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Tips on managing the risks on production environment < Back Managing risks in operations & production support environment Tips on managing the risks on production environment Managing risks in a production environment, that is making money for customers, is extremely essential. However, most often, due to the unpredictable nature of the production support or operations management work, the fear of unknown increases drastically. More often than not, for an operations analyst or a production support analyst every day is a new day and every problem is a new problem and hence the traditional risk management model that suggest to Identify->Analyze->Plan->Track->Control. The traditional model assumes there is a significant time available that will allow you to analyze and assess the risks after you identify it. However, in the production support or operations management area, the time is something that is not available and you are expected to react it quickly. Risk & rewards In my previous experiences about awarding the winners in an organization, it was observed that the companies, most often, tend to reward the people who do better crisis management than the people who do better risk management and that often means that the risks are tend to be reacted only when they are realized and become a bigger problem. So, at the end of the discussion, it was more or less agreed that the Risk Management in a production environment is all about behavioral change and mindset. Interesting ? .. read ahead! If you consider the possible responses to a risk once you identify it, they could broadly classified as follows, Terminate - terminate the risk at the source and do not accept the same Transfer - transfer the risk to the concerned stakeholders and ensure they are mitigated Treat - accept the risk immediately and start controlling Tolerate - accept the risk and do nothing ! If you revisit all the scenarios you had experienced related production support or operations business, they are more often than not demand urgent attention. A priority 1 ticket is waiting or some incident is threatening to take the shape of a bigger problem. Now, for such situations, can you terminate the risk? Can you tolerate the risk or can you transfer the risk and keep quiet? I would think no! In all such cases, you would have taken quick action to either resolve the risk yourself or ensure that the risk is resolved at the earliest. Now, coming back to my earlier statement of relating the Treat, you would agree that to treat the risk in an production environment that requires collaboration across multiple teams, you need to develop the ownership & risk taking mindset. Someone needs to take the ownership and drive the problem through to the solution or mitigate the risk in full. Few tips on mitigating the production risks are as follows, Keep customers informed of more bad news than the good news. Even if you do not believe, the customers are more prepared to listen to worse news than you can possibly give the. Expose your vulnerability without going into victim mindset! Be honest in explaining the reasons, but do not over explain things. #operations #risktaking #productionsupport #mindset #riskmanagement #behaviour Previous Next

IT departments are on the verge of being irrelevant to businesses. .. < Back Why IT departments must reinvent themselves - Part I IT departments are on the verge of being irrelevant to businesses. .. IT departments are on the verge of being irrelevant to businesses. Increasingly, there is a need to reinvent themselves and align better with the business. The industry is at crossroads, where they need to choose between being merely seen as a cost center in the organization, and instead, take the lead to be an important and influential partner in the business. At Thoughtworks, we have been thinking a lot about the direction that the IT team needs to take. In the last 4-5 years, we have been continuously challenging ourselves and evolving along with our changing business. In this blog, I elaborate on the thought process behind this change in direction and focus and hope that it will get you thinking about the opportunities that exist for your IT departments. IT departments need to reinvent and re-purpose themselves Let’s think of some factors that impact the direction of IT teams so much and so often: The nature of the business is changing, at a rapid pace - With the technologies in the space of Internet of Things, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning taking center stage, companies need to look beyond traditional ways of doing business. Technology adoption for business is no longer an afterthought, but a driving force. As an operations partner of the business, IT departments need to keep an eye on the changing nature of the business and be proactive to change and evolve along with the business. IT departments have an opportunity to drive future of business - By being a partner, IT departments have an opportunity to disrupt business processes through technology led innovation. They can work with the business to identify customer needs, market trends and help in developing the right capabilities through experimentation and application of technology to their internal solutions. With technology innovation disrupting more and more businesses, IT teams can play an important part to shape the future of the organization. The same work doesn’t give same value year on