The Accidental CIO

6How We Work

Without data, you're just another person with an opinion.

—W. Edwards Deming

If I had an hour to solve a problem, I'd spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and five minutes thinking about solutions.

—Albert Einstein

The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence—it is to act with yesterday's logic.

—Peter Drucker

The How We Work component of the operating model defines how work is carried out to achieve the goals of the business. In Chapter 2, “Philosophies for a New System,” we introduced the philosophies of lean, agile, and design thinking. In this chapter, as highlighted in Figure 6.1, we will look at the frameworks and methodologies that we can leverage to put those philosophies into practice to contribute to improving or creating business capabilities. We will also look at the more supporting IT management frameworks that cover the full spectrum of capabilities internal to IT.

The core principle behind how we work is to move beyond simply asking for requirements towards discovering how we can generate outcomes that make business impacts that in turn contribute to a strategic objective. In other words, instead of asking teams to “build this feature,” we instead ask them to “deliver this outcome.” This fundamentally shifts IT from the role of an order taker to a contributor of business impacts.

Figure 6.1: Methodologies put philosophies ...