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November 6 - December 15, 2019
Opportunities are expanding so fast that you need ways to accelerate your ability to identify which opportunities to invest in and whether your organization has capabilities necessary to deliver on those investments. In short, you need more leverage. Leverage amplifies the results from a given set of inputs.
In this book the authors will address these two aspects: capitalizing on opportunities in the form of delivering customer value by investing wisely and increasing the speed of building the capabilities (especially technological capability) necessary to achieve that.
Customer value is key to the present. Adaptability is key to the future. When ROI and efficiency dominated the fitness function, adaptability suffered. In the technology realm, for example, IT software assets accumulated technical debt that severely impacted future development. Time and time again, when priority decisions were made the emphasis was on schedule and cost, not value and adaptability.
Whether you are setting high-level goals or building capabilities or delivering a small increment of a product, the fundamental approach you need can be summarized in two simple words: Envision–Explore. These two words contrast with traditional approaches that can be characterized by two other words: Plan–Do.
As George Westerman, principal research scientist with the MIT Sloan Initiative on the Digital Economy, says, “When digital transformation is done right, it’s like a caterpillar turning into a butterfly, but when done wrong, all you have is a really fast caterpillar.”
Embracing Tech@Core means keeping up with technology—a daunting task today. Which technologies do you monitor? Which ones do you experiment with? Which ones do you set aside? Which ones do you embrace?
Friction can also arise from using the wrong technology for an initiative. Frequently new initiatives are forced to use inappropriate technology because of existing standards.
For long-time organizations with high technical debt, a strategy to rewrite existing software applications won’t work—it’s just too expensive. Plus, rewriting without making the necessary technical and organizational transformations is a waste of money.
They proposed to reduce the scope of the team’s responsibility. They found teams had problems with a large scope and were unable to clear a pathway to move forward because the problem was just too big. “During our analysis, we found that teams that had very large boundaries and too much ambiguity took a long time to converge on a solution. Teams that had more focused accountabilities and clear guardrails where they could operate could get to the delivery of value a lot faster.”
Traditional functional teams had so many stakeholders—which meant waiting for some manager or functional group to make a decision—that they felt no sense of accountability.
From this exercise, we were able to reframe the work in flight into groups of customer outcome initiatives. For instance, “Drive to 20% market share” became “Enable customers to seamlessly view live TV and Internet TV all in one place.”
Ejemplo del cambio de metas pasando de vaalor interno a valor al cliente
A goal describes how the organization intends to realize the vision. Goals are relatively stable views of the high-level business strategy and are expressed in terms of desired outcomes, rather than specific solutions, product ideas, or features.
Each bet is a hypothesis of value that the organization believes will help it realize a goal.
An initiative describes what to build to prove out a bet. Initiatives typically take the form of a series of smaller hypotheses (or experiments) that have a clear measure of success, based on which teams can make decisions on whether they’re able to prove or disprove the hypothesis.
MoS represent customer value—a measurement of something a customer sees as valuable (Figure 5-1). Outcomes that the organization desires, but a customer does not directly recognize as valuable, are called “benefits.”
For long-lived delivery teams, initiative backlogs5 must include sustaining (break-fix) and tech-debt items in addition to new work.
