Getting to Nimble

How to Transform Your Company into a Digital Leader

Peter A. High

• Publisher: Kogan Page
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781789667554
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781789667561
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Management
• Index: Business

With increased pressure from digital natives, now is the time for established companies to address outdated and antiquated practices in order to respond quickly to the ever-increasing speed of market changes.

The pace of change in business today is such that it is becoming easier to go from a legendarily high-performing company to liquidation in a short period of time. Getting to Nimble shares the stories of organizations that were able to successfully transform their people practices, processes, technology, ecosystems and strategy for the digital era. The book also covers once dominant companies like Circuit City and Kodak that neglected to change and were impaired or died as a result.

Highlighting a framework to follow along with best practices that others can emulate, Getting to Nimble includes case studies from major organizations such as Capital One, FedEx, CarMax, The Washington Post, Domino's Pizza, Walmart and the country of Estonia.

01

The path to nimble

In December 2016, I visited Shamim Mohammad, then the senior vice president and chief information officer of CarMax. In November 2018, he would add the chief technology officer role to his CIO role. He gave me a tour of his digital lab at the Shockoe Bottom neighborhood of Richmond, Virginia, within walking distance of the city’s downtown area and about 20 miles away from the company’s headquarters. We sat for our interview, and I concluded it with a question I ask most of my interviewees. It is some version of, “What trends excite you as you look to the future?” Mohammad offered thoughts on cloud computing, machine learning, and blockchain. Then he said something that stuck with me:

I do not know how the world is going to be in three or four years. It is hard to predict. What I am trying to do as CIO is position [CarMax] so that we are ready to take those changes and be nimble, agile, and responsive: an organization that can move quickly. That is what I do because I cannot predict what is going to happen. I have to position [CarMax] to be that nimble company.¹

This was poignant, and it struck me immediately. Having asked a version of that question to more than 500 people (as of this writing), he is the only one to speak so directly about the need to reorient the technology and digital function to be a source of nimbleness. That word stuck with me, and I thought about that answer for much of the drive back from Richmond to my home in the Washington, DC area.

Nimbleness is, in many ways, the greatest value a technology or digital organization can offer to a company. The ability to pivot quickly to seize opportunities or to stave off issues is important now more than ever during a time when the pace of change has never been faster, and yet it will never be this slow again.

Measuring your nimbleness

Both the cautionary tales and the stories of rebirth are enlightening, providing a guide for digital immigrant companies (those born before the digital age) to compete. In the case of the Washington Post and Domino’s, each company had to rethink five factors in order to better compete:

• people
• processes
• technologies
• ecosystem
• strategy and innovation

People

It is a truism to say that people are a company’s most important asset, and yet many companies do not think enough about how to attract, retain, and grow the best talent. Moreover, many team members are not given or do not seize opportunities that are presented to grow their skills to reflect where the business and technology landscape is going rather than where it has been. The concept of nimbleness begins with teams that are nimble in their approach to training, nimble in their approach to recruiting, and nimble in their approach to understanding where new skill needs are emerging and determining how to grow those skills or buy those skills.

In Chapter 2 we will highlight culture and its importance. Though it seems like a squishy topic to some, a company or a department’s culture is always there; it is just a question of if you define it or not and how you should use it. We will talk about the need for clear titles, roles, and responsibilities, while highlighting job families and room for growth inside and outside of one’s department. We will cover the process of inventorying skills you have today and the method to understand the skills necessary for the future through workforce planning. Consider this supply and demand of people. We will cover the best methods for evaluating people, and the ongoing debate of whether annual or semiannual reviews are helpful or not, and how they should impact compensation, as well as how else to recognize good work. As aforementioned, we will also cover the topic of growing existing people, which I believe to be the key ingredient to ensuring that companies remain current. Training is an important lever (besides meaningful work, which, itself, offers training of a sort) in keeping the best people within your company. We will talk about retention, and the various levers that are in place. We will also cover scenarios where companies have attrition rates that are too low. Finally, we will cover recruiting. How do you compel people to join your company, and what criteria do you use? In fact, you should strive to hire the kind of colleagues who you would be delighted to have leave their fingerprints on the company.

