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.

Nowadays, quickly changing markets are the norm for most industries. As a consequence, products, sales channels, brand image, and business models of any enterprise require ongoing attention. From time to time, tough decisions are needed, which change the direction of the business – for example, if companies abandon outdated product lines or enter new business areas with all their risks and uncertainties.

New collaboration models arise. we are talking about horizontal and lateral leadership, the delegation of responsibility and digital organizations. All these concepts are great and address the rights points to overcome some hurdles we have maybe seen in the past and today. But are we really there? I think it is worth thinking about this. But – unfortunately – this journey is not easy and not for free and fur sure not an easy task.

Standardisation and governance are crucial for the success of large-scale agile organisations since there are several concerns like UX design, security, technology stack decisions and architecture principles that must be solved consistently across all teams. Recently, the adoption of digital platforms in organisations or new regulatory requirements in the financial industry make this even more important. Standardisation is typically failing in large-scale agile organisations for two reasons.

“Everything everywhere” – the age of digitalization requires convenient access to and constant availability of IT systems throughout all channels and devices. However, this means additional complexity in company processes and procedures. As a result, the digital transformation is accompanied by a rigorous agile restructuring of organizations - often blindly following every trend. A consistent enterprise architecture often falls by the wayside and technical debts pile up continuously.

The transformation initiatives heading towards agile enterprises are accelerating. In order to survive on the market, enterprises need to get fast, to face current and future challenges. On the one hand, these go along with dynamic, cross-linked and globalised ecosystems. On the other hand, especially a more and more well-informed customer full of expectations with respect to product, service and process excellence puts pressure on companies to develop and refine.

In the constantly changing world of IT, success or failure might always wait around the next corner. To successfully implement new, more efficient solutions, you need great ways of working and smart, knowledgeable people who can help you out. From working in this business for 20+ years, we’ve seen such brilliant, knowledgeable, experienced, and driven people - superheroes if you like - make a huge difference for businesses.