Most of our work in the past few years has been in helping Government organisations be more effective and agile (had to get the word in) in delivering IT. This post explains a model that we have been using to help our clients understand and manage the life-cycle of IT delivery from a business perspective. We are wary of overdoing the consulting-model thing but many folks have found this one useful and some have been nudging me to write it up for some time. So here it is. See what you think.
The presentation is in the form of a Prezi. If there is a blue arrow: click it and the Prezi should load. The main control buttons are in the bottom right of the presentation window below; waggle your mouse there and they should appear. There’s a Full Screen button and Back and Forward arrows: click and hold the Back arrow for an option to skip to the beginning of the presentation. Unless you are endowed with Clark Kent eyeballs go for the Full Screen option.
Hang on to your seat…
Do leave a comment: is there stuff that could do with explaining better; do you know of other, more instructive models; or perhaps you think we have gone bonkers and are miles off beam? Please let us know. Also, since this is the first time we have used Prezi, let us know what you think of that too.
Thanks
I think this framework can work well in reducing the probability of tiny white elephants growing up to be rampaging monsters. And perhaps equally as importantly encourage more of those nascent ideas to be incubated, rather than concentrate exclusively on big designs.
Culture seems to be key to the success of the Explore phase in particular. Is a particular culture necessary for this model to work? For everyone excited and motivated by engagement with, and the opportunity to shape, a growing, evolving capability, there must be an equal number put off by being asked to work with a probably at this stage quite flakey technology. Does the culture horse need to come before the 4ex cart? Or can adoption of this model help to grow it?
btw this is an ideal use case for Prezi – it really seems a very naturalistic flow of ideas, definitely outweighing the ever so slightly wearisome whizzing and zooming…
David, thanks for taking the time to comment. There is a culture issue and, absolutely, using the ideas in the model can help grow it. There’s a need to balance benefit and flakiness. If folks feel they are getting genuine benefit from a new, perhaps rough-and-ready, capability and believe it has a future, then they will persevere. The job of the technology folks is to work with users to continually and incrementally make the supporting tools better. For most, this agile way of working is new but, handled the right way, is transparently sensible. (And a lot better than the increasingly familiar long-wait, high-cost, big-disappointment, giant-white-elephant approach.)
[...] make sure that we do the right things at the right time (which is explained in more detail in the How to think about IT – 4Ex Model). Bottom line: in Complex situations – if we don’t make room for this exploratory [...]