Your company’s people will be the biggest determination of your ongoing success or not. Identifying the best people and giving them reason to stay in your company should be the primary task of every leader.

Processes

Processes are critical in guiding actions of teams. They guide behaviors, they determine the methods and the efficiency of delivering products or services to market, and they also highlight how to recover when issues arise. It is important to note that each section of this book will have processes associated with them. There is a process that guides each of the topics that I noted above regarding people, for example. Therefore, I will focus on the processes that are critical in the digital age.

In Chapter 3 we will cover how nimble companies have rethought processes more generally. Agile processes are a cornerstone to a nimble organization. In fact, the concept of agility is akin to nimbleness, albeit a bit narrower, but you should strive to develop ideas in an agile fashion, iterating along the way, engaging with the intended users of each idea in the process. Traditional waterfall methods, where one team takes orders from another team and then develops a project in a vacuum, waiting until the project is near completion to have it tested and validated only to find that major corrections are necessary, wastes time, and, inevitably, wastes money. This method works against the experimentation required to innovate.

We will cover an important shift that nimble companies are making from a project orientation to a product orientation. This is more than words and requires a reset of a technology and digital division’s operating model, including how companies structure teams and work. We will cover project/product development processes to highlight how one generates ideas, as a starting point. Ideas are the lifeblood of an enterprise, and they should be sought from junior as well as senior members of the team. One should engage customers, external (vendor) partners, and one’s peer group as well.

In this chapter we will also cover DevOps and its broad implementation across the technology landscape. DevOps is a portmanteau combining the terms (and more importantly the practices) of software development (Dev) and information technology operations (Ops). The combination of these practices highlights the opportunity to shorten the systems development lifecycle while providing continuous delivery with high software quality.

Another process we will cover will be change management. The only constant in business is the constant state of change. Without an acceptance that change will not cease, expectations will be set not only incorrectly but in a way that will work against progress.

The service desk is, in many cases, the front door to the technology and digital division of the company. Though many companies have elected to outsource some or all of the aspects associated with the service desk, it is also an area of great differentiation for many companies. We will cover some examples of this.

The last process that I’ll cover herein is knowledge management. Ideas will be founded on knowledge, and companies that develop ideas that leverage existing knowledge rather than reinventing knowledge will have the fastest path to success. I will highlight how best to undertake this and measure progress or lack thereof.

As in Chapter 2, a theme that will run through this chapter will be the removal of silos, or at least the creation of more permeable membranes at the edge of traditional silos of the company to ensure that greater collaboration takes place between those who are developing the products and services of the company and those who are the intended users of the products and services of a company.

Technology

No matter the industry that you play in, technology is central to your success. What began as automation of manual processes as a means of eliminating wasted effort and errors has grown to the point that technology, using algorithms, machine learning, and artificial intelligence, now ensures that data collection, synthesis, and analysis, which used to require hours if not days of work by an army of people, can be done through technology, and can ensure that the point at which a human interacts with data to make decisions is at a higher plane. This means that a greater percentage of human time will be spent on the highest-value activities for a company.

None of this can be accomplished with antiquated technology. The sad reality is that today, most digital immigrant companies are weighed down by technical debt, and key data resides in systems that may be older than some of the companies’ employees. Part of the issue is one of change: again, it is not in our nature to want to change. Part of the issue is that people find it easier and more interesting to pursue the development of the new rather than contemplating the retiring or shutting off of the old. Therefore, companies are often mired with a Baskin Robbins 31 flavors of technologies. Lastly, part of the issue is one of cost: there is a perception that the medicine will cost more and cause more pain than the ailment itself.

We begin with the mapping of all technology. This includes both software and hardware. An important process to leverage is enterprise architecture (EA). According to one of the definitive works on EA, the Enterprise Architecture Book of Knowledge (EABOK), “The framework...

Table of contents

• Foreword
• Introduction: Only the nimble survive
• 1 The path to nimble
• 2 The foundation: people
• 3 Processes: the path to successful execution
• 4 Building a more future-proof and secure technology stack
• 5 Building and caring for an ecosystem
• 6 Strategic nimbleness
• Conclusion
• Index