year - Doing the same work year on year, with the same people and teams offers diminishing returns for companies. As operating costs and people costs increase each year, companies cannot afford to spend more money for the same outcome. There is an increasing need to use technology in business and IT operations to reduce costs and bring in more efficiencies. Having said that, we should also keep in mind the current situation of IT departments and business. Finances will keep getting tighter – Just as customers ask companies to deliver more year on year with same costs, the same expectation is on IT teams as well - to deliver more without a proportionate increase in costs. IT departments need to be clever in cost optimization as their budgets do not keep up the pace with the growth and complexity of the business. Value first – While people are the most important asset of organizations, the outcome is always measured in terms of the value they bring to the organization and their users. The same goes with costs and investments too, as they are always evaluated in terms of the value they generate. Considering these situations, it becomes important for internal IT departments to continuously move up the business value chain. Workspaces at Thoughtworks Let me tell you what happened with my team at Thoughtworks few years ago (earlier known as the Offices and Devices team). We realized that the regional business paradigm is shifting and we needed to gear ourselves to support the future of business. The expectations from the immediate stakeholders were changing and the traditional way of working as support teams in isolation was no longer good enough. We needed to foster the true spirit of leadership, partnership and collaboration within and beyond our teams. To get there, during the last few years we have: Reworked our vision to focus on the ‘future of work’ and ‘strong regional IT partnership’ Rebranded ourselves as ‘The Workspaces’ team that allows us to go beyond previously established scope of work Created smaller region-focused product teams by breaking down one big global team On-boarded experienced and business-focused product owners to lead the teams into regions Evolved the structure of the team to ensure that decisions are made at region level Established a framework for team capability development that aligns with the vision of our team and the regional business Put in place a stronger governance mechanism with the regional businesses While there is still some way to go, these steps have helped us start moving from being a ‘business support’ team to being true business partners. What is the future? The next challenge is for us to think on “ How to move up from being business relevant to become business influencers? ” While business support work such as help desk and customer support, laptop and office support, client project and infrastructure support is important, we can’t move ahead without changing our approach holistically and making the IT department integral to the business. The transition has not been an easy one, but this change in approach has helped us make giant strides in redefining the future of this department. In Part 2 of this blog, I will share my thoughts and ideas on how we can transform from here to become real business influencers. Previous Next

There are two kinds of emotions that one can experience. Simple enough to guess ... < Back Learning Emotional Intelligence There are two kinds of emotions that one can experience. Simple enough to guess ... So, to start with, do you know what is an “Emotion”? It seems so simple, but when asked this question during the training, probably none could give an exact answer. The answers were such as, ‘ An emotion is a feeling.’ , ‘An emotion is a thought in one’s mind.’ . The answer that the trainer gave was ‘An emotion is an energy within the body that creates an awareness of its state through feeling’, which probably was a sensible answer! There are two kinds of emotions that one can experience. Simple enough to guess, they are Good emotions and Bad emotions. Good emotions (happiness etc) are the ones that the body likes to carry and the Bad emotions (fear etc) are the ones that the body does NOT like to carry. The mind is an invisible force that resides within the human body and assists the human being to experience various states of emotions. The mind plays an important part in managing the emotional state of a person. The equation is simple, Mind is a slate on which the external situation, understood by 5 senses (see, smell, hear, touch, taste) and governed by one’s intelligence, intellect, memory, beliefs & values create an emotion that is visible through the gesture of a human being. Now, what does EI tells us? EI has 5 basic competencies as follows, Self awareness Self awareness is all about being aware of the emotional state of oneself. It also extends to expressing the emotions at right time and not suppressing them within yourself. If you are getting angry, upset, disappointed or frustrated, then its essential to identify the state of emotion and take a corrective action immediately. Self management This is all about managing one’s emotions and how you appear to others. For example, if in a meeting, due to some lengthy arguments and counter arguments you are feeling angry, then its better to announce that I am getting angry, and I suppose I need to take a break. than continuing with the meting, which is likely to affect your judgment and