Dirk Krafzig – Enterprise Transformation Circle

Project Management Beyond Text Books

Standardized methodologies and frameworks offer a reference, but projects inherently entail a degree of uncertainty. The ability to deal with this uncertainty makes the difference between a successful transformation and one that fails to fully realize its benefits.

You may think that you can take a standard course or read a textbook to gain this knowledge. However, reality is often more twisted than academia can imagine. Therefore, the Circle provides a platform to discuss project management skills that are not covered in Project Management 101, such as partially agile organizations, cognitive agility, the “real” role of the product owner, the power of retrospectives and many other topics.

AI and Data

The advent of ChatGPT could breathe life into the practical use of AI and company data for the first time. Use cases may include

Automated real-time decisions
Significant reduction of process costs and throughput times
Fact-based strategic management of the portfolio
Increasing the quality of end customer service

Adaptive Product Owner Role

Most companies operate with a static role description of the product owner. This does not take into account that there is a lot of variability needed in the real world:

Involved people have different leadership skills and seniority
Different needs for distribution of decision rights between IT and business
Different business domains demand different degree of innovation and varying entanglement with other domains
Guidance of development teams must be matched to experience level

Business Architecture Governs IT Change

Enterprise process maps are a classic element of enterprise architecture. While difficult to set up and maintain, their benefits to the organization are manifold, especially in a transformational situation:

Understand and communicate one’s own business
Analyse strengths and weaknesses
Plan change initiatives and understand dependencies
Align business and IT

Project Execution In Large Transformation Programs

Transformation initiatives typically aim at ambitious goals such as maintaining a competitive edge or driving revenue and growth opportunities. This article gives a summary of four chapters of the digital cookbook which explain how the ambitions on the program level can be broken down to individual projects: 1. All Projects Must Contribute To The Strategy , 2. Start With Business Modelling , 3. Service Modelling – Breaking Down Of Business Goals Into Business Services , 4. Customer Journey Mapping: Maximizing Customer Value And Understanding Customers. Read more and get all details…

Maintain a Consistent Fact Base Through-out the Entire Project Life Cycle

Delivering the promised scope at the agreed time is the top priority for projects. But how do you deliver on this target? Of course, in some cases, a scope shift is justified and can be attributed to unforeseen changes to the project requirements – e.g., if market conditions or corporate strategy changes. However, it is important to realize that more often than you might think, changes to the project scope are not based on a deliberate decision but are due to a shift in the political balance of power, a lack of consistency, or insufficient planning.

Agile Sin #1: Poor Processes

You are not alone if you experience shortcomings and inefficiencies of processes in your work environment. For example, because the collaboration between departments is poor, co-workers lack the know-how, vendors are not appropriately managed, different stakeholders have diverging interests, or because of many other reasons. Interestingly, problems like that can persist over a very long time and even inherited from one generation of employees to the next.

Chapter 4: Defining Digitalisation

Everybody seems to be using the term ‘digital’ today. Politicians are laying the foundations for the
‘digital revolution’, product companies have off-the-shelf-solutions for being a ‘digital leader’, and
consulting firms can help you with the ‘digital transformation’. However, you hardly ever find
anybody who can tell you exactly what ‘digital’ is; in fact, the term means different things to different
people. At one end of the spectrum are the rather simple features, such as replacing paper. At the
other end, ‘digital’ is a synonym for the transcendence of the industrial era.

8.5 Embedding the CDO into the Organisation

The CDO is driving comprehensive change across the organisation. While he or she is directly responsible for a number of key tasks crucial for the success of this transformation, the CDO also needs to interact effectively with almost all other departments of the organisation, typically in a matrix-style approach. In order to drive forward the digitalisation agenda, the CDO and the CDO Office will work with the other CxO functions for highlights of those interactions). Given the number and variety of necessary interactions with other departments in the enterprise, the CDO needs to act from a position of strength as regards the ability to influence the enterprise.

1.1 Technology Enables Digitalisation

The Cattedrale di Santa Maria del Fiore (also commonly known as Il Duomo di Firenze, or Florence Cathedral, Italy) is an extremely high calibre feat of engineering that transformed the engineering standards of the day. The dome of the church, nearly 150 feet across, was the largest of its time and remains the third-largest in the world to date. Interestingly, at the start of the construction project there was no viable technology to build the huge dome, which had been conceived architecturally, yet the highly ambitious project sponsors launched the project hoping that the right technology would appear at the right time to finish the dome.