Applying Start-up Principles to Corporate Innovation
Tales From A Portfolio Manager
Release Date: 05/08/2017
Article 9 - Achieving Alignment with Adam Lacey from Assembleyou.
Tales From A Portfolio Manager
Adam, from assembleyou, was kind enough to invite me onto their Power Skills Project podcast a couple of weeks ago. It would be very rare to find people who don't work in teams, across the departments and quite often when we have a conversation with somebody, we have an objective in mind, from deciding where to go to lunch all the way to negotiating resources for a project. However, do they get what they want? Do the people they are speaking to get what they want? In this latest article, learn about the concept of alignment in relationship management and its importance in various business...
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8. How To Enable Innovation | Stay Ahead Of Emerging Technologies
Tales From A Portfolio Manager
Other links mentioned in the article: Create a Portfolio Shared Outcomes Blogpost: Hackathons: Laboratory environment: Imagine the scene. You're a technology director, and you're providing the monthly update to the executive board of your company. The usual finance, project updates, service updates and new initiatives are being discussed. After the regular interruptions and questions, five minutes before the next agenda item, you ask, "Any questions?" In this latest blog post, I delve into a scenario that many of us have encountered in our technology roles -...
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Article 7: Trust Enables Strategic Partnerships
Tales From A Portfolio Manager
------------ Links mentioned in the Podcast: Free Course Trial: Organisation Partner Maturity Model: Shared Outcomes Blogpost: Changing Gears Blogpost: ------------ Avoiding the Friday afternoon bug: Imagine this scenario. It's 4 o'clock on a Friday, and you receive an urgent voicemail from one of your key account managers. They inform you that a customer can no longer receive order confirmations via the API with your systems. You know it's going to be a weekend of conference calls, troubleshooting, and persuading colleagues to find the root cause and implement a fix, all...
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Article 6: How Do You Know When You Are Successful?
Tales From A Portfolio Manager
Links mentioned in the Podcast: Free Course Trial: If, like me, you've had a long list of potential projects to review, triage and investigate, you may have come across entries that need to be clarified. For example, it could simply just read "Hospitality Management System". There are no clues as to the purpose, how urgent it is, the relative size of the project and whether it is funded or not. In this scenario, you may ask yourself, "How much time should I spend on investigating this compared to the other 30 line entries that are equally vague". I've spoken in previous podcasts...
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Article 5: Creating a Portfolio of Work
Tales From A Portfolio Manager
Links mentioned in the Podcast: Free Course Trial: Imagine the scene. Your boss organises an improvement workshop to brainstorm how members of the Customer Success Team can improve alignment between what we do as a central technology function for a portfolio of about 20 key customers and the overall company's goals. At the meeting, He explained that he has a list of over 200 feature requests, projects and new demands and ideas which need looking into - and that list keeps getting longer. Also, your colleagues say many customers complain that we are not providing the service they want....
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Article 4: Empathy Helps Unlock Alternative Solutions
Tales From A Portfolio Manager
Links mentioned in the Podcast: Free Course Trial: Transcript: Imagine the scene: you're having your monthly meeting with your business sponsor, going through the progress reports, project deliverables, service levels, and future ideas. They say, "Well, look, we have an idea where we want to improve the experience of our visitors, and we have found software which will help us achieve that. We're talking reception, booking meetings, desks and turnstiles. It's okay; it's "software is a service", so we can manage the whole process, start to finish, with the supplier directly....
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Article 3: Changing Gears from a Reactive Partner to a Strategic Partner
Tales From A Portfolio Manager
Links mentioned in the article: Organisation Partner Maturity: The five Competencies: Free Course Trial: Transcript: Imagine the scene. Your boss has just come out of a meeting with the finance director of your company. It's September, and he looks at you and says, "time to sharpen your pencil; it's budget time again". Not only do you have your day job, but you now have to review pages and pages of excel spreadsheets and magically conjure estimates based on abstract ideas of what you think your customers want. And then only after building this immense...
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Article 2 - A Surprise Request
Tales From A Portfolio Manager
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Article 1 - Shared Outcomes
Tales From A Portfolio Manager
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IT Business Partner - The inspiration, the sell and the implementation
Tales From A Portfolio Manager
It's my pleasure this month to discuss with James how he has made IT Business Partnering a core theme of his IT department at the Dog's trust. I delve a little deeper into what makes James tick to elicit some key traits and behaviours that make IT Business Partnering a success. It helps other IT Business Partners understand "How do other people do IT BP?". Some great tips that resonate strongly with the 12 principles of IT, a blog post which triggered our conversation in the first place.
info_outlineToday we discuss with Chris Hodgson some of the innovation principles employed in Start-up companies and how they can be applied to the corporate environment. Chris outlines the three horizon view to innovation, the very different approaches required for each, their measures and the different teams of people that make them work.
To understand more about this, google "Baxter Thompson Innovation"
or email at info@baxterthompson.com