might end into something you might repent ! Self motivation Self motivations tells you to have a passion in life. It tells you to discover your own passion and pursue it in order to keep you motivated in life. It suggest you to have a goal in life (personal & professional) so you can go all about pursuing the goal. Doing the job you love and loving the job you do is the mantra of keeping one highly motivated. Empathy Empathy is all about getting in someone else’s shoes and DO nothing ! Yes, do nothing ! It suggest you should empathize with others to understand what situation they are going through before taking any decision about anyone. It helps you to understand what pains or problems someone is going through and how it might affect someone’s performance at work. It also suggest that one should empathize with oneself. It helps understand what emotional state you are going through and what situation you are under. Self empathy is all about giving time to yourself every day to ensure you are in a good emotional state to realize your situation control limits. Effective relationships Effective relationships is the relationship that is Goal Oriented. In the discussion, after much debate, it was convinced that all relationships you can think of are goal oriented. An effective relationship is also one the one that comes with expectations and the one where the expectations are met. Its recommended that you have a clear understanding of emotions with whom you get into an effective relationship. Finally, in my own words, I would define EI as, EI is all about knowing and motivating yourself, controlling your behavior irrespective of situation type, understanding others better, relate to them for betterment of your social and work life that could translate into more happiness and help earn more money and growth. #personality #EQ #thoughts #emotions #emotionalintelligence Previous Next

Ying started her career with Thoughtworks and has played roles like Developer, Delivery Lead, Product Owner, Head of Operations and now playing the role of the Program Manager. Women leadership series - In conversation with Ying Fu 5 Mar 2022 Ying started her career with Thoughtworks and has played roles like Developer, Delivery Lead, Product Owner, Head of Operations and now playing the role of the Program Manager. How would you introduce yourself? Hello, I am Fu Ying and I would introduce myself as a program manager, as a driver to lead the team to move forward in the right direction. Can you tell me a bit about your career journey? When did you first get into a leadership role? My whole career so far is within TW and the journey started as a developer, eventually, shifting the role to Delivery lead, Product Owner, Head of Operation, Program manager. Majority of my career is work under multiple culture environments. Which helps me look at things from different angles. The first time I got a leadership role is quite interesting, it is not an officially "assigned" leadership role. It was the 2nd year I joined TW. There is an NGO project which needs to work with clients from Africa and the UK, and with a group of people from TW Inida. From China, and it was just me and a new hire who have 10 years experience. Given I have longer experience in TW and know about the project, I start to take the ownership and drive the delivery of the work. Even providing suggestions to my teammate. I saw this as the first time I took the leadership role even though at that time, I didn't feel this way. What were the top challenges you faced during your journey and how did you overcome them? My top challenge when I was in a leadership role was the balance of growing people and doing things by myself. As a leader, when I step into an area that I'm not familiar with, I need to build up the team to move things forward instead of doing things by myself (I even can't do it by myself). This will need me to better think about the impact of work and set the right expectations with the team. I'm not overcome them yet. Still working on it. But I'm more and more patient on this now. What motivates you? Ownership motivates me to keep driving the thing forward. Curiosity motivates me to explore different areas from PS to Operation. Willing to get things done motivates me to remove blocker and build connections. Do you have a role model in your life? Can you name a few people who you look up to? I don't have a specific role model. I do learn things from different people. For example: Matheus, he was a very supportive leader who gave space to team members to grow and provide support when they needed it. David, he is great at balancing different parties within TechOps. Jade, putting things better organized. Yuntao, think things from a balanced view, and care about people's career development. Xiaoli, be very clear about what is the target to achieve. Gao Li, very calm and easily takes up new roles. There are still more people I'm learning from. I can't summarize all of them. What does leadership mean to you? How would you describe your leadership style? Leadership means responsibility, means good influence to others. My leadership style is more empowering, creating a safe space and opportunities for team members to leverage their strength and desire. Through supporting their success to make me and the team successful. What would be your advice to young leaders? People are always important. Always think about how to support your people's success and make the work successful.

