I’ve written a few times about the Digital Workplace project that I’ve been the Product Owner for this year, and it gave me great pleasure to be part of the launch team this week as we rolled out the first phase of our ‘product’ – Trello. But when the tool you’re launching is already freely available, and you know that plenty of people have already started using it, then what exactly is there to launch?
Leadership
Business transformation using scrum
Captain Willard, Apocalypse Now
‘Everyone gets everything he wants. I wanted a mission, and for my sins, they gave me one’
My mission for 2018 has been to take on the leadership of a bunch of new teams in the wake of a major restructure, and to get them up and running in a completely new service model, delivering the potential efficiencies that the new structure affords – and it’s been a doozy. This post in no way flags the end of the mission, if anything it is a minor pause in the conversation to reflect on where we’re at now, and consider one possible way of moving ahead – scrum.
The Digital Workplace – solution selling as a catalyst for business change
Back in August I wrote a post about the Digital Workplace project that I’d been invited to participate in as Product Owner, and I promised I’d share updates along the way. In that post I also mentioned that I wanted us to use a solution selling model as a way to drive adoption across the University, and that’s the element I want to touch on today. I also want to point out a couple of things that the solution selling model doesn’t quite nail, and talk about how important it is for us as a project to address those shortcomings.
Learning from agribusiness and the value of looking outwards
In my three years working at Flinders and the seven years before that doing consulting work across a whole bunch of other unis, it has struck me that the Higher Ed sector isn’t always brilliant at ‘looking outwards’. I’ve been guilty of it myself on many occasions – in the face of a problem, the first point of call is often to reach out to my counterparts in other Unis and ask how they’ve tackled a similar situation.
Not that this is all bad, in fact it makes perfect sense in a lot of cases to avoid reinventing the wheel. Where it falls down is the potential for having the same sets of eyes with the same knowledge and experience finding the same solution for a similar problem, leading to ‘institutional isomorphism’, i.e. every organisation ending up looking the same in how they operate (Simon Marginson talks about this at a more organisational level in some of his papers like this one, but it applies just as well on a smaller scale I think).
The IT project governance group – kickstarting Agile behaviour change in a Digital Workplace project
I scared an Agile coach this week.
I’ve recently taken on a project role as Product Owner for an IT project we’re calling the Digital Workplace project, which aims to more effectively leverage several collaboration technologies (such as live chat, document sharing/collaboration and project planning/management) across the professional services teams at the University. Although I’ve called it an IT project, there’s really very little new technology in it, and it should really be called a behaviour change project underpinned by accelerated technology adoption – or something. In fact, all three likely tech tools involved are already available to all staff, it’s just that very few people actually use them.