Imagine allocating 90 percent of your budget to keep the lights on and only a measly 10 percent to innovation.
Today, that sounds preposterous, right, when agile, innovative market entrants are crushing it, giving companies – perhaps even yours – a run for your money. It’s the stuff that makes you lose sleep at night because you simply can’t keep up with a market where changes occur at the speed of light and business priorities are shifting.
At Slide3, we get it. We’ve guided many companies like yours out of that gut-wrenching dark place – help you operate Faster. Better. Differently… so that you provide value to all stakeholders who have a vested interest in getting quality products and services to market… efficiently and effectively.
It’s all about value… about value management and leadership and scrutinizing your business, looking at it through two crucial lenses: Mechanical and Behavioral. This dual approach is essential not only to get you off your starting blocks but also to perform competitively in the market.
For Capacity That Meets Demand: Eliminate
We talk a lot about taking things down to the studs. That’s important. You have to take a good hard look at what you’re doing and eliminate all the tasks that are not providing value to your ultimate project goal. Winnowing is essential because it’s crazy to think that a business could navigate seamlessly within an environment where so many factors inform decision-making:
- Market changes and product complexity
- Interdependencies of software and hardware components
- Multiple disciplines and cross-functional teams involved in a project
- Increase in touchpoints and decision making surrounding them
Without the right systems it’s impossible to operate successfully – let alone innovate.
It’s the outdated practices, general misalignment with strategic objectives, and performing duplicative or redundant tasks that are holding you back. To even begin to turn things around, you must assess current state processes and workflows, target gaps, and identify inefficiencies, and bottlenecks. (Down to the studs, remember!)
Plus, you must embrace requirements traceability to track and document the relations of requirements (demand) and artifacts (deliverables) throughout the development process. Requirements traceability is a must in today’s workplace – especially if you want to excel by revving up your best practices.
A formalized process helps you collect and evaluate requests and bring focus to the work that drives business value. This process goes hand-in-hand with capacity planning which ensures that the capacity and resources are sufficient to execute the required plans – and that includes having the flexibility and the rapid decision-making capability to adjust to changing conditions quickly.
You can actually visualize capacity with the capacity planning software available today. While capacity planning is anchored in real-time, it also has a future outlook. For example:
- Resource allocation – Assigns tasks and projects to team members based on their availability and skillset.
- Time tracking – Monitors individual and team time spent on tasks to assess workload and identify bottlenecks.
And:
- Demand forecasting – Estimates future workload and project needs to determine required capacity.
- Visualization – Presents data in a clear way to easily see current and future capacity levels.
What Is and What Should Be
Demand Management and Capacity Planning provide shared reference points of all requirements and their status for all individuals and teams involved. This shared characteristic enables transparency across teams, enabling them to quickly pinpoint and understand how changes to a requirement affect other components of a system.
These activities also provide the base for process improvement and value stream mapping. This mapping compares current processes to recommended improvements. Innovative technology has increasingly given organizations the tools to improve and to work within a value management structure that allows teams to capture the data that shows what drives value.
Agile Project Management: How to Structure Thinking and Approach Tasks
The introduction of frameworks and methodologies help structure thinking and approach tasks in segmented ways that eliminate confusion and improve efficiency. These include:
- Epic framework – Epic is a high-level initiative broken down into multiple smaller projects, features, and timeframes that share a common goal.
- Scrum Methodology – Scrum is a powerful tool for iterative improvement and emphasizes defined roles and accountabilities leading to a common goal. Scrum practices allow teams to self-manage, learn from experience, and adapt to change.
- Sprints – Sprints set specific goals for short timeframes (two to four weeks) and allow review and modification based on outcomes. Sprints celebrate successes and allow individuals and teams to learn from failures.
These methodologies lay the foundation for blueprint development. Your blueprint enables you to operate more efficiently, optimizing processes to minimize waste and maximize output. Blueprints also enable you to effectively zero in on achieving the intended result by identifying the appropriate functions and earmarking the right tasks that bring value to the end game.
Where the Rubber Meets the Road: The Art of the Possible
But there’s so much more to the story. The tools are only as good as the people who use them. Adapting to change requires a significant Behavioral element… the soft skills that characterize not only how you do things but also the way you approach their doing. Understanding an organization’s culture is imperative to not only address how leadership and employees interact but also how team members individually and collectively adapt to change.
Behavioral relies on attitude and the understanding that all processes when they’re the right processes contribute value to your overall corporate goal whether you’re in Human Resources, IT, Finance – whatever your team or business unit. Behavioral has a will do component to it. It’s an art of the possible. It welcomes new challenges, advanced learning, and the performance strategies of adoption management. It’s the opposite of the lull of the comfort zone and of performing on autopilot. Autopilot happens when you wear blinders, have tunnel vision, and continue with the sameness, no matter its ineffectiveness. It’s a tribal, siloed mentality, lacking an expanded regard for the value of whole. A groupthink of complacency, it is often coupled with authoritarian leadership.
Success Begins at the Edge of the Comfort Zone
Because we know that the behavioral matters, we create small group work sessions with stakeholders at all levels. We broach topics like fear, change, and goal setting and initiate two way conversations. Asking questions stretches thinking, fosters autonomy, and the educational elements open windows to new perspectives.
In fact, in one engagement, we interviewed almost 100 employees at all levels. More than half felt trapped in their functional routines and already had a sense that there must be better ways of achieving project goals. The impact of these discussions was stunning. As importantly, collaboratively with those stakeholder teams, things changed. Remember the company with 90 percent of their budget devoted to operating costs. Now it’s just closing in on 30 percent. Seventy (70) percent is now devoted to innovation.
That’s a huge step forward for that client because now they can take the market by storm.
That’s what we want for you, and we know we can work with you collaboratively to achieve those results, too.
It’s never too late to develop a plan.
We know your customers will love it.
We know you won’t regret it.
So, reach out. Then let’s talk.