In continuation from my previous blogs, here I write about the direction ... < Back Why IT departments must reinvent themselves - Part 3 In continuation from my previous blogs, here I write about the direction ... In continuation from my previous blogs, here I write about the direction we intended to take with Workspaces. In this part, I offer my thoughts on the perennial debate around what is BAU and what is innovation. I have recently been a part of several conversations that have led me to believe that confusion exists within a team like Workspaces where the majority of the work is BAU. I hosted a workshop on innovation at a team offsite sometime ago which was really useful in discovering what the team thought of innovation and some of the challenges and opportunities they perceived. Although the team has changed a lot since then, when I look at the notes from the workshop, I believe some of the perceptions about innovation remain same. How interesting! I have been recently interviewed on my thoughts on innovation and also took part in a global IT survey for innovation (hosted outside of Thoughtworks). It was a good time to reminisce on my thoughts on innovation. I present some of these thoughts to you: Innovation is a culture of thinking differently and challenging oneself to do things differently Failures in innovation is great learning and offers important lessons Successful innovations often result in reduction of time while doing the same work, reduces effort taken towards any task, saves cost or improves quality Innovation does not only mean building a product or an app or a software but also innovation in process, service or pretty much everything you see around Innovation doesn't only happen in the NASAs and ISROs of the world. It happens in smaller bits around you that will help you solve your daily problems and issues. We just need to build a curious mind and challenge status quo to think about innovation and ideas that can improve things for us and around us. With so much focus on innovation, does it mean the BAU is not appreciated? What about those of us who enjoy our work? Well, the answer to this is partly yes and partly no. Let me explain. Yes, because if we continue to do the same and routine work over and over again, the value of that depreciates over a period of time and we have to think of doing the same work differently or keep questioning why we are doing it. No, because there will always be some work that we will have to continue doing to keep the lights on. And let’s be honest, it’s a vicious circle. For things around you to change and become better, you need time and because you are so busy with day to day work, you just don’t have time to think or act or even suggest improvement. In my opinion, the change will not start unless we really want to change and think of getting out of doing ‘only’ routine stuff. In some ways, we have to push ourselves out of our comfort zone to think about and bring a change around us. Lots of us have ideas and most of them are really good. Talking about the idea in a social forum and within the team is the first step towards thinking about the change. Being accepting of someone else’s idea and contributing through discussions is another thing that helps us follow and think about the change. I also believe that the best ideas will come from people who are closest to the problems. The success of the idea will truly be dependent on how participative we can make it for everyone. I believe that with ‘Workspaces Global Ideas’, we have taken the first step to share our ideas.The showcases that we schedule have the potential to become one of the most important tech showcases within Thoughtworks, if we do them right. So, in summary, I feel that innovation will come from people around us, who are looking at the same things differently. BAU is important and so is innovation, but they are not mutually exclusive. You can not do one ignoring the other. For TechOps, 'innovation' means not accepting the way things are, especially if it can be better for our customers and ourselves. It could be an incremental improvement or a disruptive game-changer. Either way, innovation really should be our business as usual. We hope TechOps will increasingly incorporate a true learning culture where we are always observing and experimenting together. Previous Next

Every organization wants to innovate. Not everyone succeeds. .. < Back Innovate to impact framework Every organization wants to innovate. Not everyone succeeds. .. [ This article was originally published on Thoughtworks's Insights. You can see the original articles here . ] Every organization wants to innovate. Not everyone succeeds. And often, the reason for failure is that organizations are trying to capture lightning in a bottle. Good luck with that. Instead, we prefer to plan for success. In this article, we’re going to dive into the practical details of our fluency model — the Innovate to Impact framework — looking at each stage of the journey and outlining the steps you need to take to proceed to the next level. The framework relies on a collaborative approach to innovation — avoiding the pitfalls of both the top-down and bottom-up approaches that so often end in frustration (see article one for a fuller description of the collaborative approach). But success demands more than just setting up a team and hoping for the best. Let’s look a little closer at how your journey towards sustainable innovation can map out. It