Reconciling Many Business Units Into One Process Model
Reconciling Many Business Units Into One Process Model
Ask several business units how they do the "same" thing and you get several different answers: different steps, different names, different definitions of the same words. Getting them onto one process model is one of the most foundational things a transformation does, and it is a negotiation disguised as a diagramming exercise.
In any enterprise made of multiple business units, the same activity: selling, quoting, onboarding a customer...
The Overlay Pattern: Adding Capability Without Ripping Out the CRM
The Overlay Pattern: Adding Capability Without Ripping Out the CRM
When an enterprise's systems are fragmented, the reflex is to replace them all with one. That is the slowest, most expensive, and most politically explosive path there is. The overlay pattern is the pragmatic alternative enterprises rarely write up: add the missing capability as a thin layer above the systems you already have, and leave them running.
An enterprise wakes up to the cost of fragmentation: many separate systems...
Agile in Name, Waterfall in Practice
Agile in Name, Waterfall in Practice
An organization can decide to adopt a framework overnight. It cannot decide to change how it actually thinks about building software. The gap between the two gets paid, quietly and personally, by whoever is standing in the middle.
Why Transformations Stall
At some point a leadership team decides the organization is "going agile": adopting a scaled framework, standing up trains, running planning events, renaming the roles. The decision is real, the in...
The Living Backlog: Making Your Artifacts Something Stakeholders Actually Open
Most transformation artifacts are produced, filed, and never opened again. All the rigor underneath them — the traceability, the prioritization, the structure — is wasted the moment no one will navigate it. A living backlog is the opposite: a current, navigable view of the work that stakeholders open on their own, because it answers their question in seconds.
There is a particular kind of waste that transformations rarely notice, because it looks like completion. An enormous amount of effort ...
Standing Up a Portfolio From Nothing
Standing Up a Portfolio From Nothing
Plenty of organizations have a great deal of activity and no portfolio — no coherent layer that says what initiatives exist, how they connect, who owns them, what's at risk, and when they land. Assembling that layer where none existed is quiet, unglamorous work, and it is what turns scattered motion into something an organization can actually steer.
Walk into a large program mid-flight and you will usually find no shortage of work. Teams are busy, initi...
The Runway Problem: Why You Can’t Prioritize a Backlog You Can’t Yet Build
A backlog tells you what the business wants. It says nothing about what can actually be built next, or what has to exist first. That missing information — the architectural runway — is why "what should we invest in?" so often has no honest answer, and why teams end up fed by hand.
You can produce a beautifully structured backlog — epics, features, user stories, all prioritized by business value — and still be unable to answer the one question leadership actually asks: what should we invest in...
Mapping Both Value Streams as One Picture
Two value streams run underneath every transformation: how the business delivers value to customers, and how the organization builds the systems that make that possible. They are almost always mapped separately, by different people, in different languages — which is exactly why the business and the technology drift apart. Putting both on one picture is the artifact that keeps them aligned.
Ask the business how it works and you get a story about process: how an order becomes a delivery, how a ...
WSJF Without the Theater
Weighted Shortest Job First is a genuinely good way to prioritize — and one of the easiest to turn into theater. The arithmetic is the trivial part. The honesty of the inputs is the whole game, and it is exactly the part organizations skip.
Prioritization is where most programs quietly go to war. Everyone's feature is the most important; every deadline is the hardest; every team believes its work should be first. Into that fight walks Weighted Shortest Job First — WSJF — with a promise that s...
The Shared Data Contract: Why Master Data Is Epic Zero
Every cross-unit ambition an enterprise has — a unified customer view, coordinated selling, trustworthy reporting, anything with "AI" attached — rests on one agreement that usually does not exist: agreement on who the customer actually is. That agreement is the real first deliverable, and almost no one funds it first.
Ask a large, multi-division enterprise a deceptively simple question — how many customers do you have? — and watch the answer fall apart. The same account turns up again and aga...
Reverse-Engineering Requirements From a Prototype
A prototype is the best tool there is for discovering what people need — and the worst possible way to record it. The step almost everyone skips is turning what the prototype revealed back into traceable requirements. Do it, and the prototype's learning survives; skip it, and you ship the mock-up's accidents as if they were the plan.
An earlier piece in this series argued that prototyping has become the primary way to gather requirements, because people reveal what they need when they react t...