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Have you ever felt de-motivated, dejected, disappointed or down hearted ... < Back Seven tricks to feel motivated at workplace and in life Have you ever felt de-motivated, dejected, disappointed or down hearted ... Have you ever felt de-motivated, dejected, disappointed or down hearted after a long day’s work ? I am sure you would have at some point in your life, if not every day after the work. Staying motivated and positive for long time is a real struggle. We are surrounded by and often assaulted by negative thinking and anxiety about the present situation and of course about the future ! We always have a phase where we start doubting ourselves and feel depressed. Unfortunately there is no master key or a simple solution to unlock the mystery of de-motivation. Even after we feel we are over it, sometimes, it comes back to haunt us in an even bigger way. Here, in this article, I would like to mention few of the points that would help one keep up the motivation, focus and avoid the long spells of depression and dejection, especially at work ! Love music Music washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life. ~Berthold Auerbach Whilst I am not a big fan of music collection, I do have a small collection of specific songs that I find dear to my heart. It is a decent mixture of all types of songs ranging from disco to classical and ghazals to bhajans. Depending on what emotional state I want to get, I choose the song and listen. This helps me often to get right state of mind before I proceed to do next task. Have a buddy at work Its important to have someone at work whom you can consider a best friend or a buddy. You need to have one such friend with whom you can share your work difficulties and vent out temporary frustration. Believe me, more often than not, you need some kind of instant emotional support with whom you can talk and share things. At more stressful jobs, you often experience bursts of negativity around due to several work related matters. So it is always helpful to have someone who you can count on to help you get out of negativity and back to normal mind state. Human is a social animal and we all have an inherent need of talking and being heard. In case you do not have anyone whom you can to and talk your heart out, it really feels like dejected and lonely at times. Spent a good time with your friend and talk on topics that interest you to get your positivity back on track. On the other hand, please extend help to your buddy when he / she is in the need of help. Have a hobby / passion In my opinion, having some passion in life is very important. For me, my passion is watching football. It keeps me going and helps me keep happy. My favorite club is Manchester United and I do everything I can to watch them playing (on TV at least). Watching them play my favorite game makes me happier and feel inspired. However, if they lose then there is an equal chance of me feeling more miserable after that. I do keep recordings of certain match clips which I tend to watch when I am feeling a little low and it certainly has helped in keeping me inspired. Passion is closely related to the emotional behavior of the human and if you see your passion fulfilled, its more of a chance that you feel inspired and motivated. Focus on positives Sometimes, if we experience too much negativity for a prolonged period of time and feel de-motivated for a longer spell of time, we go into a state of mind where all the thoughts start with negative options and creates negative vibes around us. Once you fall into the negativity trap, its not very easy to come out and have any positive feeling about anything. In past, when I had fallen into the trap of negativity, I used to feel negative for no real reason and sometimes a mere presence of few people around used to make me start feel de-motivated. However, the wiser I got, I tend to avoid feeling on this trap by concentrating more on the positives that are coming out from the situation. Look at the scenario holistically rather than what is only seen to you Thank God for not making things any worse Find out one positive thing that you can take out of the situation. As I often mention in many of my conversations, “there are always 100s of negative things that can be made out of the situation, but if you find at least one positive thing out of it, consider it a learning for life and thank GOD”. Positivity is a habit, and once you get it, you can easily overcome situations that are trying to put you back in the hole of negativity and de-motivation. Praise others Spreading good words makes one feel positive and help others feel good about themselves. This, in turn make change in people’s behavior towards you in a better way, making you feel better. Believe me, speaking positive about someone else’s work and personality is the best way to connect with the person in a right way. I remember a specific incident when I was given to work with a so-called difficult person. All the people who worked with that person earlier, warned me about the boring and micro-management behavior of the person. While I too felt a little bit strange with his work methods, the more I started to talk to him and praise him about some real good work he had done in past (in some cases without anyone’s real help), it made him really comfortable