Lately, the most common request I get from CIOs is about what they should focus on and what other companies are doing that they should be getting a start on.
I have the same answer for most of them. The biggest unlock they can provide is not centered around a technology or specific process. It’s around viewing technology delivery as a sociotechnical problem space to be holistically optimized.
This means (over time) shifting the entire technology and product organization to become a value stream-aligned org with a pull-through work model (vs. submitting tickets and pushing into a queue). Do this by centering team models around four types, as outlined in the book “Team Topologies” by Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais:
Stream-Aligned – these are fully-kitted teams providing technology directly to end users/customers from a product perspective, not a functional technology silo. Platform – These teams reduce the cognitive load of stream-aligned teams by providing self-service capabilities. Enabling – These teams temporarily partner with Stream aligned and/or Platform teams to explore novel/new problem spaces, think of them as consultant teams that help the above two teams become self-sufficient in something new. Complicated Sub-System (optional and should only be a few) – These support a complex functional technology. Usually, this is something like a mainframe.
Layer on top of that the concepts of Slowification, Simplification, and Amplification from Gene Kim and Steven J. Spear’s latest book, “Wiring the Winning Organization” and you can dramatically increase the time to value, moving from an internal perception of a slow-moving behemoth to a proactively responsive organization.
Slowification – Makes solving problems easier for the organization to do (and therefore faster). Simplification – Break down problem spaces to make the problems themselves easier to solve. Amplification – Make it obvious there are problems that demand attention and whether they’ve been seen and solved.
Of course, this is all easier said than done in any reasonably complicated organization. But, failure to make this happen means you likely aren’t taking care of your people as well as you’d like, and you will lose ground to competitors doing this right.