One of our large financial services clients needed immediate help. It was struggling to meet customer demands and industry regulations and needed to align business priorities to capacity before it was outplayed by competitors. The company thought the answer would be to invest in Agile practices. But so far, that strategy didn’t seem to be paying off. 

 Travis Klinker, Target

At the EBA Summit this past September, Travis shared that starting an agile journey was not easy and they certainly had to practice patience. When starting Agile at Target not everyone was ready for the change. With a larger organization, it’s hard to change the mindset. The video recording of Travis’s presentation and slides can be found here.

With the severe impact COVID-19 has had on most businesses during the last several months, many organizations are putting their key transformation and improvement initiatives on hold.  This may be due to uncertainty of the future and the direction of the company, it could be due to changing priorities, but most commonly, it’s due to the financial impact many industries have suffered in 2020. Most organizations want to continue or embark on their transformation efforts but are finding it difficult to do so during this time. If you’re feeling the pain from these circumstances or simply need to free up some OpEx flexibility, allow me to introduce an approach that could help fund some of your transformation work or other key improvement initiatives that will help prepare for and lead future disruption.

Designing a Continuous Improvement Strategy Based on Data

Recently, companies have shifted from reacting to proactively responding to the disruptions COVID-19 created. They’re using these approaches to recover, thrive and move forward: 

In traditional hierarchical organizations, the manager is looked to as the person with all the answers, the Decision Maker, the “Head Honcho”…  As we evolve our ways of working, though, we’re realizing that energized, engaged, and empowered teams consistently deliver more value than those led in a traditional “Command and Control” manner.  For those who haven’t viewed David Marquet’s “Greatness” video, I’d absolutely recommend taking 10 minutes to view it, as he does an amazing job bringing these concepts to life.

Leaders across industries and geographies are continually being asked to “Do More with Less…”.  While this reality isn’t new, it’s definitely not going away anytime soon. The question, then, is how to consistently deliver more value across your teams in sustainable ways…  

Maturing your teams in a distributed, virtual environment to mitigate coronavirus disruption

Key points

• Organizations will increasingly create distributed, virtual teams to mitigate possible disruptions due to the coronavirus epidemic
• Distributed, virtual teams can be high performing, but there are some additional challenges that often need to be solved for

You might be asking yourself how teams and organizations can thrive at scale. Especially in today’s environment where organizations are faced with “mandatory social distancing.” They’re trying to keep their workers safe by quickly mobilizing mandatory work-from-home policies, dusting off and amending emergency response plans, and instituting travel restrictions to help flatten the curve of the COVID pandemic. 

As more and more companies are moving to remote/virtual team collaboration, there is a wealth of strategies we can leverage to shorten learning curves and enhance productivity.