Episodes

  • Article 9 - Achieving Alignment with Adam Lacey from Assembleyou.

    Article 9 - Achieving Alignment with Adam Lacey from Assembleyou.
    Jun 30 2023

    Adam, from assembleyou, was kind enough to invite me onto their Power Skills Project podcast a couple of weeks ago. It would be very rare to find people who don't work in teams, across the departments and quite often when we have a conversation with somebody, we have an objective in mind, from deciding where to go to lunch all the way to negotiating resources for a project. However, do they get what they want? Do the people they are speaking to get what they want?

    In this latest article, learn about the concept of alignment in relationship management and its importance in various business interactions. Discover how to establish alignment through effective communication, active listening, and understanding cultural nuances. Build bridges of trust and create clarity to achieve successful outcomes. Listen to get practical examples and understand the tips on what this means in practice.

    Links mentioned in the article:

    • https://www.assembleyou.com/

    • https://www.strategicdigitalbusinesspartner.com/blog/our-blog-1/post/assembleyou-podcast-alignment-6

    • https://www.strategicdigitalbusinesspartner.com/r/Aqi
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    32 mins
  • 8. How To Enable Innovation | Stay Ahead Of Emerging Technologies

    8. How To Enable Innovation | Stay Ahead Of Emerging Technologies
    Jun 1 2023

    Other links mentioned in the article:

    • Create a Portfolio  https://www.strategicdigitalbusinesspartner.com/blog/tales-from-a-portfolio-manager-2/post/5-create-a-portfolio-of-work-15

    • Shared Outcomes Blogpost: https://www.strategicdigitalbusinesspartner.com/blog/tales-from-a-portfolio-manager-2/post/shared-outcomes-8

    • Hackathons: https://www.hackerearth.com/hackathon/

    • Laboratory environment: https://fabfoundation.org/getting-started/#fab-lab-questions

    Imagine the scene. You're a technology director, and you're providing the monthly update to the executive board of your company. The usual finance, project updates, service updates and new initiatives are being discussed. After the regular interruptions and questions, five minutes before the next agenda item, you ask, "Any questions?" 

    In this latest blog post, I delve into a scenario that many of us have encountered in our technology roles - presenting a monthly update to the executive board and being caught off guard by unexpected questions about emerging technologies. I vividly describe the moment and the subsequent realization of the need to stay on the front foot when it comes to these evolving trends.

    To help professionals like you overcome these situations, I provide eight key enablers that will empower you to excel in your technology role. From aligning team activities with strategic business outcomes to fostering a culture of innovation, I offer practical strategies that will help you navigate the ever-changing technology landscape with confidence.

     
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    11 mins
  • Article 7: Trust Enables Strategic Partnerships

    Article 7: Trust Enables Strategic Partnerships
    May 17 2023

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    Links mentioned in the Podcast:

    Free Course Trial: https://bta.news/nmu

    Organisation Partner Maturity Model:  https://www.strategicdigitalbusinesspartner.com/strategic-partnerships#OPM 

    Shared Outcomes Blogpost: https://www.strategicdigitalbusinesspartner.com/blog/tales-from-a-portfolio-manager-2/post/shared-outcomes-8

    Changing Gears Blogpost: https://www.strategicdigitalbusinesspartner.com/blog/tales-from-a-portfolio-manager-2/post/3-changing-gears-13

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    Avoiding the Friday afternoon bug: Imagine this scenario. It's 4 o'clock on a Friday, and you receive an urgent voicemail from one of your key account managers. They inform you that a customer can no longer receive order confirmations via the API with your systems. You know it's going to be a weekend of conference calls, troubleshooting, and persuading colleagues to find the root cause and implement a fix, all while hoping to have it resolved by Monday morning. Sound familiar? We've all been there.

    In this post, I focus on a higher-level perspective rather than just quick fixes. I re-introduce the concept of the organization partner maturity model, where teams, departments, or organizations demonstrate symptoms related to their level of maturity as reactive partners. I discuss the ramifications of such incidents, which often form a narrative among non-technology peers and can impact budget decisions. I explore the trade-off between additional features and maintenance, often perpetuating a reactive mode that feels like a never-ending cycle.

