The Agile Leadership factor: How to harness agility while being successful in IT Governance and in leading a TCoE (Testing center of excellence)
Every year, new technologies, markets and competitors emerge causing leaders to rethink how to adapt to the pace of change. In order to create a leadership organization who can demonstrate agility not only in the top level but also in all levels, it is important to ensure strategic and tactical goals are set properly in all levels. The leaders should be connected closely with the customers, with the products, with the core functionality of the business. The connection deepens the understanding of the business value and help steer the agile framework, design quality and manage IT governance. This
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Agile leaders help individuals to grow continuously and not encourage to bring new ideas. The Ideas that trigger positive change. But in order to foster structured change and create innovative organization, IT processes, roles and responsibilities, and quality management needs to be well understood and well defined, which helps improve IT governance performance. At the same time, agile leadership must device a continuous agile delivery across structural and architectural quality factors of the software. That quality delivery framework must check everything from security, robustness and performance in addition to functional aspects of the product. Compound all that with applications running in cloud. So agile leaders must design a fast paced, multifaceted testing environment that can keep up with a face paced agile software releases. So automation comes very handy in an agile testing organization. The right level of scale in a continuous integration environment is crucial to ensure that software quality is not compromised. A true leadership comes from simplicity and agility while a good IT decision making and governing process is in place. Leadership welcomes change and work as an enabler to focus on what is next. Leaders keep their eyes on the value for the business. Focus on what makes sense for the business …show more content…
The IT strategy for an ecommerce company is not similar to a utility company. For example, the IT strategy for amazon or ebay not similar to that of a power grid company in west coast. IT strategy and budgetary policy is different for Tiffany and United Airlines. Agile leaders constantly think about their IT strategy to ensure IT is in alignment with business strategy of the company. Agile leaders must ensure that knowledge gap is minimal within the organization. By eliminating the knowledge gap, an organization can operate more efficiently and help cut or avoid costs that does not add value to the business. In order to set effective and meaningful IT strategy, leaders should consider designing and architecting an IT organization where IT organizational function, IT architecture and agile development framework are converging well. Another component plays a significant role here which is outsourcing. Agile organization’s decentralized functions along with deeper understanding of applications, software and hardware architecture is advantageous before allocating budget for outsourcing for the agile software development. One way to control IT budget is to ensure IT decisions are business demand driven while demands are well vetted and controlled. Ensure which demands and ideas are quantifiable in terms of value, revenue, efficiency and quality. But at the same time, IT leaders must ensure that
...y, a leader cannot control every aspect of the team or project working on, ergo an effective leader must understand this and adapt their leadership mind to different scenarios. Even the most inspired and passionate team still experiences rough patches no matter what the leader does. The best thing an effective leader can do in this situation is to remain professional and keep a tranquil attitude.
IT infrastructure provides a competitive positioning towards business initiatives like implementation, cycle time reduction. Several well know organizations to us now that are involved in supply chain relationships with the help of information technology have ripe huge gain through integration of both.
Throughout history, there have been great leaders: civil rights leaders, business leaders, and spiritual leaders who have inspired millions. Leaders and visionaries such as John Lennon or Martin Luther King Jr. fought for unity, love, and made an impact on people through their speeches or songs. Watching these great men touch the hearts of millions has brought out a desire for me to become a C.E.O. and an important leader in the life of others. Not only do leaders have knowledge in politics, in emotional values, and spread a certain message or “vision” to their followers or co-workers, but they have certain special characteristics which make them great leaders or heroes. So, what makes these people different from you and me? Could it be that they are better looking? Perhaps they speak in parables or give great speeches? People have often said to me that a good leader is a person who guides both physically and mentally. Going to the job shadowing program has given me an opportunity to broaden my view on how efficient and effective a good leader can be in the work place. Something that has been shown to me in my many interviews with the board of directors has been that every leader must have the capability to have integrity, listen, a vision, and must be responsible.
When comparing my Big Five Personality scores to the class average, I received a score of 6 and the average was 5.7, one score did not come to a surprise. My personality is reliant on my strength of conscientiousness. Individuals who score high in conscientiousness tend to be methodical, well-organized, achievement orientated, and ethically guided. The conscientious personality type has a strong correlation to leader emergence which I can attest is true. I often am the first individual in the group to take reigns because of my organization, self-discipline, and need to create a plan before acting.
