Category: Transformation

Strategy, Architecture & Problem-Solving

high-heeled-shoes

High-heels, guitars and cultural expectations

Expectations can run deeper than you may at first think, especially if those expectations are based on decades of cultural information/misinformation. This may affect attitudes towards quality or acceptance of new ideas, including industry innovations. If we’re aiming to make changes in an organisation, we should look out for the deep-rooted expectations of what’s acceptable.…
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taco

The Taco of Business Architecture – What’s the Purpose of Business Architecture?

As a profession, Business Architects are in danger of becoming defined by just one of the products that they create. Unfortunately, it reduces the value that the profession can provide to organisations and limits expectations of prospects and clients. What went wrong? Imagine a fine-dining chef who makes tacos once at the request of a…
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The whole model for this series of articles

Using Archimate for Business Motivation Model and MSP – Part 5: Perspectives

The model I’ve been using in the previous articles has grown to become relative complex (complex for a online article, not for a typical business architecture model) while trying to describe a common situation in most organisations. I’m going to show it all in one diagram in this article and show different perspectives on the…
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Tidy Clothes Hangers

KonMari Method applied to Organisational Design

Can we apply the KonMari to Organisational Design? The KonMari method describes how to tidy your house and how to keep it tidy. It is a set of rules that you can absorb in order to keep a less cluttered house. Having read through the concepts and the rules, I noticed some similarities to the…
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textile

Enterprise Architecture as a household chore

If transformative change is the task of ironing, then Enterprise Architecture is the act of stretching the fabric across the ironing board beforehand. Ensuring that the creases that already existed are smoothed out, allowing the change to flow freely, instead of exacerbating the folds that were already present before the change. Experienced Enterprise Architects will…
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conference-room

What’s in a Role Name?

How many people do you have in your organisation that produce the product for the customer and how many manage those people? We assume more people doing and fewer managing within an extended enterprise (allowing for counting those in outsourced functions). Background I was trying to find a new contact in a well-known company. One…
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Post-it Notes

Confirmation bias in design thinking

Every few years another fad comes around. Look back long enough and you’ll see lean, systems thinking, TQM, CRM, structured systems and many, many more methodologies and/or approaches. The problem is in the delivery of the projects when the terms become more widespread. Background What we’re seeing is the climb of two methodologies: Service Design and Design…
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calendar

How a Simple Change Can Bring Multiple Benefits

I’m often designing change programmes for large organisations. I’m an external consultant, an outsider coming into the organisation that already exists. There are already governance boards in place, whether for operational, financial or change governance. These boards happen on a regular basis, often on a set day of the month. As an outsider, I’m not…
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Ladder of citizen participation

Where Organisations Go Wrong

A lot happened in 1969. The moon landing, Led Zeppelin was released (the first LZ album), the maiden flight of the Boeing 747, and a paper by Sherry Arnstein. It’s difficult to say which is the most important of those above, but Arnstein’s paper is probably the least famous. Context I frequently speak with directors…
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Shhh!

Is this a bad time to talk?

There are times to make people feel comfortable, to help them feel that the change is achievable. There are also times when we need to remove that comfort and destabilise temporarily, so that they can work towards a solution. We commonly reintroduce comfort, or better still guide the audience towards discovering the own new level…
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