starts with a vision: how you see ways to differentiate yourself from the competition. Stage 1: Experimenter (Build the capability & innovation engine) The first stage of your journey is all about building capability and the innovation engine that will help you with experimentation. Your innovation team needs to understand all key stakeholders; the roles team members will play; how to source ideas from people across the enterprise; and how to establish communication channels and build a process that will allow efficient execution of the experiments that you’re going to conduct. Experimentation, however, needs to be aligned to a purpose: that of getting you closer to your vision for strategic customer differentiation objective. Successful experimentation will help you scale through the steps of this framework, and smooth the path towards sustainable innovation. As part of the innovation engine, your team needs to get accustomed to the discipline of sourcing ideas; validating them; ensure the focus is aligned to business priorities; and evaluate experiments’ success in ways that are tangible to the business. This helps the team to be lean in their approach of building an innovation engine for experimentation. As part of this stage, the following are the aspects you need to consider: Purpose To build the capability and set foundations to carry out experiments in the most efficient manner. What you need to do? At this stage, you will need to: Identify the purpose of your innovation programme and set a long term charter for the programme Identify the key stakeholders and team members Build relations and alignment with leadership and understand strategic objectives of the organization Generate, validate and select a set of ideas and experiments in collaboration with people across organization Prioritize a set of ideas and run experiments using the rapid innovation framework Review your process to identify the most efficient and impactful way to build experiments Repeat the process for different types of experiments to fine-tune your innovation engine Expected outcome This phase is all about building an innovation capability that turn your ideas into products, prototypes or some tangible results (success or failure) in the most efficient manner. Once you’ve taken the above steps, its expected that you would have: Built the team that’s capable of running experiments in the most efficient manner Understood the communication pathways and decision points within your organization Proven your capability that you can turn ideas into products, prototypes or some tangible results (success or failures) within a definite period of time This should invite more attention for you innovation programme and possibly enable you to secure additional funding. Possible risks One of the biggest challenges for this early-stage Experimenter team is that the projects may fail, or at least not produce the anticipated results. Maybe more experiments fail than succeed. This can undoubtedly impact morale. So you should raise this possibility with the team at the outset. Because at this formative stage, successful projects aren’t the only goal: it’s essential that your team learns to adapt and quickly identify when projects aren’t delivering. They’ll learn far more from projects that go awry than those that are plain sailing. Innovation in practice Google X is a great example of how experimentation-oriented innovation labs can be set up. X is a diverse group of inventors and entrepreneurs who build and launch technologies that aim to improve the lives of millions, even billions, of people. Its goal? 10x impact on the world’s most intractable problems, not just 10% improvement. It approaches projects that have the aspiration and riskiness of research, and tries to tackle them with the speed and ambition of a startup. Some of its best known ideas include Project Loon (balloons to deliver internet in rural areas) and Project Wing (Drones for good deliveries). Stage 2: Value creator (Build enhanced credibility and strengthen leadership support by targeting internal value creation) Once you have a solid engine that enables you to turn your ideas into tangible results and has proven its worth through a series of experimentation, you should then turn your focus onto building impact within the organization. This can be done through targeted value generation using your engine. As a part of value creator, your focus should now be to partner with important business functions within the organization, identifying opportunities where impact of innovation can be highest and partner with the users or functions to deliver those innovations to them. The important difference between the experimenter phase and value creator phase is that in the latter, you identify specific areas (such as recruitment, staffing or operations) and work with the end users to establish a hypothesis of value and agree on it before starting to work on solving the problem and delivering an innovation. In this phase, your working team becomes bigger as you welcome the potential users and functional people into your team and focus on co-creation to deliver impactful innovation through your engine. Purpose The purpose of this phase is to strengthen the partnership with the organizational leadership by providing direct and tangible benefits to the important business functions through your innovation engine. What you need to do? To prepare successfully for this stage, you should: Identify and