1. Build your story: By the time you get around to presenting a plan, you will know the subject inside and out. The people you are sharing the plan with will likely have no context or understanding, so methodically build your story. Too many people jump around between the details, big picture, strategy, execution…It becomes a confusing mess. Tip: If you are delivering the plan as a presentation and need a slide with lots of bullet points, you might as well stop talking, everyone will read the slide and ignore you. Either give people time to read the bullets before speaking, or (sparingly) use animation to build the list and unfold … Read More
Getting Software Implementation Right – Prepare
Any software implementation is going to have ups and downs, but your experience and your team’s preparation are critical. Even though it may be the same package you have deployed 100 times, the environment in which your operating is brand new. Being prepared takes on several dimensions of which you must account for them all in order to guarantee success. Creating the Customer Experience Professional services/the implementation team should never define the implementation experience…but they usually do. This responsibility lands squarely with Product Management. Of course, Professional Services must collaborate with Product Management and Finance to determine what level(s) of service is feasible to deliver, but the determination between boot … Read More
Enabling Growth Through Business Architecture: Training
This post is the third in a series on dealing with growth through business architecture. In the first article we covered how and why to understand your business capabilities. In the second article, I shared about the importance of establishing metrics and controls. In this post we will make a pivot to discuss how you keep supporting growth while your organization works to digitize and automate for limitless scalability. By now you have an understanding of the capabilities, major functions, and the supporting processes. Beyond that, you now also have metrics to track historical performance and projection information that indicates where the scaling issues will be most severe. These scalability … Read More
What did you learn today
School will be starting for my kids in just a couple of days. On the ride home or at the dinner table, I will repeat my standard conversation starter…“tell me what you learned today”. I don’t ask if they learned. The expectation is a commitment to learn every day, and that goes for me too. A while ago I was at lunch with a friend who was nearly in a panic. He had been laid off and did not know what he was going to do because he was a niche specialist. He wrote machine level code for a microprocessor, and he was sure he would not be able to … Read More