with me and I could see an immediate behavior change in him towards me allowing me freedom to work the way I want. Ultimately this led to work satisfaction for both of us and a little bit more positive at work for me ! However, one thing that you need to keep in mind is when to praise someone and how much to praise. There is fine line between real appreciative person and feet-licking bastard ! You need to ensure that you do not cross to the other side .. Open your mind I always feel that one need to share what he / she feels about the situation in a right way. Its not often very motivating to work in uneasy, unconvincing situations or scenarios where you are in a confused state or feel half-committed to the cause. Learn a bit about emotional intelligence and try to be aware of your state of mind. One very important, but often neglected, fact is to know our state of mind and understand our emotions. We go through so many emotions such as happiness, inspired, dejection, unhappy, nervousness etc., at work place during various hours of the day and due to several causes, it almost becomes a habit to suppress them and continue with the job we are doing. Can you stay in a meeting where you do not feel like being, and contribute productively ? Can you give right suggestions and solutions to a problem, when you are in a state of anger or frustration ? Definitely not ! The more you suppress your emotions, the more you feel out of control and start losing your own focus. Its important to let others know what state of mind you are and help yourself in getting back to where you should be. Believe me, the more I tried this, the more I felt in control of the situation and my responses were getting better, in turn making me feel positive and motivated. Think big and have faith When you get the questions, such as “why does it always happen with me”, “why am I being pushed to do something that I do not want to do”, “no one seems to help me here” start flowing in your mind, think of is as time to take a step back and consider the bigger picture and look at the intention behind the situation. When such situation occurs, look at the big picture and find out the intentions behind this situation. In case you are wondering how to do this, I recommend reading a story in my leadership series. You can safely bank on the thumb rule of “intentions of people at work place are never bad, sometimes behaviors are” to sail through this period. On the other hand, if you are unable to trace the intentions and get any positivity of the big picture, think of it as the lowest point and be happy that things can only improve on this point onwards. Just have faith ! #positivethinking #work #mindset #behaviour #worklife #emotions #emotionalintelligence Previous Next

A little story of a conversation between me and one of my product managers .. < Back Trust does wonders to people A little story of a conversation between me and one of my product managers .. [ Originally published on Linkedin here ] PM (A bit worried) to me – Hey Swapnil, we have a 1:1 catch up scheduled every two weeks right now, but I would like it to be a bit more frequent. Can we talk weekly or daily? I would like to validate my thinking and decisions I make before I talk to the team and stakeholders and communicate them the updates and decisions. Me – Hmm. Why do you want to validate your decisions with me? PM – I just want to ensure that I am on right track and making right decisions and have thought through from all perspectives and I think you can help me validate my thinking. Me – What if I say No? PM (Puzzled) – But, what if I make a wrong decision? And how would you know what decisions I make every day with regards to the team? Me – Well, that’s exactly why I say No. I want you to know that I trust you one hundred percent and you should feel comfortable being in-charge and make decisions. Its OK, some decisions will go wrong and we may need to revert those, but that’s the learning you will get through the process. Intent is important and even if you make some decisions wrong keeping right intent, it will not impact my trust and my backing to you. PM (A bit relieved) – Thanks. Feels better now! What if the team members, do not agree with my decisions? Me - Well, it’s not enough just to communicate decisions. You should also be able to communicate ‘why’ you made those decisions and what was the reasoning behind them. Tell them the story, constraints, context and intent behind making that decision and be open and transparent with them. I am sure they will understand each decision you make and by doing this, you are also strengthening the trust bond between you and team members. PM (Happy) – Makes lot of sense. Thanks! But I would still like to come and talk to you on things that puzzle me. Me – Anytime! Like you just did today! Trust does wonders to people! #trust #leadership #decisions Previous Next