partner with an internal business function, which is strategically important for the organization (say staffing, recruiting, sales) Talk to the users and understand their problems, as well as opportunities in the area Ideate within the context to understand the possibilities for innovation Map idea to potential value /outcome and target specific idea for experimentation Create a working group with users and functional people that would work with your team to co-create the solution Use your experimentation engine to build the solution/product/prototype and targetedly deliver the value Measure the value delivered Expected outcome Because your innovation team is now working with a target group within the enterprise, you can expect the team to hone their ability to generate ideas that solve specific problems for that team. This can help build the culture of purpose-led innovation. Innovation is driven by customer value and market differentiation. It's sustained with strategic alignment and people participation. The innovation efforts through this phase should directly help your organization achieve part of its strategic goals or push your functions closer to achieving their strategic goals. In a nutshell, deliver impact for an important business function within your organization. Possible risks The choice of targeted teams within your organization will determine your success. That’s because this needs to be a close working relationship. If your stakeholders can’t make time for, you can’t deliver. This can be a challenge. As we saw in the first article, when business-as-usual is the priority, innovation suffers. You can’t afford to be seen as a distraction, rather than a strategic enabler. Innovation in practice In a commercial aircraft’s galley, space is at a premium. And with hundreds of passengers to please, every square centimeter is precious. So when looking at how to maximize use of this space, Delta Airlines’ innovation team, The Hanger, came up with an neat idea to reclaim nearly two carts’ worth of space: turning the coffee mug handles to face each other . Sometimes, valuable ideas don’t need to cost the earth. Stage 3: Business enabler (Build customer-focused innovation engine to support sales and new client solutions) Once you’ve proven yourself to be a value creator for the business, it’s time to take the next step and start thinking of directly contributing to the business growth. As you start thinking of growing the impact of your innovation program, it’s important that you start thinking of impacting the sales and demand efforts of your organization and to an extent, your organization’s clients. This phase, the Business enabler, specifically targets value creation for the revenue-earning departments or in some cases, directly for the clients. Using the work done for building the delivery engine and value creation for internal functions, you’d have built a repository of innovations that could possibly be ready to be showcased to your clients as a part of your proposal, or a sales pitch. In some cases, there may be a need to do a targeted prototyping or concept designing for clients based on certain pre-sales activities. Your innovation team can partner with the client account teams or sales and demand teams to proactively identify opportunities to showcase your innovations to clients or create new innovations that will assist sales efforts with existing and new clients. This is where the focus of the innovation shifts from delivering targeted value to an internal function to target supporting business development efforts of the organization through innovation. Purpose The purpose of this phase is to directly support the pre-sales, client account teams and business development efforts by targeting specific client or market opportunities to help win more business. What you need to do? To prepare successfully for this stage, you should: Partner with the market-facing or revenue-generating departments within your organization to understand the opportunities Understand about the existing clients and potential clients that your organization wants to target Collaborate with client account teams and sales teams to identify opportunities where innovation bring an impact on business development Identify opportunities to showcase your innovations to relevant clients (existing / potential) as a part of sales efforts Deliver new innovations that would be relevant / showcaseable to clients (existing / potential) that would open up new business opportunities Continue aligning with the business functions within the organization to deliver concepts / prototypes / innovations relevant to the market Expected outcome As part of this phase, your team is now working with the direct revenue-earning (or maybe winning) departments of the organization, you can expect the team to contribute to winning more business for the organization. This is especially true when it comes to existing revenue-generating streams. You can do this by supporting the sales efforts by delivering innovative example PoCs, concepts, prototypes aligned with the clients or market you are targeting. The innovations that you deliver should be targeted to help open up new conversations with existing clients for more work, innovative work and help convince new clients about your capability of delivering work. By running experiments that are targeted towards customers, clients and the business, you should get quicker way at market and opportunity assessment. It