The alternative is to choose an approach, not crossing your fingers. And that path begins with stakeholder mobilisation. Here’s what I want to know about your IT-driven business change programme: How many stakeholders outside of the core technical team are involved every day? How often are they partnering with you on requirements to make things better and to make better things? Here’s what else I want to know: How many stakeholders are insisting that their colleagues and their customers get involved too. As in right away. Are their outcomes better? Do they love their work more because they lov ..read more

Here’s the truth about stakeholder engagement: mobilisation isn’t going to simply happen. The old-school business analyst’s dream revolves around creating a product, this straightforward, logical, “meets needs” product or service … the one that solves the business problem, exploits the business opportunity. Functionalise it into being a success. The hope is that with interviews, with a workshop, with a requirements specification, with sign-off, with a stakeholder matrix, with a few users participating in a few UAT sessions, with a go-live broadcast sent from the project sponsor … the hope is t ..read more

Sarnoff’s Law, named after the American radio and television pioneer, observed that the value of a broadcast network grows in direct proportion to the number of viewers. Yet while simply dropping your product or service to a group of users will have some marginal benefit, where risks are mitigated, gaps are closed, problems are solved, seeing an end-user as a node on the end of a spoke from a hub significantly undermines the potential utility. Bob Metcalfe, the inventor of the Ethernet, described this when he formulated Metcalfe’s Law which illustrates that the value of a n ..read more

A few more than ten, actually. Over two billion blog posts will be published this year. Curating the best of what you consume is worthwhile, here are some good reasons to get started: Reading more blogs is one of the best ways to become smarter, more effective and more engaged in what you do. (Every week I read more than fifty blog posts. Well worth the time.) It opens your mind to new and different ideas. It helps to focus your own areas of interest. It bookmarks where you are at this moment. And leaves behind an archive of the trail you’ve taken. And because you’re sifting through all of thi ..read more

Instant messaging was transformative. It was adopted not because of a bright, shiny project roadshow, but because users chose to embrace it. Why? Because instant messaging works better when your connections are on the platform too. Brian Acton and Jan Koum saw this first hand when they created WhatsApp. Their early version showed statuses next to individual names of the people. This is a marginal benefit, not much to get excited about. But once users were able to message each other, share photos, and group chat everything changed. Now, you were in one of two camps: on WhatsApp or off WhatsApp ..read more

Every very happy stakeholder encourages another one. Uninterested stakeholders aren’t worth the trouble. Neutral stakeholders, critical stakeholders, stakeholders you think need to be kept on watch … you can’t influence transformation from a dead end. Your supportive stakeholders become your new champions. Your work to enable the business flourishes when change spreads, and if you want the change to spread, you need to create something that works better when it gets spread. That generates the chain reaction you’re looking for. The influence that makes change happen ..read more

The Ford Taurus is one of the best selling cars in Ford’s history. It was loved by customers and over two million of its first-generation model were sold. The Taurus was a success, launched to a fanfare, with numerous performance, design, safety, and reliability awards to its name. Yet when the original five-year project was completed, the project manager was sacked because it was late by three months. Next, was the second-generation redesign. But now, the new project manager had learned the lesson of his predecessor. So with project schedule as the most important criteria, team spirit diminis ..read more

Pre-orders for Microsoft’s X-Box Series X were basically sold out. This is not surprising. The performance is faster, the graphics are gorgeous, and a game pass gives you easy access to hundreds of games. And, although you have to wait almost a year, it’s anticipated with excitement, sometimes a longing. It’s transformative. Of course, once you get the console, you’ll play around, hang out in the chat, and probably start to make plans about where to spend a few hours exploring the next time. Sony, whose PlayStation 5 was released just two days later, could probably build a games console a lot ..read more

What’s the difference between a three-week spec and a six-week one? What would make a ninety-minute interview worthwhile? Or an observation worth four hours of effort? What would influence someone to spend three days in a workshop rather than one day? “More of the usual” is the wrong answer. In order to significantly increase the patience of your stakeholders or the time that you have, you’ll need to do more than book more meetings with more people and produce more paper. Stakeholders don’t give double the time for more talk, a fatter document, or a prettier diagram. Instead, they’re after a d ..read more

Solving the wrong problem is ineffectual. Diving straight into designing the solution doesn’t have a high success rate, and it will wear you down. Rich picturing is an efficient alternative. When understanding a business challenge, or an operational issue, or a system problem, you can rich picture it. Find the things that your stakeholders are concerned about and struggle with. The people, the views, the structures, the processes, the cultures, the impressions … and sketch it out, brain dump down all the relevant knotted components within. Then see the shopping list of parts that you need to d ..read more