< Back How developers can become a lot more productive Swapnil Deshpande & Vivek Kant speak on developer effectiveness, with Times Jobs. The phenomenal pace of digitalisation, especially following the pandemic, has led to a surge in demand for developers. But hiring and reskilling developers is turning out to be an expensive and time-consuming affair. Another way to tackle the problem is to improve the productivity and effectiveness of your existing developers. That was the subject of our discussion in the Times Techies Webinar last week. “A typical programmer spends no more than 30-40% time in actual coding,” said Vivek Kant, CTO of Finserv MARKETS. The rest of the time, she is in meetings, asking and following up on approvals (like for use of IT infra), following up with another team which has built an API she needs to use, going back to business analysts or product owners for clarifications of requirements and design. “There’s also the discoverability issue in today’s microservices and API world, where all applications are dependent on each other. There are so many of these, I wouldn’t know what all exists, what each one’s capabilities are. The developer spends a lot of time trying to find these, raising tickets, waiting for responses,” Swapnil Deshpande, chief digital officer at Thoughtworks, said. Deshpande also found different Thoughtworks offices working on exactly the same problems, without realising it. So Deshpande’s team set about developing what they call an internal developer platform and a developer experience portal, and launched the beta version in July. Called Neo (network-enabled organisation), the platform connected all developers, became a repository for all knowledge in the organisation, enabled requests and approvals (it’s increasingly even automating provisioning once an approval is given). “Getting basic IT infrastructure now takes less than a day, compared to 7-10 days earlier; the average time between ideation and first line of code has gone down from a couple of weeks to a couple of days; building APIs is down to minutes, from days. Developers can discover all assets entirely by themselves by searching on the portal,” Deshpande said. Kant said developer effectiveness at Finserv MARKETS has increased 20-30% after his team improved tooling, automated processes, and built developer self-service capabilities. “I believe we can go another 2x, 3x on developer effectiveness,” he said. Previous Next

In the always-on, digital economy change happens fast. Any business that .. < Back Building innovation engine In the always-on, digital economy change happens fast. Any business that .. [ This article was originally published on Thoughtworks's Insights. You can see the original articles here . ] Don’t wait for tomorrow In the always-on, digital economy change happens fast. Any business that rests on its laurels can expect to become obsolete. In an ultra-competitive market, you have only a small window to spot opportunities and exploit them before your competitors. That’s because no matter how fast your market is evolving, technology is evolving faster. Tech-led, innovative disruptors are everywhere. Just look at long-established markets like global commodity trading. Within three months of launching, VAKT ($), the blockchain-based energy trading platform had signed up more than two-thirds of companies responsible for all deals in North Sea crude oil trading. This pace of change is unprecedented. And the consequences are clear: Unless your organization is geared up to innovate, you’ll always be playing catch-up. Many established organizations are comfortable not being at the bleeding edge. And that’s understandable: in febrile times, taking time to come up with a measured response can seem the pragmatic thing to do. In fact, pragmatism shouldn’t be conflated with inaction. If you really want to understand the best course for your business, you need to understand it from a cost perspective. How much will exploring disruption and investing in innovation cost? What value can you derive from exploiting opportunities? What is the cost of missed opportunity? What will you have to spend to get back in the game? And in many cases, that means you need to take action now. As Forrester Research principal analyst James Staten notes : “Driving change is far better and less fearful than waiting for others to disrupt you and having to painfully respond and adapt.” Introducing the ‘innovate to impact’ framework Concepts such as innovation can become overused, with everyone adopting slightly different ideas about what they mean. In this context, I’d define innovation as: Creating something new, that generates a tangible value to the intended audience. The most salient points here are “new” and “tangible value”. If it’s not new, and if it’s not bringing tangible value, it’s not innovation. It’s worth noting at this point that one-off innovation isn’t really much use. Take pic sharing trailblazer Snap. Its clever use of AR tech briefly made SnapChat the must-have app for any social media-loving teen, paving the way for an IPO that valued the company at over $30 billion. But its innovations were easy for competitors, such as Facebook-owned Instagram to copy — over the months following the IPO, Snap’s market cap dropped by more than $20 billion. Snap has only subsequently been able to recover lost ground through embracing the ideas of continuous innovation. To those that see innovation through the lens of eureka moments — where advances are only made after flashes of inspiration and brilliance — continuous innovation can appear anachronistic. It’s like capturing lightning in a bottle. This isn’t a view I subscribe to, but it’s one I’ve often encountered; therefore, before we start thinking about a roadmap for innovation, it’s worth considering some of the major