    To break free from this negative feedback loop, I emphasize the importance of trust. Trust measures the quality of our relationships, and it can work either for or against us. By demonstrating good behaviour, clearly communicating and delivering on commitments, negotiating shared outcomes, and actively listening without judgment, we can cultivate trust, build better relationships, and move up the organization's maturity scale toward becoming strategic partners.

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    Hi, I'm Jon, and this is a series of short articles called "Tales from a Portfolio Manager". I help people in corporates plan technology across teams. You could be someone who has a portfolio - of clients, projects, services or a backlog of features, and you have to manage them across a wide variety of teams to achieve any number of goals. I have been doing these roles for over 20 years for many corporates, and I have a few tales to tell. The best thing I can do for you is to encapsulate that experience into my advisory, online training and coaching so that you can reflect on how you solve some pretty challenging issues that you come across and, as a result, be more successful in your role. If you like the content, stay tuned for more episodes and try our courses for free with a link in the article description or here https://bta.news/nmu .
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    11 mins
  • Article 6: How Do You Know When You Are Successful?

    Article 6: How Do You Know When You Are Successful?
    Apr 26 2023
    Links mentioned in the Podcast: Free Course Trial: https://bta.news/nmu If, like me, you've had a long list of potential projects to review, triage and investigate, you may have come across entries that need to be clarified. For example, it could simply just read "Hospitality Management System". There are no clues as to the purpose, how urgent it is, the relative size of the project and whether it is funded or not.   In this scenario, you may ask yourself, "How much time should I spend on investigating this compared to the other 30 line entries that are equally vague". I've spoken in previous podcasts about the starting point in structuring your demand, but this time I want to focus more on the next level of detail required for each request. Many organisations I've worked in have a scoping document, request form or an ideas document that outlines the essential information to help fit these jigsaw pieces of the puzzle, and it's at this initial stage where the seeds for scope creep, overspending, and delivery failure start to creep in. This is because it's down to the type of questions posed in the template.   Imagine the scene. You set yourself a task of understanding what the "Hospitality Management System" means. So you meet with the business sponsor to understand more and have your scoping document to fill out. How do you conduct the meeting, and what questions do you need to ask to ensure we don't sow the seeds of failure later in the delivery process? -------------- Hi, I'm Jon, and this is a series of short articles called "Tales from a Portfolio Manager". I help people in corporates plan technology across teams. You could be someone who has a portfolio - of clients, projects, services or a backlog of features, and you have to manage them across a wide variety of teams to achieve any number of goals. I have been doing these roles for over 20 years for many corporates, and I have a few tales to tell. The best thing I can do for you is to encapsulate that experience into my advisory, online training and coaching so that you can reflect on how you solve some pretty challenging issues that you come across and, as a result, be more successful in your role. If you like the content, stay tuned for more episodes and try our courses for free with a link in the article description or here https://bta.news/nmu . --------------- I find that these scoping documents start with a project management mindset, looking "downstream" towards the end deliverable, where the impulse is to answer the question "How much?" we control time and resources. Someone else decides whether it is worth doing or not. Yet, we need to look "upstream" towards the source of demand in the first place. So in this example, we'll need to reverse engineer the phrase "Hospitality Management System". The term itself could cover many activities. So what does the business sponsor specifically have in mind? What is the pain point that, overall, they are trying to resolve?   In the meeting, we need to get the conversation as quickly as possible onto their objectives. This will be understanding their agenda and how they measure success. They may be prepared to share what they have outlined in their personal performance development plan or what their line manager holds them responsible for. The higher up the organisation you are, the higher level the objectives will be. For example, if it is a department head, they will have to manage a budget, and they may be asked to reduce costs. Other things could be compliance, revenue, and efficiency savings.   So in one of my examples, I spoke to the Head of Customer Services. They have been given the joint objective with the Head of Sales in a hotel chain to increase revenue, and they have decided the best opportunity is to do this through up-selling room bookings to existing clients. Think weekend getaways, that sort of thing. In this instance, they have a call centre alongside a brochure website. In the call centre, they manage customer queries, take bookings, resolve escalations and coordinate booking changes with the individual hotels.   Given that there is already a booking system that the company uses in the back office, how can that be exposed to the front office? As a technologist, this may well be a sufficient trigger to start your investigations, and you could come up with any number of possible solutions, such as an upgrade to the website integration with the existing booking system, a new booking system, or an existing cloud platform that integrates into booking.com, for example. It will cost money, and inevitably, you'll need to come up with some estimate to ensure a return on investment.   The management team at the Call Center has spotted the opportunity where call agent time could be saved by giving direct access to the customers to make the booking themselves on a redesigned website, rather than having to ring up the CallCenter to do the job for them. Of course, with that efficiency ...
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    13 mins
  • Article 5: Creating a Portfolio of Work

