CRM Archive

Growing your own agility coaches to adopt new ways of working

Posted in: CRM, Informatyka w Firmie, Innovation, Makroekonomia, Nowe Technologie, Zarządzanie Finansowe

Agile coaches play a vital role in enterprise-wide agile transformations. To develop enough coaches, companies should create specialized training academies.

Companies are increasingly looking to infuse agility into their operating models. However, as organizations attempt to scale these efforts across their entire business, new challenges that simply didn’t exist at the micro level are beginning to surface. These challenges are especially prevalent where traditional organization silos need to interact.

The big realization for many companies is that scaling agile is not simply a matter of replicating agile practices across more teams. This is why trying to adapt project-management offices (PMOs) to support agile projects or bringing in more scrum masters is unlikely to be effective (see sidebar, “The scrum master’s role in scaling agile”). Rather, agility as an operating model requires the rewiring of core enterprise-wide processes. With this comes a need for the organization to operate differently.
The degree of change required to adopt agile ways of working across an entire organization is simply too large to repurpose existing roles and structures. Only by investing in agility coaches—and a comprehensive program to identify, train, and support them—can companies expect to scale and sustain agile across the enterprise.

…

To ensure the success of the agility coaching academy, it is critical to have the right support and leadership structure. Typically, the academy is led by a full-time executive who reports to either the CHRO or some other member of the C-suite depending on who is really driving the agile transformation—it could be the CIO, the head of transformation, or the COO. The academy lead is accountable for the following:

Setting the strategy and defining the delivery road map for the academy
Running the day-to-day operations of the academy, such as building and refining the academy backlog
Leading the recruitment of coaches
Overseeing learning and development of the trainee agility coaches, and administering the learning and development of graduated coaches
Defining the evaluation criteria and mechanisms to measure effectiveness of the agility coaches
Deploying the right agility coaches to the right areas and teams
Overseeing performance evaluations for the agility coach cohort

More: https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/

By Amit Anand, Sahil Merchant, Arun Sunderraj, and Belkis Vasquez-McCall

About the authors: Amit Anand is a senior expert in McKinsey’s Sydney office, Sahil Merchant is a partner in the Melbourne office, Arun Sunderraj is a digital expert in the New York office, and Belkis Vasquez-McCall is a partner in the New Jersey office.

Kedro, McKinsey’s first open-source software tool

Posted in: Branże, CRM, Informatyka w Firmie, Innovation, Marketing, Menedżerowie, Nowe Technologie, Prezentacja Firmy, Zarządzanie Firmą

QuantumBlack, the advanced analytics firm we acquired in 2015, has now launched Kedro, an open source tool created specifically for data scientists and engineers. It is a library of code that can be used to create data and machine-learning pipelines. For our non-developer readers, these are the building blocks of an analytics or machine-learning project. “Kedro can change the way data scientists and engineers work,” explains product manager Yetunde Dada, “making it easier to manage large workflows and ensuring a consistent quality of code throughout a project.”

McKinsey has never before created a publicly available, open source tool. “It represents a significant shift for the firm,” notes Jeremy Palmer, CEO of QuantumBlack, “as we continue to balance the value of our proprietary assets with opportunities to engage as part of the developer community, and accelerate as well as share our learning.”

The name Kedro, which derives from the Greek word meaning center or core, signifies that this open-source software provides crucial code for ‘productionizing’ advanced analytics projects. Kedro has two major benefits: it allows teams to collaborate more easily by structuring analytics code in a uniform way so that it flows seamlessly through all stages of a project. This can include consolidating data sources, cleaning data, creating features and feeding the data into machine-learning models for explanatory or predictive analytics.

More: www.mckinsey.com; https://github.com/quantumblacklabs/kedro

What are the main features of Kedro?

1. Project template and coding standards

A standard and easy-to-use project template
Configuration for credentials, logging, data loading and Jupyter Notebooks / Lab
Test-driven development using pytest
Sphinx integration to produce well-documented code

2. Data abstraction and versioning

Separation of the compute layer from the data handling layer, including support for different data formats and storage options
Versioning for your data sets and machine learning models

3. Modularity and pipeline abstraction

Support for pure Python functions, nodes, to break large chunks of code into small independent sections
Automatic resolution of dependencies between nodes
(coming soon) Visualise your data pipeline with Kedro-Viz, a tool that shows the pipeline structure of Kedro projects

Note: Read our FAQs to learn how we differ from workflow managers like Airflow and Luigi.