obstacles you’ll need to overcome before any innovation program can get off the ground. Barriers to innovation Ask any business leader you encounter and they’ll say being more innovative is highly desirable. But for innovation to be something more than a pipe dream, you need to be realistic about the challenges you’re likely to face. While there could be many reasons why innovation programs fail to take off within the organization, the most common barriers I have encountered are: Fear of failure In a world of performance reviews and targets, nobody wants to be associated with failure. When people are in fear for their livelihood they can become risk averse. What’s more, innovation means change — and change can be scary. Being ready to innovate often demands a huge cultural shift, where experimentation is embraced. And if things don’t work, what’s important is what you’ve learnt from the experience; not who’s to blame. Too busy on BAU You’re probably used to hearing from your teams how busy they are. But when all your efforts are expended on keeping the lights on, your ability to innovate suffers. And since people are busy, they often feel that they’re adding value — perhaps without questioning whether they could add more. The importance any organization attaches to innovation has profound cultural implications. It’s all very well making grand gestures, such as setting aside regular time for blue sky thinking; but if those sessions are the first thing to be cut when cost savings need to be made, don’t be surprised if your staff question your commitment to innovation. Lack of diversity As author Simone Bhan Ahuja notes, lack of diversity within innovation teams can hamstring your efforts from the outset : “You’ll know you have the wrong team when everything is running along smoothly but the team’s output doesn’t look much different from business as usual.” If you’re looking for new approaches and ideas, you’re going to need diversity of thought — people with different skill sets, people that come at problems from different angles. Key skills for the group may include: product strategy; product development; entrepreneurship; domain expertise; experience design; research and analysis; and ideation and creation. Typical approaches to innovation? Given the importance attached to innovation, it’s little wonder that so many people in the organization want to lead it. And while it doesn’t pay to be too prescriptive — each organization is unique and needs to find an approach that fits — here are some common approaches, along with their pros and cons. As we’ve seen earlier, this collaborative approach will need team members with a diverse set of skills. And it also has the greatest opportunity to succeed when it involves the tech function. That’s because today’s greatest innovations are dependent on tech; the complexities and processes needed to deliver innovation reliably depend on tech expertise. But collaboration also needs checks and balances: who is the one deciding on whether to focus on building something or enabling innovation? When should you focus on products and when is it more important to energize the team through events such as hackathons? Ultimately, you’ll also want to consider how you plan to support sustained innovation over the long term. This isn’t something you can achieve overnight. Planning for continuous innovation is a journey — and one, if done right, that will become a strategic differentiator against the competition for years to come. We call this journey the Impact to Innovation framework. This Innovate to Impact framework gives you a roadmap to create internal incubator teams, that become the engine of your innovation. The framework also sets out how to grow the impact inside and outside of your organization through scaling different stages of maturity. As the model suggests, for innovation to become a strategic differentiator, you cannot just stay at the experimentation level: you need to show the impact of innovation and have a plan to grow that. It can be useful to think about this journey at the outset: Stage four becomes your blue ocean ; you have to think about how innovation can become a strategic differentiator for your business and work backwards from there to identify what steps to take now. In subsequent articles ( Part Two, Part Three and Part Four), we’ll explore this maturity model in more detail, enabling you to understand where you are today and how to reach your desired end-state. Previous Next

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The Incremental & Radical innovation techniques are most commonly used .. < Back Learning innovation ! – Part II– Incremental & Radical Innovations The Incremental & Radical innovation techniques are most commonly used .. Last time I wrote about one of the techniques of learning Innovation called Innovation by Subtraction. This time, I would be trying to explain one more type of Innovation viz., Incremental & Radical Innovations. The Incremental & Radical innovation techniques are most commonly used across the world for innovation. They are also called Sustaining & Disruptive Innovation techniques. Incremental innovation generally relates to enhancements or small improvements in the existing products or services, whereas the Radical innovation brings a significant improvement in the product or the service. One of the