“Change Enterprise” Part 3 – Focus on Value

The enterprises that will survive the next decade are those that are continually changing and then focusing those changes on value.

So, what do I mean by “Focus on Value” – well simply, I’m saying that, instead of delivering a business objective based around “collaboration”, “transformation” or all of the current buzzwords, it’s vital that your key metric is to add business value. So, unusually for me, this is less of a technical article than one to look at the bigger organisational adoption of and the funding of changes.

Having a culture that is already understanding of the tooling and people means that understanding where the value can be added will be easier. Removing the focus from Monolithic and massive projects to continual delivery helps an organisation keep sight of and respond immediately to the continually changing needs of the teams within it. Keeping teams efficient, processes current, and constantly improving those processes, transitions the organisation into a mindset of what we get done, not how we work.

There is a reason that massive projects fail and are still failing after 40 years of measurement: they don’t take into account the speed of change that happens during development. That’s not to say that we should not run projects, on the contrary, if we embrace projects running by “sprint” (or whatever term you prefer) with the focus on delivering measurable results (efficiencies, productivities, value points etc) then the project methodology works.

What we cannot do is define what the outcome will be in 2 years’ time when the technology, social, even working from home landscape will be entirely different. Notice I said will be, not may be different. Change is always happening; things will simply not stop changing – look at the 31 Million new daily users on Microsoft teams in just 20 days when lockdown kicked in for Covid-19. In fact Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft himself said:

“Already, we’ve seen something like two years’ worth of digital transformation in just two months”

Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, Microsoft Build, May 19th 2020

I appreciate that is unusual, but it’s just an escalation of what already started as a technology adoption just with a little extra push from nature!

The tooling to be able to continually innovate and automate is here – the speed of development iterations is massively changing with the DevOps style strategies bringing development closer to operations. The velocity of software development and the change when using modern platforms, cloud technologies and dynamically scalable infrastructures is increasing. Add to this the availability of powerful business tooling with no/low-code development, meaning all areas of the organisation are simultaneously improving.

Moving away from the focus on budget to focusing on change means it’s not just the technology that changes. Changes to how projects are defined and funded will need to follow – change organisations will be those who will look at the benefits of continual development and allocate an annual “change fund” to it. They will show progress with metrics on organisational agility and staff retention. They will leverage the tools they have and allow their teams to contribute to that development in all roles, providing guidance, budget, and governance to oversee the whole of the organisational growth.

Become a Change Enterprise

None of these steps in the methodology are stand alone, they are all part of a bigger organisational mindset of accepting and working with change.

Understanding how and what organisations need to look like to survive is the key to working out how you can start that process of transformation, adopting the new technologies and the new practices that are needed to fund and govern them.

I am a technology evangelist as well as a business consultant and therefore I have seen and worked with companies to help and advise them on how they make this transition. The great news is that the tooling to help is already in place and getting better every day – the not so great news is that organisations who don’t adapt and start to leverage the tools will not survive what is already promising to be an extremely challenging decade.

If your organisation is changing and you can see the benefits please get in touch – there are leaders we can showcase and I’m looking to interview some of those to add to my book (Getting to Value Faster) – I would be excited to hear from you!

Thanks for listening – don’t forget to leave comments below or get in touch with me directly if you’d like to chat about the content posted here or anything to do with the Power Platform – I’m a Business Applications speaker and evangelist with a clear focus on delivering real business value from technology. I speak at least once a month so please find me at an event and #LetsGetCoffee