4. Feature extensibility

A plugin system that injects commands into the Kedro command line interface (CLI)
List of officially supported plugins:
- (coming soon) Kedro-Airflow, making it easy to prototype your data pipeline in Kedro before deploying to Airflow, a workflow scheduler
- Kedro-Docker, a tool for packaging and shipping Kedro projects within containers
Kedro can be deployed locally, on-premise and cloud (AWS, Azure and GCP) servers, or clusters (EMR, Azure HDinsight, GCP and Databricks)

Six governing considerations to modernize marketing

Posted in: Branże, CRM, Felietony, Informatyka w Firmie, Innovation, Nowe Technologie, Opinie

Most chief marketing officers (CMOs) understand that the utilization of data, analyses, and algorithms to personalize marketing drives value. Concept tests are becoming more efficient, customer approaches are being accelerated, and revenues are quadrupling in certain channels (Exhibit 1). All the evidence suggests that marketing functions should invest in, collect, and analyze available data to support their decision making.

No wonder, then, that one in three CMOs is driving a digitization initiative with high personal involvement, according to a McKinsey survey. Despite notable successes, digital marketing has often stalled in a trial phase for years in many companies. Why is that? We find that the managers responsible often blame it on culture and legacy behavioral patterns (Exhibit 2). These soft factors lie far ahead of technical issues, such as IT infrastructure and data availability, which is not surprising. It is easy enough to buy a new server for the customer database, and even new customer-relationship-manager software is quickly installed. But how does one change the attitudes and behaviors of those who use the technology?

We strive to provide individuals with disabilities equal access to our website. If you would like information about this content we will be happy to work with you. Please email us at: McKinsey_Website_Accessibility@mckinsey.com Based on our experience from a multitude of digital engagements, modernizing the marketing organization to unlock the full potential of the digital revolution requires business leaders to address six considerations.

1. How to centralize guidance and oversight

2. How to bring together marketing and IT (heart and brain)

3. How to build collaboration and agility

4. How to reinvent HR to meet talent demands

5. How to build flexibility into resource planning

6. How to make cultural change a continuous task

Modernizing marketing is a process that relies on multiple factors for success. Only by understanding what these are and by focusing on how to address them can marketers hope to get real value from digital. An earlier version of this article was published in the December 2018 issue of McKinsey’s German-language consumer journal Akzente.

About the authors: Patrick Guggenberger is a consultant in McKinsey’s Vienna office, Miriam Lobis is a partner in the Berlin office, and Patrick Simon and Kai Vollhardt are partners in the Munich office.

More: www.mckinsey.com/industries/

McKinsey – Getting organizational redesign right

Posted in: Anti-equilibrium, Artykuły, CRM, Inkubator Menedżerów, Menedżerowie, Opinie, Zarządzanie Firmą

Companies will better integrate their people, processes, and structures by following nine golden rules.

Recent McKinsey research surveying a large set of global executives suggests that many companies, these days, are in a nearly permanent state of organizational flux. Almost 60 percent of the respondents, for example, told us they had experienced a redesign within the past two years, and an additional 25 percent said they experienced a redesign three or more years ago. A generation or two back, most executives might have experienced some sort of organizational upheaval just a few times over the course of their careers. One plausible explanation for this new flurry of activity is the accelerating pace of strategic change driven by the disruption of industries. As a result, every time a company switches direction, it alters the organization to deliver the hoped-for results. Rather than small, incremental tweaks of the kind that might have been appropriate in the past, today’s organizations often need regular shake-ups of the Big Bang variety.

Frustratingly, it also appears that the frequency of organizational redesign reflects a high level of disappointment with the outcome. According to McKinsey’s research, less than a quarter of organizational-redesign efforts succeed. Forty-four percent run out of steam after getting under way, while a third fail to meet objectives or improve performance after implementation. The good news is that companies can do better—much better. In this article, we’ll describe what we learned when we compared successful and unsuccessful organizational redesigns and explain some rules of the road for executives seeking to improve the odds. Success doesn’t just mean avoiding the expense, wasted time, and morale-sapping skepticism that invariably accompany botched attempts; in our experience, a well-executed redesign pays off quickly in the form of better-motivated employees, greater decisiveness, and a stronger bottom line.

Why redesign the organization?

Organizational redesign involves the integration of structure, processes, and people to support the implementation of strategy and therefore goes beyond the traditional tinkering with “lines and boxes.” Today, it comprises the processes that people follow, the management of individual performance, the recruitment of talent, and the development of employees’ skills. When the organizational redesign of a company matches its strategic intentions, everyone will be primed to execute and deliver them. The company’s structure, processes, and people will all support the most important outcomes and channel the organization’s efforts into achieving them.

When do executives know that an organization isn’t working well and that they need to consider a redesign? Sometimes the answer is obvious: say, after the announcement of a big new regional-growth initiative or following a merger. Other signs may be less visible—for example, a sense that ideas agreed upon at or near the top of the organization aren’t being translated quickly into actions or that executives spend too much time in meetings. These signs suggest that employees might be unclear about their day-to-day work priorities or that decisions are not being implemented. A successful organizational redesign should better focus the resources of a company on its strategic priorities and other growth areas, reduce costs, and improve decision making and accountability.