    Article 5: Creating a Portfolio of Work
    Apr 11 2023
    Links mentioned in the Podcast: Free Course Trial: https://bta.news/nmu Imagine the scene. Your boss organises an improvement workshop to brainstorm how members of the Customer Success Team can improve alignment between what we do as a central technology function for a portfolio of about 20 key customers and the overall company's goals. At the meeting, He explained that he has a list of over 200 feature requests, projects and new demands and ideas which need looking into - and that list keeps getting longer. Also, your colleagues say many customers complain that we are not providing the service they want. Finally, the business wants to change direction and keep up with the new industry trends.    So where do you start? What would you put down as a list of ideas? Think about your current work situation and how you currently do things. What works well, and what would you like to try out? I have a few ideas, and I'd like to share those with you today.   Hi, I'm Jon, and this is a series of short articles called "Tales from a Portfolio Manager". I help people in corporates plan technology across teams. So you could be someone who has a portfolio - of clients, projects, services or a backlog of features and you have to manage them across a wide variety of teams to achieve any number of goals. I have been doing these roles for over 20 years for many corporates, and I have a few tales to tell. The best thing I can do for you is to encapsulate that experience into my advisory, online training and coaching so that you can reflect on how you solve some pretty challenging issues that you come across and, as a result, be more successful in your role. If you like the content, stay tuned for more episodes and try our courses for free with a link in the article description or here https://bta.news/nmu   So let me start by giving you some background of my experience. When I began managing a list of ideas, projects, and services, I first used Excel. Also, each item on the list always had criteria related to the dimensions that were easy to describe, such as the size of projects, cost resources, time and objective. Invariably, one of my tasks was to update the different stakeholders on the status of each of these items. And that's where the conversation could quickly derail. As soon as a request made its way onto the list, there was an explicit expectation that I would do something about it, and infinite resources backed me up on delivering it. We all know that is not the case, and I've already discussed ways with you in previous episodes to deal with these expectations.   I started by thinking the best way to do this is to sort these projects into some common scope so that I could create a program of related work activities. Then questions would arise about who, what, and why. Next, there would be scheduling, dependencies and priority decisions, so the next step was to talk about governance quickly with some form of committee. But wait - what about all the new demand coming in? How would I prioritise that with the existing portfolio of work? To help, I have often worked with a solution architect to think about how the jigsaw pieces of the future technology footprint would sit together. Typically, I found that when the customer makes the request, it would take three months to turn it around with some idea of whether it can be fulfilled, when and how, even if it is a simple requirement. This work does not even consider the business strategy, which often seeks to reduce cost, simplify and make everything digital.   It is a complex problem, and if you feel this reflects some degree of what's happening in your organisation, I can empathise deeply. If you change one cog in the planning gearbox and replace it with another, it may not fit, so you remove all the cogs to see how they could all fit together again. What I can do I can start to outline some steps and a broader framework to guide your thinking.    If, like me, at the beginning of my career, you're thinking about organising programs from projects based on an Excel list, I would caution that there are better places to start. One of the prerequisites of the whole exercise is a clear business strategy. Anything written down that explains, even poorly, the customer's plan is a good step forward. A better step forward is to research technology trends, your department's plans, and how that could influence your customer's strategy. Further, finding out the level of risk that the business sponsors are prepared to take is a critical insight since business strategy can be easily formulated into options based on that risk appetite - Do they want to do slow incremental change? Is the customer facing an urgent and critical threat to which it must respond, and most importantly, is the customer prepared to accept the level of disruption and the risk of failure should they choose to radically change the direction of their business?    Suppose the customer needs a plan. ...
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    14 mins
  • Article 4: Empathy Helps Unlock Alternative Solutions

