Articles

How Agile is your Operating Model?

How Agile is your Operating Model?

Author(s):

Mr, Ashridge Executive Education

Let me start with a definition of agile as it applies to operating models or processes: “being able to turn on a dime for a dime” and “being able to change faster and more cheaply than your competitors”.   These phrases are taken from, who was part of the team who coined the term agile as being relevant to the lean and six sigma community.  In this community, agile is associated with short-period (often six-week), test-and-learn projects, at the end of which priorities and direction can be reset based on what has been learned.  It is also associated with “minimum viable product”: the way of testing a new idea.

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Using BPM to Meet Today’s Investment Management Industry Challenges

Using BPM to Meet Today’s Investment Management Industry Challenges

Author(s):

Editorial Director and current Faculty Member, BPMInstitute.org

In today’s demanding business environment that rewards flexibility, speed, quality, efficiency, effectiveness and innovation, a strategically competitive middle- and back-office strategy and its operational execution can be a roadmap to achieve sustainable competitive advantage. Business Process Management (BPM) helps an asset management company achieve these characteristics in the components of its value chain.  Applying the BPM discipline achieves measurable process improvements that lead to organizational performance improvements in the middle- and back-office.

Middle- and BACK-OFFICE challenges

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How to Be Agile in a Non Agile Organization (Part 1):

How to Be Agile in a Non Agile Organization (Part 1):

Author(s):

Managing Director, Both Hemispheres, LLC

Delivering Agile Projects within Structured Project, Process and Quality Management Frameworks

The most important factor in successful Agile adoption (and expansion) is aligning it to the culture, standards and constraints of your organization.  Even the most effective Agile project work risks losing executive support if it cannot meet the overarching management, compliance, administrative and reporting structures established by the organization.  Unless you are in the unique position of being able to adjust your organizational structures to suit the flexibility of Agile approaches, you will need to find a way for your team’s Agile work to comply with these corporate standards.  Thankfully, this is an achievable goal, although it may take some creative thinking to make it work within your specific organizational constraints.

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Lessons from the Field: The Bold Business Architect

Lessons from the Field: The Bold Business Architect

Author(s):

Senior Director, Ameriprise Financial

Picture this: you get this fabulous opportunity to work with a business on bringing its new strategy to life. They share with you the fanciest PowerPoint slides you have ever seen describing their vision, mission, and the tremendous opportunities they see in the marketplace and how uniquely they are positioned to gain market share. You dive right in and open up your business architecture toolbox and get to work. You map out their strategy, document the business model, create a capability map and conduct a maturity assessment. Life is great and the energy level is high. As time goes on, though, you start to get an odd feeling that something isn’t right. You find pockets of disengagement across the organization. You are finding a growing number of major capability gaps. There are parts of the organization you really can’t figure out what they do. And worst of all: you can’t figure out why anyone would really choose to buy from your company versus a competitor.

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The Challenges in Deploying Operational Excellence

The Challenges in Deploying Operational Excellence

Author(s):

Faculty Member, BPMInstitute.org and Principal Consultant, Marvin M. Wurtzel & Associates, Inc.

Deploy: to organize and send out (people or things) to be used for a particular purpose; to open up and spread out the parts of (something, such as a parachute).     Source: Merriam-Webster’s Learner’s Dictionary

Organizations face many challenges when trying to deploy or redeploy an improvement program. So much of the success of any initiative depends on how it is implemented and used by the organization. To be successful, you must consider what is the correct method to use, what are the change management issues, and how it will be deployed. A one-size-fits-all mentality will not work in any of these three areas.

It all begins with culture

We must begin with self-examination of the current culture in your organization. Several questions must be answered:

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Disruption, Innovation and the Art of Business Architecture

Disruption, Innovation and the Art of Business Architecture

Author(s):

Director of Operations and Strategic Initiatives, Leidos

Over the past decade, the Business Architecture community of practice has built a firm foundation of methods, practices and tools that allow organizations to map their place in the business world, assess the viability of their capabilities, and chart a course towards their future. And yet, Business Architecture still has a long way to go to permeate the public consciousness. In fact, while concepts such as change, disruption, and innovation have fired up the imagination of entire industries, Business Architecture’s public brand as a game-changer has drawn more muted reactions, as the Google Trends diagram below starkly demonstrates.

Lovin 921 Image 1

Figure 1: Google Trends graph (dated 9/16/2017), keywords: disruption, innovation, Business Architecture

The Complex Organization

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Enticing Executives with Visual Analysis

Enticing Executives with Visual Analysis

Author(s):

Faculty Member, BPMInstitute.org and President, i4 Process

Once you have your current state model, what do you do with it? How do you share it with the Process Owner and Executive Sponsor and spark their interest? My experience is that executives looking at a model that is 30 to 60 steps long are impressed and say something like, “Wow, that process is complex. I can see it has a lot of steps which could take a long time.” But they are not interested in reviewing every single step and getting into the details.

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5 Questions to Assess Digital Transformation at the Enterprise Level

5 Questions to Assess Digital Transformation at the Enterprise Level

Author(s):

Faculty Member, DBizInstitute.org and Managing Director, Spanyi International

Digital transformation is still one of the business buzzwords of the year. It is estimated that 89% of organizations have digital transformation as a business priority. But if you feel like you’ve come to a standstill in your digital transformation efforts, you are not alone. As many as 84% of digital transformation efforts fail to achieve desired results. And that statistic would likely be higher if we examined only the larger, enterprise level efforts. What exactly is digital transformation? According to researchers at MIT Sloan, digital transformation occurs when businesses are focused on integrating digital technologies, such as social, mobile, analytics and cloud, in the service of transforming how their businesses work. The preoccupation with digital transformation makes sense given the pace of change. Richard Foster, at the Yale School of Management, found that the average lifespan of an S&P company dropped from 67 years in the 1920s to 15 years today.

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The Single Best Measurement of Agile Success

The Single Best Measurement of Agile Success

Author(s):

Director, National Agile Practice, MATRIX Resources

Tell me if this sounds familiar. Organization A decides to adopt Agile methods and begin the lengthy and possibly (probably) expensive transformation process. In doing so they engage in lots of training, read books, attend conferences and listen to webinars. They engage a consulting organization to help coach the change. But, after a period of time has gone by someone brilliantly asks, “So, are we better for having done this?” Great question. Many companies have no idea whether or not these Agile methods are actually helping the bottom line and the way we deliver overall. We figure that if teams are sprinting and doing retrospectives we must be better. If teams are co-located and I see sticky notes on the wall, we must be better.

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4 Tips to Maximize Project Walls

4 Tips to Maximize Project Walls

Author(s):

Managing Director, Ephesus Consulting

Projects create a maelstrom of documentation – charters, workplans, issues logs, process flows, requirements, solution designs, parking lots, and many more. With the deluge, invariably some of the documentation is relegated to the hard drive of death – hidden out of the view of those who might benefit from its availability.

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