting their strategic needs? That question is the opening gambit in an interesting kind of strategy review. In this Executive Update, we offer the design of two types of reviews — the OI-SR and OI-SDR — which together bring alignment and experiment­ation into prominence.

In this Executive Update, we look at how product intelligence helps address challenges to achieving product leadership, as well as the general business improvements that improved product data and insight can drive.

After doing some mini design thinking interviews at all levels of an organization to uncover hidden issues, the authors propose an 8-step value stream mapping exercise to help team members all get on the same page.

The team is the fundamental unit of organizational work, not the individual. But the ways we manage our teams — and thus our talent — often set us up for systemic gaps and increasing challenges (versus continuous improvement) over time. Today’s executives face two ongoing complex problems: business strategy and people leadership. The invisible nature of these talent issues makes solving them a strategic need through HR capacity building over time.

Project schedule risk management using modeling and simulation tools and techniques is a tried and proven best practice in organizations and industries that strive to do more with less. However, there are some challenges associated with this methodology, and the intent of this Executive Update is to help those who strive for excellence in project management of complex projects to see how proactive risk management can be done successfully.

This Executive Update extends my system dynamics (SD) methodology proposed years ago to integrate the use of SD modeling within the PMBOK Guide’s risk management process. It provides a useful framework for effective management of project risk dynamics.

This Executive Update investigates blockchain adoption in the transport industry; it also describes common challenges and provides practical recommendations for the future.

Continuous disruption is going to be the new normal; you will either disrupt or be disrupted. For those that succeed in adapting to the new era and reaching beyond their current business models, digitalization brings great opportunities for business growth both within industries and across industries.

Part XI of this Executive Update series on customer experience (CX) management in the enterprise covers the major issues and stumbling blocks that organizations tell us are holding back their CX efforts.

While the software industry is currently grappling with ideas of complexity and resilience, there has been very little in the way of concrete actions or activities that software engineers can use to actually design systems. Residuality theory answers this need and draws on complexity science and the history of software engineering to propose a new set of design techniques that make it possible to integrate these two fields. It does this at the expense of two of the most important concepts in software design: processes and components. (Not a member? Download a complimentary copy.)

Business architecture is many different things, capable of delivering many different value propositions to an organization. It is a shared enterprise business language and mental model; a macro business lens for analyzing investments, risks, opportunities, and more; a key component of end-to-end strategy execution; and an important mechanism to bridge and break down silos. Certainly, silos can be necessary for organizations to operate; however, silos can be detrimental to an organization’s success. This Executive Update explores the challenges with organizational silos and how business architecture is uniquely qualified to address them.

Although many organizations have developed digital strategies, far fewer have managed to implement them successfully. As we explore in this Executive Update, creating a “sense of urgency” is often seen as a top challenge for digital transformation due to general unawareness of the opportunities and threats to the core business. Furthermore, many organizations consider a lack of skills and competencies as major challenges on their digitalization journey.

In this Executive Update, we put a spotlight on the energy industry and offer a view of the challenges energy retailers face. We also examine various strategic moves companies should consider to reinvent themselves and stay relevant.

Here in Part XII, the final installment of this Update series, we describe three perspectives on project management to discuss its future directions and especially the future for SPM.

There are two data challenges during the COVID-19 pandemic: (1) collecting the data and (2) building models using the data. In this Executive Update, we discuss the existing approaches and techniques employed to address these challenges.

To remain successful and to disrupt instead of being disrupted, best-in-class B2B organizations are recognizing the increasing importance of “the customer experience” to maximize value. Consequently, they have initiated profound transformations to develop customer preference and maximize margins.

Economic lockdowns in the COVID-19 crisis have quickly and severely compromised the automotive supply chain and dealerships worldwide in unprecedented ways. The recession after the crisis will cut global car demand by multi-digit percentages in 2020, followed by a slow recovery that will lag GDP rebound by one or two years. By the time car sales reach pre-crisis levels again in two to three years, powertrain electrification and digitalization will have made additional advances, just as buyers are returning to the market. This confluence creates opportunities in the automotive crisis recovery for those in the industry who set themselves on the right course now.

Today’s corporate world requires companies to look for a clear purpose for their business ventures, beyond solely maximizing profits. This purpose — or the why — is essential for future success in an ever-changing, increasingly digital business environment. As this Executive Update highlights, today’s companies must not only convince their customers of their offerings, but they also must convey opportunities to their investors and company strategy to their employees through the flywheel concept.

This Executive Update explores opportunities for strategy execution, the role of business architecture and the resulting benefits, collaboration with other teams, and some steps we can take to move into action.

Most of us will have some intuitive criteria for judging what data is valuable. These intuitive criteria may be good enough for simple and familiar operations, but when we start to address more complex and dynamic ones, we need a more systematic method for assigning value to data. In this Executive Update, we look at some of the challenges of putting a monetary or nonmonetary value on your data assets.

The job of the IT strategy isn’t to align to the business strategy. It’s to give the business people who create it as many options to change tack as possible. It’s a provider of IT capability in support of strategic business capabilities. Supporting, enabling, and aligning with core business capabilities equals competitive advantage when the business strategy is a good one.

In a broad Arthur D. Little (ADL) study, we interviewed 30+ industry and technology experts along the automotive value chain (i.e., OEMs, suppliers, distributors, and end customers) in Europe, North America, and Asia. This Executive Update highlights the biggest challenges, barriers, and implications for vehicle design and the industry’s business models.

In Part X of this Executive Update series on customer experience (CX) management in the enterprise, we examine survey findings pertaining to how organizations view their CX efforts to date.

In today’s digital environment, companies and their customers are generating increasing amounts of data. Correctly interpreted and used, this overload can be a means of competitive differentiation. It can improve understanding of customers and their behaviors, as well as control of internal processes. However, in many cases, the amount of data is so large, and the nature of it so complex, that it is difficult to analyze and act upon. As a result, many companies do not manage to harvest the potential value of existing data, despite significant investments and efforts. This Executive Update provides a brief description of how Agile ways of working can help companies effectively and efficiently leverage data in their day-to-day operations.

In this Executive Update, we provide a detailed introduction to the design thinking and Lean Startup paradigms. We also explore their interplay with Agile and how this trifecta can enhance product-market fit by focusing on customer delight.