I was delighted to read a thought leadership article from McKinsey recently, “How to start building your next-generation operating model,” that emphasizes some key themes that I have been pushing for years (the quotes below are from the article):
While they promote organizing IT around business value streams, the McKinsey authors identify a risk to be mitigated in that value streams should start to build up software, tools and skills specific to each value stream. This might be contrary to the tendency in many organizations to make life easier for IT by picking a standard set of software, tools and skills across the whole organization. I agree that it would be a shame indeed if agile and lean principles that started life in IT software development are constrained by legacy IT attitudes as the agile and lean principles roll out into the broader organization. There are a lot more positive ideas for organizational transformation in the article, so I recommend that you take a few minutes to read it. My only small gripe is that while the authors emphasize organizing around value throughout, they do not mention prioritizing by business value. Maybe at the high level that McKinsey operates in organizations that concept is taken for granted. My experience is that as soon as you move away from the top level, if business value priorities are not explicit, then managers and teams will use various other criteria for prioritization and the overall results may be compromised. This blog was originally posted at https://www.softwarevalue.com/insights/blog/posts/2017/march/using-software-value-to-drive-organizational-transformation/. Comments are closed.
|