Building resilience by reinventing the way your people work
By WP Creative Group
November 16, 2023
For almost every enterprise, customer expectations and competitive pressures are growing fast. The recent flurry of global shocks is leading many organizations to focus on building the resiliency needed to not just withstand disruption, but to use it to their advantage.
Many are leveraging cloud technologies to digitally succeed in this new environment and build resilience to disruptions. But fully realizing the potential of cloud technologies requires reinventing the way your people work and deliver value together. This means re-envisioning your world as products—with the IT organization working closely with their business partners to design and deliver value-added products.
Shift to a product-mindset
Most organizations currently operate IT through an “activity-based” model. In this structure, most enterprises are not in alignment—with IT focused on deploying technology capabilities instead of ensuring desired business outcomes. To successfully close the skills gap, that mindset has to change. The way forward—to a post-skills-gap future—requires shifting how the business thinks about and operates IT, moving from “activity-based” to “product-based.” The product-based operating model enables teams to stay focused on powering customer-centric innovation and modernization. This leads to shorter delivery cycles, which reduces risks for the organization caused by long development windows.
The product-based model starts with customers rather than ending with them, capturing their feedback, and then working backward to address their needs. Unlike older models that push efficiency above all else, the product-focused approach encourages experimentation in small batches of both delivery and funding.
Instead of rushing to “make it as quickly and cheaply as possible,” IT is tasked to try something—keeping what works, scrapping what doesn’t, applying the learnings, and trying again. While there may be initial dips in productivity at first, this more deliberate model helps reduce developmental waste while leading to greater innovation, smarter decision-making, better products, and, ultimately, happier customers. Amazon identified these learning and improvement cycles more than 20 years ago and refers to them as flywheels.
The flywheel represents a virtuous cycle where each component of the cycle feeds and accelerates the next, creating momentum that drives growth and innovation. For example, collecting data from customers allows a company to identify opportunities to improve or “modernize” personalization, recommend products, and enhance the customer experience through a series of experiments. A better experience leads to higher customer engagement, providing even more data to refine the process and accelerate innovation.
Position people for success
The product-based model requires a diversity of talent and experience. Experimentation won’t yield results when teams are comprised entirely of like-minded, same-skilled individuals. The more diverse your team, the more ideas you’ll get—whether that diversity comes from role, skills, background, culture, or personality. Several studies have shown the connection between diversity and innovation, including Harvard Business Review, which found that companies that exhibit both inherent and acquired diversity out-innovate and outperform less diverse competitors, being 45% more likely to grow their market share and 70% more likely to capture new markets.
Transitioning to a product-based model moves organizations closer to bridging the skills gap—but it’s all just theoretical if the individual members within your organization don’t change the way they work. Once you’ve got the right model, you need to give your people the tools, resources, and abilities they need to succeed within it.
You have to do more than wish for a fully skilled workforce. You have to make it happen with training. Training enables organizations to accelerate cloud adoption, achieve business objectives sooner, and overcome concerns related to cloud adoption. Training also saves time and money. You’ll avoid the high costs of hiring new staff to fill cloud-related roles, and it can also help your organization retain employees longer. Though it is a vital step, it is important to understand that training can’t bridge the skills gap in a vacuum. Training will ensure technical aptitude, but it alone can’t position your teams for success. It’s but one factor in moving toward a product-based operating model—make sure you treat it as such.
Create autonomy, not anarchy
The best ideas might come from unexpected places, and if those teams don’t have access to the resources they need for an experiment, those ideas might be lost forever. The cloud democratizes access to services and data that everyone can use at lower cost and risk.
More people experimenting brings more innovation, agility, and resilience as the business improves. Once teams can access the resources they need, they can make decisions autonomously. Autonomy is not about everyone doing what they think is best—that’s anarchy. True autonomy requires leadership to guide teams while they are moving fast.
The cloud gives teams the agility to experiment and iterate based on customer feedback and the flexibility to course correct when needed. In these ways, the cloud prevents anarchy by supplying controls and transparency that align teams on common objectives.
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