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Stand Back and Deliver: Accelerating Business Transformation
- By Pollyanna Pixton, Niel Nickolaisen, Todd Little, Kent J. McDonald
- Published Jun 3, 2009 by Addison-Wesley Professional.
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Description
- Copyright 2009
- Pages: 192
- Edition: 1st
- eBook
- ISBN-10: 0-321-61707-X
- ISBN-13: 978-0-321-61707-1
Enhance Fundamental Value and Establish Competitive Advantage with Leadership Agility
Whether you’re leading an organization, a team, or a project, Stand Back and Deliver gives you the agile leadership tools you’ll need to achieve breakthrough levels of performance. This book brings together immediately usable frameworks and step-by-step processes that help you focus all your efforts where they matter most: delivering business value and building competitive advantage.
You’ll first discover how to use the authors’ Purpose Alignment Model to make better up-front decisions about where to invest limited resources–and how to filter out activities that don’t drive market leadership. Next, you’ll learn how to collaborate in new ways that unleash your organization’s full talents for innovation. The authors offer the Context Leadership Model for understanding the unique challenges of any project, and they help you tailor your leadership approach to address them. You’ll find a full chapter on organizing information to promote more effective, value-driven decision-making. Finally, drawing on decades of experience working with great leaders, the authors focus on a critical issue you’ll face over and over again: knowing when to step up and lead, and when to stand back and let your team produce results.
Coverage includes
- Effectively evaluating, planning, and implementing large system projects
- Reducing resistance to process improvements
- Bringing greater agility to the way you manage products, portfolios, and projects
- Identifying the tasks that don’t create enough value to be worth your time
- Developing the forms of collaboration that are crucial to sustaining innovation
- Mitigating project risks more effectively–especially those associated with complexity and uncertainty
- Refocusing all decision-making on delivering value to the organization and the marketplace
- Making decisions at the right time to leverage the best information without stifling progress
Sample Content
Table of Contents
Preface xi
Acknowledgments xv
About the Authors xix
Chapter 1: Introduction to Key Principles 1
What Could Go Wrong? 1
What Went Right 3
Why Do We Do This to Ourselves? 5
A Framework of Effective Tools 6
Summary 9
Chapter 2: Purpose 11
The Big Ideas 11
An IT Project Death March 11
Aligning on Purpose 14
Usable Strategy and the Purpose Alignment Model 18
Getting Started 33
Summary 39
Chapter 3: Collaboration 41
The Big Ideas 41
Picking Money Up Off the Floor 41
Collaboration: Step by Step 43
Leading Collaboration 53
Putting These Tools to Work 63
Summary 65
Chapter 4: Delivery 67
The Big Ideas 67
Case Study: The Swiss Stock Exchange 67
All Projects Are Not Created Equal 68
Assessing Project Uncertainty and Complexity 72
Case Study: Integrating Software by Integrating People 76
Case Study: Time Is on Our Side 79
Case Study: The Swiss Stock Exchange Revisited 80
Using the Assessment to Reduce Risk 83
Product Life Cycle 86
Case Study: A Lot of Bull 87
Leadership Development 89
Portfolio Assessment 92
Summary 93
Chapter 5: Decisions 95
The Big Ideas 95
What Do We Do? When Do We Do It? 95
Building a Value Model 98
It’s a Conversation, Not a Number 106
Do We Have to Decide This Today? 108
Deliver in Chunks to Embrace Change in the Marketplace 110
Case Study: Improved Customer Retention 112
Case Study: An Agile Conference 115
Decisions and Portfolio Management 117
Summary 121
Chapter 6: Leadership “Tipping Point” 123
The Big Idea 123
Stepping Back 123
Case Study: Leaving Money on the Floor 124
All This Stuff Is Fine and Good–But Where Do I Start? 133
Stepping Up 138
Summary 141
Chapter 7: Summary 143
Putting These Tools into Action 143
Purpose Alignment Model 143
Leading Collaboration 145
Context Leadership Model 146
Value-Based Decision Making 151
Index 153