13 Results Found for: effectiveness
Overcoming the Resource Efficiency Paradox
“Transformation comes more from pursuing profound questions than seeking practical answers.”
– Peter Block, author of The Answer to How Is Yes
Many Scrum teams’ sprint burndowns look like a cliff, with numerous backlog items in progress at the same time, and most not marked ‘done’ until the end of the sprint.
Your business’ website projects the ultimate first impression, so it’s worth making it well-designed and responsive. But an effective website requires more than just wise aesthetic choices. To create a site that generates leads and informs buying decisions, you need to make it influential. And, the bulk of your influence comes from content. From strong …
What is DevOps? It’s a buzz word, to be sure. It’s a practice. It’s a process. It’s a culture. It’s a tool set. It’s all of those things, and more. Sometimes, its definition will change depending on who you ask and what problems their organization faces.
Adobe ColdFusion is a robust and reliable development platform for many businesses. However, that doesn’t mean you’ll stay on ColdFusion forever. Even if you’ve been using the platform for years, there are many reasons you might want to make the switch to a platform like NodeJS, Rails, or Java. Perhaps you’re ready to scale …
A Momentum-Based Mathematical Tool To Assess Your Blindspots.
A Momentum-Based Mathematical Tool To Assess Your Blindspots. The best teams, who perform with precision, purpose, and efficiency emanate vitality and optimism. These teams universally have great clarity of vision, intrinsic motivation, confidence in the competence of their team, and the proficiency that comes from their ability to execute well together. I call this combination of four leadership levers (vision, motivation, execution, and capabilities), The Momentum Framework. It is represented by a bounded four-quadrant model that represents an organization’s inputs, outputs on the horizontal, and its strategy and tactics on the vertical. When a team is firing on all four of these cylinders, pulling on all four of these levers, it manifests in clarity, creativity, adaptability, and proficiency (represented in the diagram by the orange arrows).
Demystifying Task Analysis of the JTBD Strategy
When I first waded into the JTBD pool a decade ago, I found myself conflicted. I was enamored with this theoretical approach to making disruptive strategies into executable roadmaps to solve customers’ needs, but I was simultaneously confused by the cottage industry terms that cropped up around the JTBD community.
The ancestry of the JTBD theory can be directly traced back at least 25 years to Tony Ulwick’s book, Business Strategy Formulation, and later codified in Clayton Christensen’s The Innovator’s Solution. Before these, dozens of marketing and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) works reference many forms of Task Analysis, which closely resemble Jobs processes.
Why Treating Every Client As #1 Gets Us In Trouble
Clarifying Our Vision Through Strategic Stakeholder Prioritization
In any thriving business, possessing a clear, mutually understood vision of whom your organization serves stands as the hallmark of robust strategy and compelling leadership. This understanding becomes particularly critical as organizations expand, necessitating that leadership teams grasp and effectively communicate the complexities of stakeholder hierarchies. These hierarchies guide more informed, effective decision-making that aligns with the organization’s long-term objectives.
However, misconceptions or misalignments within these hierarchies can lead to significant strategic missteps, often manifesting as widespread confusion about the primary focus of service. This blog proposes a structured approach to dissecting and prioritizing stakeholders to ensure targeted, impactful engagements.
Several years ago, I collaborated with a major corporation grappling with a technology crisis. To make a long story short, market criticisms about security vulnerabilities within their key software precipitated a hasty decision to overhaul and re-platform the application. Driven by a reactive concern for market perceptions – primarily focused on stock price impact – the corporation’s leadership mandated a rapid redevelopment cycle. This rush sidelined potential incremental improvements, aiming instead for feature parity with the legacy system.
Upon release, the new version (while technically superior) failed to meet user expectations. This led to market backlash and a tarnished brand reputation. While totally understandable, this scenario exemplifies a breakdown in understanding service hierarchies, where the focus skewed too heavily toward investor concerns at the expense of user satisfaction.
A well-run organization, with highly motivated and aligned people, is a powerful form of high art. It includes the performance art of your people delivering services and coordinating activities at scale and it has artifacts, symbols, and physical art that have the potential to leave a profound impression on the people it touches. The art manifests in and through all of the layers of the organization’s culture.
Pathways to Growth for Mature Organizations and Startups
Of course, large enterprises can innovate, but it is harder for them than for startups. Many do not know where to begin. They look back and recall how, as a startup, they discovered the product-market fit that made them successful. And now, in full growth mode, they attack innovation with the mindset of growth they have today – which does not work.
Product builders chasing the elusive product-market fit move through two key stages in pursuit of long-term product success. The work they do on the path to product-market fit is a lot different than it is after they’ve achieved it. And the difference in the approaches they take to this work is critical.