Digital Transformation Stories is a new series of interviews 十大网博靠谱平台的数字 is conducting with our members, ranging from those who help facilitate digital transformation processes to those who have been through or are going through a transformation themselves, to find out more about their experiences of digital transformations and share their advice.
This week, we spoke to Caz Farrell, Principal Agile Project Manager at Zühlke.
What impact do you think the Covid-19 pandemic has had on how businesses approach digital transformation, and what trends do you think we’ll see fuelling digital transformations post-pandemic?
For many years organisations have been rejecting the idea of working from home. Snow days have had to be unpaid leave or use annual leave because businesses couldn’t get their head around their staff working from home for one reason or another. The pandemic has forced us to get really creative with our solutions – it was described to be as an enabling constraint to me, 去年2月, 我喜欢这个词. The dimension of working together in the office was removed: That was our constraint. We’ve found ways of recreating or bettering what we did before but largely from home.
To use an example from home – I have a group of friends geographically distant. 我们有八个人. We’ve always struggled to get dates in the diary and find a place we can all meet and have only once managed to get all eight of us in a room together, 由于工作或其他承诺. Covid意味着我们错过了圣诞节聚会, but it did mean we could all get together because we used Zoom and it created a level playing field. In hindsight it was something that was always available to us, 但我们之前没有发现它- Covid, 或者没有面对面的维度, 让我们看到了之前错过的东西. 敏捷仪式也是类似的.
What role does culture have to play in digital transformation, and how can businesses create a culture that embraces digital and mitigate risks?
我非常相信西蒙·斯涅克的"先问为什么". 人们想知道他们要去哪里，为什么要去. 如果有令人信服的理由, 大家都明白, 他们会上车和你一起开车. This why needs to be understood at all levels of the business so that any person, 在任何层面上, 能向其他人解释一下吗. Somebody once told me that if you don’t know where you’re going, you’re just a bum on a seat – we don’t want bums on seats – we want everyone to be able to drive, 所以我们都需要知道我们要去哪里, with that “why” in our head so that when we hit a roadblock, we are motivated to get it resolved and continue on our way.
文化是我们共同的价值观和行为. Culture will be dictated by the lowest common denominator you allow in terms of behaviour. The phrase “it only takes one bad apple” is so apt for culture – it just takes one person’s bad behaviour to be allowed to set a precedent/be a role model to others so, 对我来说, 永远不要在行为上妥协. Set the standard and ensure you hold people accountable – how you get results is super important, 不仅仅是结果本身. Any targets you might set should be inclusive of the culture and behaviours you want to cultivate. 如果你想要团队合作, 设定团队目标, 而不是奖励不良行为的个别目标. Sales is a good example of this: If you set individual performance targets this can encourage people not to collaborate and share ways of working, 秘密行为以保持客户/交易等.这最终对公司不利.
How can businesses learn where they should be focusing their efforts and navigate roadblocks?
Collaboratively create a series of shared target conditions and regularly poll your team about whether you’ve met/are meeting your target conditions. Lots of companies are using variations of OKRs lately and it’s hard to get the measures right without vanity metrics, but your team’s perception on how you’re doing will tell you an awful lot and will give you an indication of what matters and where you need to spend more time.
How can businesses keep pace with changing technologies to ensure that they're delivering the best possible service?
在你的组织中创造一个学习的环境. Technology people love technology – my experience has been that it’s harder to stop technologists from bringing in new technology in favour of trying to bring it in at the right time. 然而, changing tech is not necessarily synonymous with providing the best service and it’s best to assess each change on its merit than to assume all changes in tech are good.
Technical road maps or radars can play a role in visualising what technology exists and where we’re going. We can give deliberate attention to retiring old tech or services as well as bringing new technology on board.
由于Caz!
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If your company would like to feature in a future edition of this series, contact thom@ospifse.net 了解更多信息.
