We’ve probably all been there at one time or another in our careers. We knew that change within our organisation had to happen. We were careful and we sought input before creating our plan. With careful consideration we built a plan that encompassed all our critical stakeholders; our budget was approved by management and our first critical new changes were implemented successfully.
Great first signs – right? But wait…our plan begins to die before it even takes off. Key stakeholders who appeared to be onboard are now complacent. And perhaps even worse, they are becoming large barriers to the success of the project.

Can it be turned around?

Implementing corporate change can be one of the toughest challenges for large organisations. Software development departments that want to scale their agile projects often run into this obstacle. The agile project that may have been extremely successful within a small team or department begins to crack and fall apart as the organisation attempts to scale Agile.  Read More

I noticed the other day on my local newscast, that the opening ceremony for this year’s Winter Olympics is only a few weeks away. The newscast showed a sports team working together, training to win one of the most coveted prizes in their career. As per Wikipedia, team sport refers to sports where players interact directly and simultaneously to achieve an objective.  When we put this at an Olympic scale, it combines 10,500 competitors from 204 countries. The stakes are high, preparation and training is intense and the cost of failure has tangible and not-so-tangible results. This newscast made me reflect on IJI’s daily interactions with IT teams and I had to conclude that perhaps the similarities are quite strong. Olympic athletic teams, like IT, which includes the study, design, development, implementation, support /management of computer-based information systems, particularly software applications, is all about working together to achieve one same goal, either win the medal or in the case of IT have the software work seamlessly within an organization. Both teams consist of individual experts working together for a common goal to be the best. The stakes are high in both cases and the costs are equally high with real tangible dollars tied to wins or failures. Read More