most common examples of the Incremental innovations are the early Pentium chips developed by Intel. From Pentium I to IV, they were generally based on the similar pattern however as the new version came out they brought out newer technologies & innovations in their chipset, which could be attributed to the Incremental innovation. Moving from a single core to dual or quad cores in their latest processers could be termed as a Radical innovation though. Another example of Incremental innovation being Microsoft’s Windows 98 operating system, which was an enhancement over the Windows 95 operating system. The Windows 95, however was a Radical innovation over the previous Windows 3.1 operating system interface. Now you may ask me how to differentiate between the Incremental innovation from a Radical innovation or you may even ask, what should be the degree of deviation between an innovation to be considered as Incremental vs Radical? The answer to this question was defined by a team at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute . They recommend to consider an Incremental innovation as a Radical if it meets one or more of following characteristics, The innovation provides entirely new set of usage features and experience In terms of statistics, it provides about five times or better performance Or it provides more than 30% reduction in the costs of the product / service Normally the Incremental & Radical innovations go hand in hand. If you see my previous examples you would see that the Radical innovation has followed after one or more Incremental innovations. So you would relate to the fact that the Radical innovation is characterized by a long period of Incremental innovations before and after it. The important benefit of the Radical change is the fact that it can potentially and significantly change the basis of competition in the favour of the innovator. Incremental innovation is relatively easy to obtain than Radical one and I am sure by now you would have understood pretty much of it. There are significant examples of where the Radical innovations have given great advantages to the innovators. Some of them are as follows, IBM Introduction of electronic typewriter, nearly wiped off the manual type writers form the market and gave IBM a significant business advantage. Wal-Mart Innovated a radical process change in the way the supply chain was managed throughout its stores in the US that gave a significant advantage in terms of time & cost and helped it cement its position as No. 1 in the retail market. Incremental Vs Radical – Which one to choose? Radical Innovations are significantly risky, take more time to develop and are more expensive to obtain in nature, whereas, the Incremental are significantly less risky, relatively cheaper & based on a proven product or a process and are more likely to produce results in a shorter time frame. The Incremental innovations provide the businesses with a steady stream of enhanced and improved products / processes or services, but due to relatively simpler nature of these innovations it is required to keep in mind the following, Ensure that the innovations are focussed around the market demands. Since the nature of innovation is such that you would eventually keep on developing new enhancements, small features, there is a danger that you might do something which the customers would not want and may not need in their product. If you continue to churn out the improvements or new features that the customer does not want, the customer eventually might look for alternative products. Don’t forget Radical innovation! Incremental innovations do not necessarily envisage the future technology and attempt to provide a bridge between current and future technologies. Imagine what would have happened to iPhone if Apple would have used the traditional keyboard design of the phone !! Also, remember that its on Radical innovation that changes the business game in your favour !So when you look around next and do a brain storming about innovation, you might want to start with an Incremental innovation and who knows you might bring out a Radical innovation in your product / process or your service! Good Luck! #Softwareengineering #Innovation #productivity #learning #techniques Previous Next

The pandemic has changed the dynamics of almost every kind of business. . < Back Digital transformation – 8 inside characteristics of the modern & digital organizations The pandemic has changed the dynamics of almost every kind of business. . The pandemic has changed the dynamics of almost every kind of business. And today, most businesses have no choice but to transform themselves through technology to reach their customers and continue their existence. Digital transformation is not a new concept. Probably, it's one of the most overused terms in recent times, especially during the last couple of years. Every other company is either getting digitally transformed, or helping others get transformed, or both. However, have you ever thought about what a ‘transformed’ organization looks like? What are the characteristics of a modern and a digitally transformed organization? How does a ‘Digitally transformed’ organization function and work, to continue the agility that they have gained through the transformation? Here are 8 characteristics or principles of the ‘Modern and Digitally