The journey is the destination: running the #techrace

Whoever is working in the field of #technology knows that the pace of #change is constantly & steadily increasing. New regulatory requirements, new market incumbents, increased digitization expectations require technology teams to run faster a never-ending race. Some of your team members might get exhausted asking you when will it end?

We all know that waiting for the day when our products will be perfect and when we will all rejoice that we finally provided the value expected by our clients and stakeholders is illusory.

So how to keep the pace & the drive high?

Here are a few ideas based on recent thoughts & conversations….

Communicate & aim for values rather than for an end state

We all heard of (or experienced) pluri-annual projects that were supposed to deliver high value but failed to do so or were replaced after a few years by even better projects. Does that mean we have to stop aiming high for big #transformation?

Of course not! But let’s have the “why?” in mind as @Simon Sinek advises. The “Why?” can be stated through simple corporate objectives such as “Increase our client satisfaction by providing cutting-edge digital services” or “Helping our client-facing staff provide high value services to our clients”.

Top management should clearly state those objectives, decide on what level of investments it wants to put on them for the coming years and initiate a brainstorm with all key people within the company on the diverse means to achieve them. Once contributing initiatives are lined up, this is the moment to set regular stepping stones on a bi-yearly or quarterly basis with tangible results that can be measured. Of course, as markets might change or unforeseen events might occur, those initiatives and stepping stones can be revisited regularly.

Setup cross functional multi-disciplinary teams in charge of reaching the stepping stones

Project teams are gone, welcome #Agile #Devops squads! Agile teams have been there for a while now but they are sometimes more attached to delivering their products rather than the value attached to their products. Being focused on the value can give a better sense of #contribution to team members and will #energize them to find #innovative solutions when they face challenges. Of course, these teams have to be empowered to find their way along the path. Measuring tangible increments of #value creation will be occasions to celebrate successes and will help everyone continue their journey with renewed motivation.

Build on robust evolving scalable technical platforms

Difficult to choose the “Best” technical solution with #tech standards evolving so fast! The best alternative to be able to adapt along the way is to go for widespread standards and to build on scalable platforms. ?#Cloud solutions are good candidates as they allow delivery teams to focus on their solutions and leave the technical platform life-cycle management issues with cloud vendors. For non-core processes, #SaaS solutions can also help build modular products and generate value fast. However, sufficient prior analysis should be carried out to assess SaaS vendor service reliability and product viability. #ITmanagement’s focus should be then on building an #architecture roadmap, on assembling all components at the technical and service levels and on leveraging #data.

Keep on learning and developing

If you are in the #tech #digital #IT field, you have to keep learning every day!

One of the consequences of the pace of change is that expertise becomes fast obsolete. As managers, we have to make time for our teams to learn, acquire new skills so that they can be relevant contributors on the journey. Building teams where everyone shares a common set of skills and each of the team members come with specific complementary expertise enables members to build on each other’s know-how and creates a great environment for interaction, appreciation and innovation.

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The pace of change can be challenging but it can also provide opportunities to create #fun and #puposeful workplace environments if we make our teams understand that we will never get it done…and that’s the beauty of it !