should become second nature for your teams to know about market conditions and identify where opportunities lie. Possible risks The stakes are rising. You may need larger investments for the experiments you’re running — and that’s often a business challenge. Especially because you are doing a pre-investment into delivering potential revenue earning innovations that may or may not necessarily guarantee new business. There’s a danger that customers may still be thinking about yesteryear’s ideas and may not be really prepared for your innovation to drive their growth. So in many cases there is a likelihood that you may present a shiny new innovation to them and they may think: “This looks great, but probably we need time to be ready for this kind of work.” Innovation in practice At US insurance group USSA, business enhancements are achieved by going to its customers directly. It runs new ideas past its customers via USAA Labs, where members are invited to evaluate and test new ideas and concepts. For instance, members might be asked to evaluate the firm’s process for handling natural disasters or maybe a guide for managing debt. Through its innovation process, it can run experiments that target specific value and get to production through a targeted innovation process, where it has proven customer needs. Stage 4: Strategic differentiator (Define your own blue ocean and find your sweet spot, led by innovation) Now that you have mastered building your innovation engine, understood how to create significant value for internal stakeholders and the organization, and also mastered the art of building innovations for clients and help strengthening existing revenue streams, it’s time to take a jump and take the next step. To grow significantly faster, you need to create your own blue oceans and deliver differentiated value to clients through your innovation engine. You need to create a value proposition such that it differentiates you positively against your competition and potentially, makes the competition irrelevant. This is the whole point of innovation and through this phase, you should aim to create a strategic differentiation for yourself against your competition. Purpose The purpose of this phase is to use innovation to build a strategic differentiator for yourself against your competition and position yourself positively in the market you operate. What you need to do? To prepare successfully for this stage, you should: Invest in R&D to understand and spot potential new market opportunities that would provide significant new value to your customers Use your market research skills to come up with new offerings, services or products for your existing customers, or to spot an entirely new customer segment Understand how this could differentiate yourself against your competition and provide you an advantage in the market Invest in building a strategic capability to support the delivery of the new offering, services or a product for your customer segment Successfully delivery value to customers and run a full cycle of acquisition, retention and growth with your customer (i.e., acquiring, retaining and growing the customer) Think about building a strategic partnership with your customers and help them to graduate through their own innovation journey You can think of being successful if you are able to help customers draw significant value in the markets they operate through your new innovative offering Expected outcome As a part of your strategic investment in innovation efforts, you need to create a new product, service offering or a value proposition for customers that’s innovative and positively differentiates you against your competition. This can be done by establishing a strategic innovation partnering with your customers and help them shape up their own innovation journey and help them deliver significant value to their customers. Possible risks The biggest risk in this is the lack of belief of leadership in investing into R&D to create true differentiation through innovation. It’s often seen that the leadership prefers to take low-risk approach to exploring new opportunities and it may mean that they’d miss out on creating a significant differentiator for organizations through this approach. This phase requires organizations to take a radical new approach and may impact culture, people and the way the business is done etc. and it needs strong and visionary leadership to take this step. Innovation in practice Airbnb is a great example of how innovation has enabled an entire new business to be set up; one that’s disrupted the hospitality industry globally. Its unique rental platform lets people list, find, and rent short-term lodging in 65,000 cities and more than 191 countries across the globe. Innovation has proven to be a big strategic differentiator for Airbnb and allows itself to create a blue ocean for itself against the competition within the hospitality industry. In n ext part of this series, we'll explore how this fluency model has been implemented in practice. Previous Next

Conversations with prominent leaders on things that matter in the world of technology, business, innovation, strategy & leadership. Conversations. Women Leadership Series Conversations with brilliant women leaders who share their leadership journey, experiences & motivations Read more .. Emerging Leadership Series Conversations with Emerging technology leaders who share their leadership journey, experiences & motivations Read more ..

