This 1-day workshop provides digital leaders, implementers and clients a unique opportunity to learn how Systems thinking, Lean thinking and Agile principles can be combined to meet client requirements faster, and with less effort.

This workshop addresses several common challenges:

• There is an emerging consensus that many digital projects are too large, too ambitious, and too complex to succeed, leading to a failure to deliver the desired business outcomes;
• The problems that the system needs to resolve are often unclear to both the Client and to the developers, and are often based on a “wish list” approach rather than a focused business problem-solving approach – resulting in more requirements than truly required. In many systems, up to 50% of functionality is developed, paid for, and maintained, but never used.   
• Automation applies very differently to algorithmic work than it applies to heuristic work.  This distinction is poorly understood, resulting in digital solutions that attempt to solve issues that can only be solved by the client itself through improved business processes, mindsets and behaviours. In other words, many initiatives do not adequately identify the issues that can only be solved by the Chief Information Officer (CIO) versus the ones that can only be solved by the Chief Operating Officer (COO), thus business issues go unresolved.

In exploring these issues through interactive exercises, participants can improve their approach to solving problems using technology and make better system-development investment decisions resulting in less software, but software that solves the right issues, delighting clients and freeing up IT capacity to provide more value.

• Beyond Agile/Scrum: Happier Clients is targeted to: 

• Leaders of technology development groups
• Systems Analysts, Business Architects
• Clients of IT who want to implement a digital solution

• Topics covered include:

• Why software solutions are often over-delivered
• The cost of over-delivery
• Identifying the Jobs to be Done of the software solution
• Creating an effective problem statement with your client
• Determine interrelationships between causes and root causes
• Understanding process flow, backlogs and the three main decisions of Lean
• Understanding value demand versus failure demand, and quantifying cost of the latter
• Understanding wide range of typically invisible causes of poor performance
• Algorithmic vs Heuristic work – and how software can solve these problems.
• Where and when to digitize versus improve process
• How to create requirements that define what problems need to be solved by the Client versus which problems can be solved by through automation – to create a true lighter-weight, right-sized digital solution