At the team level…
Small, focused teams are the fundamental building block of adaptive organisations. Embedding agile and service-oriented methods at the team level is at the heart of any digital transformation, and has the greatest potential to achieve efficiencies and operational improvement.
With the support of local leaders who can protect the space for agile teams to thrive, this transition can quickly reduce unnecessary or broken processes and bureaucratic inertia – plus increase the scope for automating the boring bits.
The goal is practical agility, not agile ideology, which requires flexible multi-modal management, presence and engagement from leaders.
We provide tools, learning and support to help teams evolve from ‘following the process’ to owning the services and value proposition they deliver to the organisation and customers.
We support teams and leaders to optimise their use of digital and collaboration tools, and help them transform their work as service owners, using continuous improvement methods to evolve.
Digital Transformation
How can we help team leads implement agile methods and enable small, multi-disciplinary teams to move ahead more quickly?
Capability & Service mapping
How can we map digital business capabilities and services to identify strengths, gaps and priorities for development?
Learning Support
How can we build a picture of team learning needs and generate custom learning journeys to support them?
Why “not enough time” is no excuse
We do a lot of work with organisations to help embed new ways of working enabled by the digital workplace. One of the most commonly cited barriers to adoption of modern work techniques is employees who think they lack the time to try new things. More often than not, this objection comes from leaders, rather than front-line teams…
Diversity-as-a-System
A 21st century organisation uses systems thinking to enable agility. Shipping working code is an example of a highly valuable system that most startups develop early. When startups scale, everything moves so fast that the sole focus is on shipping the product to specified deadlines. If diversity isn’t engrained into the system of shipping the product, it will be forgotten during scaling…
Trustfulness and professionalism
In a complex world where few of us have time to understand the intricate detail of data, accounting, law and perhaps even code, we will need trusted professionals to help us navigate complexity. So whilst automation and technology will probably reduce headcount in the profession overall, the prize for those who can use our new technology superpowers to create value for their clients will be ever greater. Algorithmic transparency and code standards can help us trust the underlying machinery, but I predict we will still place our trust in humans to make the final judgement.
The trap of user-centricity in the Digital Workplace
The aspect of the future of the digital workplace that most excites me is its data. The social and organisational network data produced by these tools provides a wealth of possibilities to explore. These can be as simple as a chatbot that replaces an IT help-desk, or as complex as being able to understand the behaviour patterns of your business.
Why throwing out job families is a good first step to creating a future-proof talent strategy.
In HR, the concept of job families is one example of a practice that needs revising to stay relevant. Clustering a set of roles into a ‘job family’ allowed for transparency in rewards, promotions and career paths, but today this can create artificial barriers to collaboration and personal development.
The Tell-tale Heart of Team Failure
At the end of a conference presentation, I was recently asked “how can I tell if an enterprise agile team is failing?”. A question for which I didn’t have an immediate satisfactory answer…