The case of a consumer-packaged-goods (CPG) company that chose to expand outside its US home base illustrates one typical motivation for a redesign. Under the group’s previous organizational structure, the ostensibly global brand team responsible for marketing was not only located in the United States but had also been rewarded largely on the performance of US operations; it had no systems for monitoring the performance of products elsewhere. To support a new global strategy and to develop truly international brands and products, the company separated US marketing from its global counterpart and put in place a new structure (including changes to the top team), new processes, new systems, and a new approach to performance management. This intensive redesign helped promote international growth, especially in key emerging markets such as Russia (where sales tripled) and China (where they have nearly doubled).

By Steven Aronowitz, Aaron De Smet, and Deirdre McGinty

More: https://www.mckinsey.com/

Deloitte – Annual Review of Football Finance 2019

Posted in: Branże, CRM, Makroekonomia, Marketing, Raport z Rynku

This 28th edition charts the latest movements on the ever fluid football finance landscape. Whilst the Premier League retains its leadership in financial terms, the Premier League clubs face challenges to continue to deliver revenue growth and profitability. Meanwhile, Championship clubs are increasingly gambling to reach the top, and strenuous and creative efforts are being made by other European football leagues to enhance their own global appeal and close the gap to the Premier League.

You’ve got to hold and give
In a Premier League season which saw Manchester City achieve the widest winning points margin in history between first and second place, Premier League clubs were unable to extend their own significant revenue lead in global football, as the German Bundesliga narrowed the revenue gap slightly. Nonetheless, the Premier League comfortably managed to hold its position as the largest revenue generating league in the world.

The Bundesliga benefited from the commencement of a new broadcasting deal, which saw a step-change in the league’s broadcast revenue. Whilst the Premier League’s closest rivals are seeking to play catch up with recent growth in their respective broadcast deals, the 2019/20-2021/22 Premier League broadcast rights cycle has seen more marginal net increases as international growth compensated for a domestic reduction. For context, it should be remembered that this follows two previous cycles of substantial broadcast revenue growth.
Therefore, it is imperative for Premier League clubs to remain dynamic in the creation of their own revenue, with a focus on matchday and commercial revenues, in order to maintain its substantial revenue advantage.
Tottenham Hotspur’s new stadium, which opened its doors in April 2019, is the highest profile example of such dynamism. The stadium has been designed and built with a view to operating not just as a football stadium for 90 minutes, but rather an entertainment destination, including a ‘Sky Walk’ and its own microbrewery, as well as a ten-year partnership with the NFL to be the dedicated home of the NFL in the UK.
With regards to commercial revenue, many Premier League and European clubs are looking to continue to utilise and grow their global footprint and popularity created in part through broadcast exposure in order to drive interest, and more importantly value, from their commercial partners. The key to success is connecting with and delivering value to their worldwide fanbase. Four Premier League teams are competing in the Premier League Asian Trophy in Shanghai in July 2019, and pre-season friendlies announced to date cover eight different countries, with China and USA being the most popular destinations, owing to the perceived commercial growth potential in relatively underdeveloped football markets in the world’s two largest economies.
A record five teams competing in the UEFA Champions League helped drive the Premier League clubs’ record revenue in 2017/18 . The lucrative value of this competition to the ‘big six’, as well as the intensely competitive nature of the division itself, has resulted in clubs spending more of their revenue on wages to obtain and retain the best playing talent. This was clearly evident with two record transfer windows in the 2017/18 season, as well as an increase in the wages to revenue ratio in the Premier League.
Given the onus is now on clubs to generate revenue growth from sources other than broadcast revenue, coupled with the higher levels of wage spend, it may put downward pressure on pre-tax profits from the record breaking levels of recent years.
Commendably, in addition to parachute payments to relegated clubs, each season the Premier League provides contributions to support the wider football pyramid and various charitable causes. This was about £200m in 2017/18, equivalent to almost 7% of the League’s total central revenues for the year. Meanwhile, £211m exited the game in payments by Premier League clubs to agents.
As the Premier League and its clubs have enjoyed record revenues, profitability and investment in recent years, there is increased opportunity and pressure to further boost the future level of support to the wider football pyramid, charitable donations and good causes. Additional investment in a range of initiatives could undoubtedly benefit communities and enhance football’s role and position in society. For example, more investment to provide pitches and facilities for grassroots football, to help develop the women’s game; to promote anti-discrimination activities; to promote mental health and lifestyle issues; and to support the education and betterment of the next generation.

Dan Jones, Partner
www.deloitte.co.uk/sportsbusinessgroup

More: Annual Review of Football Finance 2019