However, instead of the lean approaches mainly making forecasts according to the EPOS data, the agile approach need to do more work. First of all, demand recording and forecasting. For instance the retailers should make records of the everyday demand and make forecasts of the future demand trend with the help of current demand data. By doing this, Promotions can be forehead noticed and the reaction speed can be improved. Secondly, the information system. The information system is the bridge between different upstream and downstream partners. Thus it is very important for the agility partners improve their information system to smooth the information transfer. For instance, electronic data interchange (EDI), radio frequency identification (RFID), and Distribution Requirements Planning (DRP) system are all good information systems for transferring the EPOS
Leadership skills are essential for those who wish to lead change in an organisation. According to Kouzes and Posner leadership is a relationship between those who aspire to lead and those who choose to follow (2007). How this relationship works can be a determining factor in the success of a project or indeed an organisation. Not everyone is a born leader, but leadership skills can be developed and many theorists have come up with strategies and processes that can be followed to achieve this goal. Kouzes and Posner outlined a very successful 5 step model called the leadership challenge. Their theory is based on many decades of research that discovered that organisations, communities and individuals can and will
The book “The Leadership Pipeline How to Build the Leadership Powered Company”, discusses the need to establish clearly defined passages from the individual contributor to the Enterprise Manager. In the first section of the book we review the characteristics needed to succeed as a Group Manager. These characteristics are all built on efficacious passage from the previous level of manager. If an individual was not fully proficient and had not made the transition from one level to the next he or she will clog the leadership pipeline and will prevent effective management, both above the clog and below the clog.
...he solution. Instead the solution is to develop richer and more complex processes of accomplishing the leadership tasks. Project Managers facing a complex challenge should focus on how to set direction for the team, create alignment between them, and generate their commitment and ignore how many people are, or are not, leaders. Making the accomplishment of the leadership tasks at the core of leadership raises new questions: What are the barriers or obstacles project managers should clears in order to set a clear direction, create an effective alignment, and generate a solid commitment? What resources exist in the organization that project managers could tap in for creating direction, alignment, and commitment as a complex challenge is being tackled? Answering these kind of questions can assist organizations avoid the traditional problems of distributed leadership
In summary, “Internet activities are not most significant in competition, such as informing customers, processing transactions, and procuring inputs”. (Porter, 2001) significant corporate assets--skilled employees, proprietary product, and efficient logistical systems – these factors are the most important to keep competitive advantages. In fact, it is foreseeable that the Internet's evolution will come up in the future involve a shift “in thinking from e-business to business, from e-strategy to strategy”. (Porter, 2001)Only by integrating the Internet into overall strategy will this powerful new technology become an equally powerful force for competitive advantage.
To become a truly effective leader, one must encapsulate the various behaviors related to the aforementioned course learnings in his/her persona and demonstrate such behaviors daily. This course has allowed me to identify four behaviors that all leaders must portray to be effective. The first of which is that a leader must be inspirational. To do so, a leader must set the appropriate vision and direction for the organization and provide a path to achieving defined goals. Additionally, a leader must induce the proper levels of motivation so that each employee has sufficient incentive to work towards the organization’s goals. As discussed in the class, motivation can be accomplished by factors such as rewarding hard work and providing the correct opportunities to employees. While these are motivating in that employees desire to be fairly compensated and to be doing work they deem valuable, inspiration comes more from organizational culture. A leader will be inspirational by setting a tone that appreciates each employee’s contribution, no matter how small in scale it is. Further, employees are inspired when they work collaboratively in a group setting and can capitalize on individual strengths to drive organizational goals.
Leaders: Strategies for Taking Charge is an organizational management book written by Warren Bennis and Burt Nanus for those who aim to become better leaders. The authors emphasize that having executive positions or being a manager does not automatically make one a leader. A leader is one who inspires his staff, helps them find purpose in their work, and effectively implements their plans. They separate the book not quite into chapters on different topics, but rather by four strategies that they have determined are vital for any leader to take on. The strategies are effectively defined as attention through vision, meaning through communication, trust through positioning, and the deployment of self.
Leadership is defined as a process by which an individual influences others to obtain goals. There are three aspects that should be addressed when explaining leadership. One aspect is that leadership is a social influence process; leadership could not exist without a leader and one or more followers. Another leadership aspect is compliance; all of the leader’s directions must be complied with voluntarily. Compliance is what separates leadership from other influence-based formal authority. Finally, leadership results in the followers’ behavior, that is purposeful and goal-directed which must be in some organized setting (Leadership Theories and Studies, 2009).
The future of economic competitiveness for most enterprises relies on entrance and active participation in the e-commerce market. An essential problem with e-commerce is that the controls and organization are different for each site. There is no standard way of building t...
Consequently, e-business and especially online shopping is crucial for retail stores. They should provide necessary infrastructure for selling their products online. By taking advantage of e-business not only they can get competitive advantage of online shopping, but the...
Leaders of the future will be faced with many challenges. As the world changes, we must adapt the ways in which we face these challenges, and in turn grow as leaders. A leader is not merely someone which commands a group or organization. A good leader exhibits the ability to take an average team of individuals and achieve greatness. Leadership is not supervision or leading. It is the ability to inspire or influence others towards the end goal. As Barendsen and Gardner stated (2006), “the best leaders are individuals who, in their work, exhibit three distinct meanings of good: (1) an excellent technical and professional quality and competence, (2) an ethical orientation, and (3) a completely engaged sense of fulfillment and meaningfulness” (p. 266). Good leaders must utilize all of these traits in order to meet the challenges of the future. A few emerging challenges that future