Transforming Your Business to the Agile Needs of Today's World
Transforming your business to the agility and efficiency needs of today’s world is a highly complex challenge. It cannot be achieved by yesterday’s best practices1. You may have tried agile best practices2. But somehow, what worked in a small department, just didn’t work out in the larger organisation. Effective practices may have been lost. Outsourcing the work might sound like an easy fix. But something in the back of your mind tells you: How can anybody make this work when today’s agile best practices fail to answer the same vital questions yesterdays best practices have failed to answer? Here is our response to this:
Why starting a high-cost, high-risk transformation project when answering the vital questions provides the low-cost/low-risk transformation path and higher value?
Our approach is targeted at helping you and your staff to ask the vital questions and learn a simple framework to deal with the complexities of the 21st century. It consists of a simple series of workshops and practices.
More specifically, is any of the following your problem?
- A project or program is in serious trouble?
- Risk management has failed to improve project success rates to acceptable levels?
- The obstacles standing in the way of your transformation project seem insurmountable?
- Compliance with your strategies and standards just doesn’t work out to the level required?
- Best practices and popular trends became more important than creating strategic value? Has your team lost the ability to create strategic value?
1 Yesterday’s/traditional Best Practices: Project Management, Governance, Service Management/ITIL, Waterfall, etc.
2 Agile Best Practices: Scrum, Semco, self-organization, Lean Start-Up, etc.
Why We Can Achieve Results where Others Have Failed
Open root cause analysis delivered 10 fundamental root causes of insufficient results and project failure. They turned out to be pretty much the same across industries and fields. As they do not fit into a field, they are missed with popular solution approaches. In turn, this allows us to guide you and your teams straight to where the highest possible impact can be made at the lowest costs and risks.
This can be applied to rescue a single project or for solving structural issues undermining your projects and competitive positions. Below is our generic solution framework for structural issues. For a single project, we use relevant parts.
Feel free to start right away by asking Guiding Questions in your organisation. You can contribute one or the other example of a simple solution and one or the other possibility these solutions provide.
Our Generic Solution Framework
1. Ask Guiding Questions
Guiding questions are questions that cannot be left unanswered much longer. They have been derived from the fundamental root causes mentioned above. Following are generally applicable questions. Simple solutions exist to all these questions. More so, the challenges of questions 1 and 5 can be solved via a single word. Additional, challenge and field-specific questions are available via ‘Guiding Questions’ in the menu.
Generally applicable, Guiding Questions
We have best practices, tools and experts for virtually any field. Where are those ensuring that not only the partial solutions work, but also the whole package at project, department, enterprise or system level? More specifically, where are those best practices, tools and experts that …
- Solve the mounting conflicts between traditional and agile best practices?
- Solve the changeable (root) causes hiding behind complaints, reoccurring problems, failed projects and ongoing cost-savings pressures?
- Bridge the highly complex internal communication space between organisations and between processes?
- Identify phenomena3 in complex environments and solve them with techniques suited to these phenomena?
- Reduce the crippling bureaucracy and the overwhelming complexity to healthy levels?
Do you want to know the word and the solution approach for the challenges of questions 1 and 5?
2. Educate and Coach with Examples of Simple Solutions
To move forward, examples of simple solutions are need. That’s solutions having shown their value in situations where popular solutions have failed. It includes guidance to recognize phenomena such as the tipping beyond which an effective solution turns into one fueling new complexity and project failure. To this end, feel free to use examples from our list of simple solutions and associated possibilities.
3. Get People of Conflicting Views on the Same Page
This is where interviews and workshops come in. Following is our standard approach. It will be adjusted to the environment-specific needs:
- We listen to you and your teams: To your lessons learned, your needs and the obstacles standing in the way of your projects.
- When the internal knowledge is exhausted, we contribute external knowledge: You decide whether it is relevant or not, and whether it will be part of the further work.
- Together, we identify the changeable situations and root causes hiding behind symptoms such as complaints, cultural problems and insufficient results of previous projects.
- We focus on the higher-impact situations and root causes: This prevents getting lost in hundreds of situations, symptoms and root causes, and compromises that would backfire later on.
- Together, we identify goals for each of the changeable situations and root causes.
4. Identify the Solution Framework for the Specific Challenge
One of our experiences is this: Quite often, when ‘everybody’ expected a complex solution to a complex challenge, the executable solution turned out to be a simple solution. The previous steps made it possible.
For more information or to speed things up, contact Eugen Oetringer at +31-78 644 0199 (Netherlands) or via info@comdys.com