Traditionally, businesses like banking and telecom focused high on standardization and national regulation. The development lead times were long. Consequently, the solution providers developed capabilities to influence standards, develop products and interact with the end-service providers. The changing business landscape challenges providers to keep pace. In the slow-moving market, providers honed the ability to run major multi-year projects. Solution Providers became predictable development machinery with extensive mechanisms to enable predictability and control at the expense of flexibility and customer closeness. This, led to organizational setups focusing on the alignment with the project structures and deepening the competencies in narrow areas both in the product and in the functional dimensions. The result? Organizational silos with multiple related hand-over challenges.

My session will cover ideas and lessons learnt, on how did we succeed while working with large-scale program engagements, when multiple teams, geographically distributed, had to come together to deliver a solution.

Business agility is not easy to define as it encompasses several aspects within an organization such as organization design, adaptive leadership, governance and strategy as well as Agile practices outside IT. The need of the hour is to sense and respond to customer and market needs with disruptive products and services in an immediate friction less manner.

However, in a rapidly evolving and highly competitive environment, how does one adapt to market pressures with consistently better products, processes and organizational environment? How can an enterprise achieve this adaptive state to achieve greater market share and revenue growth?

Studies show that human imaginations, desires, needs and wants grow at a faster pace than the rate at which systems and technologies can support. For example, none of us thought a taxi could be at our doorstep with a click of a button 10 years ago. Today, app-based taxis, even those who conceived and conceptualized the idea of Ola or Uber, did not envision the current version of the product. This leads to complex and adaptive systems.

It is becoming increasingly difficult to understand the customer’s needs and wants through only conversation. Rather customers realize what they want mainly by seeing it. Products emerge and evolve iteratively and incrementally, as value is realized by releasing working software to production, wherein customer validates it and provides their feedback.

My talk will present insights into some of the emergent practices, that can help succeed organizations in maximizing return on investments, by minimizing non-value added features and activities. I will cover couple of case-studies to complement the approach.