transformed’ organization. These principles define how these companies operate internally, how their employees and teams see the organization from inside. Simple For digitally transformed organizations, the size of the company does not matter for their IT operations. Whether the company size is 500 people, or 50,000 people, these companies do not find it hard to scale their internal operations and business processes. The internal organization complexities are hidden behind simpler interfaces and intuitive business processes. They provide great working experiences to the employees, customers, and guests alike. The access to their core systems and services are easily available to build better interfaces and experiences for their internal business operations and customer facing processes. Flexible & personalized Employees will work from anywhere, any time and business processes are tuned and built to support flexible, time zone aligned, remote first & hybrid working culture. Cross country markets will emerge and people across the regions will collaborate better on delivering success to their customers. The services that are offered to employees and customers will be hyper personalized and they will be able to take their experience anywhere they go and access services with any device. Social & collaborative Diversity and inclusiveness will continue to be the key elements of the culture, and everyone’s opinions stay important to take the organization forward. Employees will engage in natural and non-hierarchical communications across the organization, and they will have necessary tools and technology at the disposal that allows them to communicate the way they want and improve social collaboration. They will continue to strengthen their ‘networked’ organization through new tools and technologies to make communications and collaboration easier. Open & compliant Information will remain a key enabler, however access to information will change per their compliance policies. Security, privacy and compliance will become even more important in future. The core IT systems will be easily interoperable, and the IT assets will be easily discoverable and accessible through internal developer platform / API / core asset marketplaces. There will be a strong access management & control mechanism in place at various levels that will guard ourselves and their key information from misuse. Smart Companies will integrate the physical workspaces with digital technologies to build smarter and more personalized experiences for their employees, customers, and guests and will continue to improve the experience using the big data. Our technology will enable employees to use different devices and help experience a truly connected workspace. They will use AI for enhancing their human effectiveness at work and provide full or assisted decision support for key organizational decisions. Sustainable Companies will care even more about sustainability and environment and ensure that they run on sustainable energy and prioritize being carbon neutral (if not negative). they would have committed to and demonstrated actions on supporting the SBTi goals towards climate action. For the assets and devices owned by them, they will follow the eco-friendly recycling and promote reusability. Their cloud infrastructure will run on green cloud computing. Fast, yet accurate Digitally transformed organizations are highly data driven. They have trustworthy data, made available to employees and leaders through established data platforms and relevant tools. The data that people are entitled to access is available at fingertips, in the format the employees want. All operational, business, and organizational decisions are driven by intelligent & actionable data insights. Innovative, learnable The digitally transformed organizations make innovation easy and take efforts to democratize innovation within the organization. Their next phase of growth is driven by innovation. They have lower barriers for innovation and experimentation and set clear paths for idea->impactful outcomes. These organizations retain a high focus on research and continuous learning and people capability development. Employee growth & development is a core part of the organizational strategy & culture. Final thoughts Markets and customer needs are evolving fast, and technology is evolving even faster. In the new age of business, there is an inherent need for companies to stay ahead of others. Being a modern & digital organization gives companies an advantage in the competitive market to respond faster to changing customer needs. While above 8 principles define the characteristics of the modern & digital organizations from inside (for employees & its leaders), it’s very important to know that being digital and modern is no end state, but it’s a continuous evolution. The companies who would wait and stay reactive, will be in a true danger of irrelevance, unless they act now, and act fast. Being a modern & digital organization gives companies an advantage in the race, the relentless focus on customer success, being flexible and adaptable to customer needs and being continuously innovative towards building better / newer products and services for customers is what will define the success of these organizations. Previous Next