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The pandemic has changed the dynamics of almost every kind of business. . < Back Digital transformation – 8 inside characteristics of the modern & digital organizations The pandemic has changed the dynamics of almost every kind of business. . The pandemic has changed the dynamics of almost every kind of business. And today, most businesses have no choice but to transform themselves through technology to reach their customers and continue their existence. Digital transformation is not a new concept. Probably, it's one of the most overused terms in recent times, especially during the last couple of years. Every other company is either getting digitally transformed, or helping others get transformed, or both. However, have you ever thought about what a ‘transformed’ organization looks like? What are the characteristics of a modern and a digitally transformed organization? How does a ‘Digitally transformed’ organization function and work, to continue the agility that they have gained through the transformation? Here are 8 characteristics or principles of the ‘Modern and Digitally transformed’ organization. These principles define how these companies operate internally, how their employees and teams see the organization from inside. Simple For digitally transformed organizations, the size of the company does not matter for their IT operations. Whether the company size is 500 people, or 50,000 people, these companies do not find it hard to scale their internal operations and business processes. The internal organization complexities are hidden behind simpler interfaces and intuitive business processes. They provide great working experiences to the employees, customers, and guests alike. The access to their core systems and services are easily available to build better interfaces and experiences for their internal business operations and customer facing processes. Flexible & personalized Employees will work from anywhere, any time and business processes are tuned and built to support flexible, time zone aligned, remote first & hybrid working culture. Cross country markets will emerge and people across the regions will collaborate better on delivering success to their customers. The services that are offered to employees and customers will be hyper personalized and they will be able to take their experience anywhere they go and access services with any device. Social & collaborative Diversity and inclusiveness will continue to be the key elements of the culture, and everyone’s opinions stay important to take the organization forward. Employees will engage in natural and non-hierarchical communications across the organization, and they will have necessary tools and technology at the disposal that allows them to communicate the way they want and improve social collaboration. They will continue to strengthen their ‘networked’ organization through new tools and technologies to make communications and collaboration easier. Open & compliant Information will remain a key enabler, however access to information will change per their compliance policies. Security, privacy and compliance will become even more important in future. The core IT systems will be easily interoperable, and the IT assets will be easily discoverable and accessible through internal developer platform / API / core asset marketplaces. There will be a strong access management & control mechanism in place at various levels that will guard ourselves and their key information from misuse. Smart Companies will integrate the physical workspaces with digital technologies to build smarter and more personalized experiences for their employees, customers, and guests and will continue to improve the experience using the big data. Our technology will enable employees to use different devices and help experience a truly connected workspace. They will use AI for enhancing their human effectiveness at work and provide full or assisted decision support for key organizational decisions. Sustainable Companies will care even more about sustainability and environment and ensure that they run on sustainable energy and prioritize being carbon neutral (if not negative). they would have committed to and demonstrated actions on supporting the SBTi goals towards climate action. For the assets and devices owned by them, they will follow the eco-friendly recycling and promote reusability. Their cloud infrastructure will run on green cloud computing. Fast, yet accurate Digitally transformed organizations are highly data driven. They have trustworthy data, made available to employees and leaders through established data platforms and relevant tools. The data that people are entitled to access is available at fingertips, in the format the employees want. All operational, business, and organizational decisions are driven by intelligent & actionable data insights. Innovative, learnable The digitally transformed organizations make innovation easy and take efforts to democratize innovation within the organization. Their next phase of growth is driven by innovation. They have lower barriers for innovation and experimentation and set clear paths for idea->impactful outcomes. These organizations retain a high focus on research and continuous learning and people capability development. Employee growth & development is a core part of the organizational strategy & culture. Final thoughts Markets and customer needs are evolving fast, and technology is evolving even faster. In the new age of business, there is an inherent need for companies to stay ahead of others. Being a modern & digital organization gives companies an advantage in the competitive market to respond faster to changing customer needs. While above 8 principles define the characteristics of the modern & digital organizations from inside (for employees & its leaders), it’s very important to know that being digital and modern is no end state, but it’s a continuous evolution. The companies who would wait and stay reactive, will be in a true danger of irrelevance, unless they act now, and act fast. Being a modern & digital organization gives companies an advantage in the race, the relentless focus on customer success, being flexible and adaptable to customer needs and being continuously innovative towards building better / newer products and services for customers is what will define the success of these organizations. Previous Next

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