Overwhelmed Managers – part 3: Swamped by Digitization & Innovation

As discussed, we at semdi believe, that today’s Managers are overwhelmed because of 3 different swamps. We talked about different complexity areas, different motivations, but also swamped by Digitization & Innovation.

As I learnt from Shane Hastie as Agile Tour Singapore: “If you’re business operates in the 21st century, you are in the business of Digitization”. Organizations need to therefore understand, what that would mean for their own industry and service delivery. Where do we have touch points and how can we interact quickly with our customers?

The new new product development game – in digitization

1986 Nonaka & Takeuchi publisehd the article “The new new product development game.” Already in there, they mention the importance of speed and adaptability. In the 21st century, this is also true – more than ever.

Organisation, though, still mostly build for themselves hierarchical structures. The function decide the departments. We neglect the service or product delivery. This impacts the speed of responses as their are more dependencies between departments. As already mentioned as a principle of the Agile Manifesto of Software Development, business people and developers need constantly work together. And modern service / products handle Customer Support, Designers, Sales, and Engineers in one team. Therefore we need to develop other structures.

Framework along the value stream

ING Bank announced a couple of years ago, that they would be working differently and were inspired by the Spotify model. Jurgen Appelo suggest Management 3.0 with a rather system thinking approach. Niels Pflaeging uses the OpenSpace Beta.

Important for your organization is to not just follow the setup of an existing company and then implement that. Is rather important to understand your service or product delivery journey. Then you can decide, how you want to structure your team. Important is to structure your team along the service delivery, not along the skills of the people in one team.