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In my last blog, I tried to explain the factors that impact the direction .. < Back Why IT departments must reinvent themselves - Part 2 In my last blog, I tried to explain the factors that impact the direction .. In my last blog, I tried to explain the factors that impact the direction that IT departments need to take to stay relevant in the current business scenario. In this edition, I share my thoughts on the change in the culture of work within IT departments. We believe that our IT departments should deliver the same way that Thoughtworks delivers to its clients. - David Whalley, Thoughtworks CIO Traditionally, IT departments operate differently from the ‘delivery’ teams within the organization. This happens due to the nature of work, which in most cases is dominated by support and maintenance. This excuses them from being seen through the same lens as the delivery teams. However, this is no longer an accepted excuse. In the last few months, we have moved towards restructuring our teams along the lines of how businesses operate. With the current focus on ‘value first’, it is no longer okay to operate differently from any other product team. The expectation is that IT departments transform themselves into a ‘delivery focused’ team. Does this mean they are no longer a support/operations team? Yes. It may sound strange, but I advocate for IT departments to turn themselves into an innovation led and delivery oriented organization. Even though the primary focus of IT departments is on operations and ensuring that the business systems are running smooth, we need to constantly question the way we work. While it is important to keep the lights ON, IT departments need to lead the way by bringing business insights to their stakeholders, not just take orders. Here are some simple things these teams can do: Have a strong governance framework that helps prioritize your work along with your stakeholders. Make all your work visible to key stakeholders so that right prioritization can be done Let the work be driven by the value that it generates for its users. If you are doing any work that does not offer value to the stakeholders or the team, question why you are doing it Host internal planning meetings with the teams for weekly prioritization and to track the work progress. Define clear milestones and stick to them Host regular retrospective meetings for continuous improvement Establish proper communication channels for sharing your work and communicating with stakeholders. Establish a fast feedback mechanism that allows mid-way course correction and altering of priorities as needed Host regular showcases for your work and allow teams outside IT departments and immediate stakeholders to give you feedback With the focus on value creation, ask more questions on bringing efficiency, automation and self-service channels to the users And, most importantly, empathize with your stakeholders and partners, understand their needs and talk to them in the language that they understand Internal IT teams have a unique advantage within organizations because they know the internal business processes, know how the systems act and manage their infrastructure. This makes them best placed to understand the impact of changing business scenarios than anyone else in the organization. If you think of any business vertical, any technology or innovation/ideation that happens within an organization, you would find that IT teams play an important role in them. This makes me believe that with the right focus, internal IT departments can really make a difference in the way organizations operate and do businesses. Considering how important it is for T teams to work like delivery teams, there are some aspects of work and team culture that needs shaking up. From my experience of leading teams across multiple organizations, including Thoughtworks, I have found that changing the culture of the team, is not easy: However, to start the change, you can: Ask yourself if you are working on the most important task of the day Check the value of your work and the outcome you get out of it, repeatedly Share and communicate your plans to a wider group Ask if there are any alternatives to the repetitive stuff that you are doing? Is it delivering enough value to justify it? Can it be automated? Can it be done by users themselves? Can it be stopped? Think of ideas that can help you improve your own workplace and office and help you learn more skills Learn to co-create and collaborate across offices, across regions and teams The team first, always! Don’t limit your ideas to what only you can deliver. Learn to harness the power of collaboration and join people with different skills Tell yourself and your teams that it’s OK to fail as failing early and failing faster and changing course is better than failing too late into the cycle Turn your organizations into a continuous learning organization While aiming to change the culture of the team, IT teams need to be able to cover the entire spectrum of scope that includes ‘Create / Build / Configure / Implement / Roll out / Own and Support’ of their infrastructure and products. When the focus is shifted from BAU and maintenance to innovation and value creation, the work becomes more interesting and challenging. This allows IT teams to start making an even bigger difference than what they have been thus far. Previous Next