    Article 4: Empathy Helps Unlock Alternative Solutions
    Mar 27 2023
    Links mentioned in the Podcast: Free Course Trial: https://bta.news/nmu Transcript:  Imagine the scene:  you're having your monthly meeting with your business sponsor, going through the progress reports, project deliverables, service levels, and future ideas. They say, "Well, look, we have an idea where we want to improve the experience of our visitors, and we have found software which will help us achieve that. We're talking reception, booking meetings, desks and turnstiles. It's okay; it's "software is a service", so we can manage the whole process, start to finish, with the supplier directly. We've already had discussions with them, and they've given us access to a demo account. I wanted to let you know.   So what do you do? Do you say;  "Thank you very much for the information?" I hope it all goes well. "Let me check with my colleagues in central IT to see if we have anything already in place?" "Help me understand the problem you're trying to solve in more detail?"   Hi, I'm Jon, and this is a series of short articles called "Tales from a Portfolio Manager".  I help people in corporates plan technology across teams. so you could be someone who has a portfolio - of clients, projects, services or a backlog of features and you have to manage them across a wide variety of teams to achieve any number of goals. I have been doing these roles for over 20 years for many corporates and I have a few tales to tell. The best thing I can do for you is to encapsulate that experience into my advisory, online training and coaching so that you can reflect on how you solve some pretty challenging issues that you come across, and as a result,  be more successful in your role. If you like the content, stay tuned for more episodes and try for free our course here https://bta.news/nmu   Well, in terms of the questions, the answer I wouldn't give is the first one. I appreciate that the business sponsor has been transparent in letting me know, and I see that as an invitation to take a closer look. So I will go with the third response. Naturally, I'll be curious to understand what needs to be fixed in the visitor experience and what they want to see happening. In this particular scenario, I'm assuming that someone somewhere has done some quick desk-based research - a couple of phone calls and a meeting with a supplier and the solution has already been decided. This may be sufficient in simple scenarios; however, there are certainly far more factors to consider in corporate scenarios, especially the scale; we won't be talking about a couple of visitors, but maybe tens of thousands in a year.   Another consideration is the do-nothing option. Is there a legacy system in place already? Is it out of support, or are there new requirements it does not fulfil? What would the staff do to facilitate visitor management if there were no digital enablement of the process? Would they use index cards, Post-it notes, Excel, spreadsheets and walkie-talkies to manage the flow? The downside risk of not fulfilling a requirement in the short term may cause reputational damage and require substantial additional resources to work the process with the incumbent error and embarrassment that ensues.   So inevitably, there is a sense of urgency. Depending on the circumstances, sometimes implementing something local sooner does trump onboarding onto a corporate-wide solution later. Yet fulfilling that need with a just-in-time response may come with the expectation that a long-term alternative solution can be found and supported by corporate IT and placed on the roadmap.   I've often found that the not invented here syndrome can quickly take root. So even after a couple of phone calls, people have already decided on the solution, and as a result, they are less open to discussing alternatives. Given the pressing need to solve many other issues, I understand why the desire to get stuff done and move forward doesn't go away. On the other hand, if there is a standard solution that exists within the company, people can get offended quite quickly, simply because it hasn't been considered, or since out of the 10th features that are required, only nine of them are fulfilled, and that one feature suddenly becomes the must-have feature dealbreaker.   People tend to wrap their egos into whatever solution. THEY decide it is the best choice, and it becomes difficult to disambiguate between the ego and the solution. So if you offer an alternative, they can become offended. In this situation, I make it easy for them to adopt an alternative idea as if it were theirs in the first place.    You can get caught up in a culture between "us" and "them", where the opposing team rallies around their idea of how the problem should be solved vs the other team and their idea. Suppose different teams in diverse parts of the organisation employ empathy to understand their counterparty's issues and way of working can help different teams. In that case, having a ...
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    10 mins
  • Article 3: Changing Gears from a Reactive Partner to a Strategic Partner

