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Sprint-based digital and IT strategy approach
Doing strategy work, have you ever experienced that initiatives created at the beginning are outdated before ever getting started? Our best guess is YES. That is why we need a new way of working with IT strategy in a process that is agile, sprint-based and resilient.
That is why we have developed a sprint-based IT strategy approach – based on the agile principles of Half Double. It provides you with a way of making 80 % of your decisions in half the time, a way of kicking off an iterative approach to strategy making and a way of involving people from business management to passionate employees through hands-on experiences in the strategic decision-making.
We do not believe in IT strategy being only a boardroom exercise for the selected few or an exercise only for IT. You need to co-create your IT strategy with the people that will live the strategy and make the strategy happen – making sure that options are tested and refined in the organisation as soon as possible.
To ensure ownership, we recommend that you make each of the functional sprints driven and owned by the functional responsible, e.g. that the head of infrastructure owns the infrastructure strategy. In that way you can inspire, facilitate and support a strategy process, where the functional responsible decides the final outcome.
In our sprint-based approach to IT strategy creation, strategy development and implementation happens simultaneously in selected sequences to ensure an agile process. This means that you can put the developed strategy elements in motion before the total strategy is finalised and thus realise strategic initiatives earlier in the process.
When strategies need to be replaced, it is not necessarily everything in the strategy that needs to be replaced. This is why we work with sub-strategy modules and in a flexible structure, where the modules can be replaced, refined, added or removed over time.
Take for example Cloud and IT Security which have radically changed the sub-strategy for IT operations. However, this does not mean that you need to change your entire IT strategy, but rather that you need to adapt your IT strategy to selected modules. Adaptability is important. However, 100 % alignment seldom exists. As humans, we want to map all dependencies. We want perfection – but there is no such thing. In the light of that, we have made an approach that is so adaptable that we change the things where we were wrong, or things have changed.
You need a number of strategy process factors to be in place to deliver impact of an agile IT strategy successfully:
Applying these three strategy process principles takes you towards a new way of working. It requires significant change in traditional strategy mindset, governance and behaviour.
We know that changing behaviours may be frightening and hard. But it is worthwhile overcoming.