The Good Spending

Agile operating model  Since I learned about bimodal IT from Gartner , I went super-excited. I saluted this concept in my book and Udemy course . I was initially intrigued by the possibility of shifting gears in the agile procurement process and selectively applying different process logic in different situations, and it still does.  In 2022, the "unisex" governance for any occasion is a repelling anachronism, which does so much more damage to the company than any competitors. In the era of cloud IT, Agile and multimodal operations come together naturally.  However, integrating cloud-based and traditional applications assumes that the eventual new function will be delivered by practicing  multi-speed IT , i.e., different working modes for various applications. The earlier definitions of agility included the "ability to move nimbly and easily." However, later on, the bimodal nature became increasingly associated with agility.  Gartner positioned bimodal IT as t...

Experts don't need decision-making . This post will present another great concept by Dr. Dean Kashiwagi of Arizona State University. We already touched upon his Best Value Procurement model in this post . The beauty of concepts by Dr. Kashiwagi is the unbeatable logic and intuitiveness.  E.g., he defines an "expert" as "someone who perceives all initial  conditions and natural laws" and thus "knows there is only one outcome [and there] will be no  decision-making."  Therefore, there's no risk in projects managed by experts . However, risks exist inside the customer organization, where people exercise decision-making.   What we call " decision-making " is, in fact, a choice made by non-experts . Let's get a bit deeper. Decision-making as a source of project risks Traditional project management by decision-making In the traditional project management model, the customer's team and project manager (PM) must : be able to translate bus...

"It is unfortunate that people dealing with computers often have little interest in the history of their subject. As a result, many concepts and ideas are propagated and advertised as  being new,  which existed decades ago, perhaps under different terminology."  (c) N.Wirth "A Brief History of Software Engineering" Skunk Works were Agile with no hype. I don't like the hype around anything, whether Yohimbe or Agile .  But, perhaps, there is an abundance of consultants (one of which I'm also trying to become) and a shortage of new ideas. So, old things get polished, rebranded, and remarketed. I'm not trying to diminish the notion of agility; just pointing out that it's been with us since the 1940s, so there's no point to start worshipping it suddenly.  There are many great concepts around which we can discover and reenergize ourselves before someone starts selling them to us with a new label and premium price tag.     How Skunk Works started The S...

"The university is so many things to so many different people that it must, of necessity, be partially at war with itself" (c) Clark Kerr "The Uses of the University." The way to manage conflicting demands   While updating  this post regarding demand management , a question was raised on the realism of advice to eliminate wasteful demand by managing internal stakeholders. Such advice is easy to throw at the audience but hard to accomplish, especially when it concerns the behavior of the C-suite. Therefore, the decision came to write this post about analyzing and managing conflicting demands within an organization.  Managing conflicting priorities by multitasking and controlling the merge bias For many of us, the adjective "conflicting" comes with priorities as much as demands. That's the ugly side of modern corporate life, where people are overwhelmed with myriads of "top urgent" and "on CEO radar" priorities. Possibly, there's ...

"Our findings reveal that agility does, in fact, strongly correlate  with higher overall performance and other procurement capabilities."  Deloitte Global 2021 Chief Procurement Officer Survey Procurement 4.0 in 2021 isn't only about agility Procurement agility is buzzing from everywhere. Everything we needed to do was about "value" just recently; now, it is about "agility." In 2021, the broader agenda of Procurement 4.0 seemed to be limited to agility only.  The notion of "agility" existed for decades , well before the Agile Manifesto.  One of the definitions from the mid-1990s describes it as the "ability to detect opportunities for  innovation and seize those competitive market  opportunities by assembling requisite assets,  knowledge, and relationships with speed and  surprise." This fantastic definition reads much better than the 2021 Deloitte CPO Survey version of the "ability to draw conclusions quickly, and move nimbl...