    Article 3: Changing Gears from a Reactive Partner to a Strategic Partner
    Mar 14 2023
    Links mentioned in the article:   Organisation Partner Maturity: https://bta.news/aqb The five Competencies: https://bta.news/25n  Free Course Trial: https://bta.news/nmu   Transcript:   Imagine the scene. Your boss has just come out of a meeting with the finance director of your company. It's September, and he looks at you and says, "time to sharpen your pencil; it's budget time again". Not only do you have your day job, but you now have to review pages and pages of excel spreadsheets and magically conjure estimates based on abstract ideas of what you think your customers want. And then only after building this immense forest of numbers for the finance director cut it back again.   You're probably thinking to yourself, "what's the point? Even after it is approved, everybody wants to start everything in January, and we're often unable to complete the budget simply because we don't have the capacity to spend it!" Fortunately, you kept your thoughts to yourself, out of your boss's hearing.   I have been exposed to many situations like this, so this is not uncommon. This yearly ritual of forecasting your project spend for the year can sometimes feel like a chore. So, whilst it could be worse - after all, there could be no planning, is there a better way?   Hi, I'm Jon, and this is a series of short articles called "Tales from a Portfolio Manager".  I help people in corporates plan technology across teams. so you could be someone who has a portfolio - of clients, projects, services or a backlog of features and you have to manage them across a wide variety of teams to achieve any number of goals. I have been doing these roles for over 20 years for many corporates and I have a few tales to tell. The best thing I can do for you is to encapsulate that experience into my advisory, online training and coaching so that you can reflect on how you solve some pretty challenging issues that you come across, and as a result,  be more successful in your role. If you like the content, stay tuned for more episodes and try for free our course here https://bta.news/nmu   So let's imagine another scene: you're 18 months into the future, and things look very different. On the relationship front, you have a regular cycle of catchups with your customer/business sponsor to ensure continued alignment on where they are with their plans and current situation and whether there needs to be any adjustment. That's not been easy to get to - since you've had to slowly build the level of trust so that they share their plans and thoughts, and you've had to demonstrate responsiveness to what were some outstanding issues before you could even start talking about the future.   On the value front, you've tried to understand your customers' needs, spend time with them, and know how they work and their daily issues. Even then, the level of the conversation at the beginning was like taking an order in a restaurant - and you had to work hard to steer the conversation more to solving the business problem rather than finding a technical solution. Similar to hanging a picture rather than buying a drill. You've considered what they are trying to achieve and what's stopping them. You have listed a series of measurable outcomes that crystallise these.   On the Strategy front, you've organised these outcomes into a clear mandate that the client team can accept as their plan over the next three years and created several themes into which you can allocate business activity onto one sheet of paper (or slide). At this point, the magic starts to happen since you can relate back to the various central technology teams on how they can enable business initiatives. This activity has not been one conversation but a continuous discussion where you've had to work together to figure out what could be done in the short term, if any existing solutions can be leveraged, or do you need to procure or build new solutions to enable the business client to do their job.   On the portfolio front, things are taking shape. There has been quite a bit of back and forth during the year, shaping the demand into something that is starting to look very much like a roadmap - and whilst there has been some jostling for some work to be done immediately, we're talking for the first time about projects that go beyond 12 months. There are some other tangible quick wins you've been able to do - a kanban board of ideas and requests that now gets prioritised. This board gets updated every two weeks with the client to report back on the feasibility of the project or feature request and where you have time allocated to look at agreed requests for the next two weeks. Finally, you've instigated a quarterly strategic portfolio review of the roadmap, where you check whether the situation requires any changes, agree on work packages for the next three months and sign off on those deliverables that were instructed a quarter ago.   On the Organisational front, naturally, there has been...
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    9 mins
  • Article 2 - A Surprise Request

    Article 2 - A Surprise Request
    Feb 27 2023
    9 mins