Excellence by Design

Excellence by Design (Copyright VPL 2007)  was drafted as a set of strategies to enable companies to systemically improve their execution and capability.  It was based on my career experiences and was accelerated after the rise of the Internet, e-Business, and the anticipated global technology disruption.  While the specific ExD techniques may have changed over time, it was surprisingly predictive of the future, and its basis for leadership and organizational management theories are even more relevant today.  in fact, I spend a great deal of my time advising CIOs how to develop more agility, innovation, and efficiency in their organizations... e.g. excellence by design. 

Excellence by Design is founded on these beliefs.

• The world has shifted to be essentially uncontrollable and unpredictable. This is due to the convergence of many factors but the largest are Technology advancement, the rise of Consumerization, and Globalization and its elimination of barriers to entry.  As a result, the capability of change to occur has dramatically accelerated: innovation is quicker to arise, faster to market, and more easily adopted by wider audiences. The rise of Digital Business and the new Global Politics has accelerated the pace of change and greater unpredictability of business.
• Business must design flexibility into their organizations, products, and services to thrive in this environment of unpredictability by better understanding the impact it will have on their markets, building the organizational competencies needed for this fast changing world, and crafting products and services that are designed for agility and change. This need for more agility in business has only increased and become more dependent on technology, but in very different ways than the past, with increasing use of cloud, platforms, ecosystems, APIs, IOT, and data...and the near irrelevance of traditional server/storage details or massive ERP/CRM systems.
• Business can succeed by applying key principles of excellence by design to their organizational culture, competencies, and processes as well as to the management and design of the products and services the business creates. The principles were originally crafted from an information technology perspective but are also  applicable to non IT challenges of constant and unpredictable change.  While the framework below is hardly the only one (there are today many frameworks to consider from many Companies), there is still core value in it and the principles are, remarkably, even more relevant today as Digital Agility becomes more critical.   

The key Themes of Excellence by Design are shown below and described immediately after.

Chaos vs Control

• The key challenge of the future is to manage the increasing tension between capabilities which are growing in emergent and unanticipated (chaotic) ways, and the opposing yet increasing demand to assure (control) those capabilities are understood, secured, and properly managed.

Systems as Strategy

• A critical success factor for the future is the use of structured, sustainable, and flexible systems of operation as a core business strategy that improve reliability, repeatability, assurance,  and quality, while better enabling dynamic and unanticipated change.

The Architecture Advantage

• As demands become more robust, varied, and unpredictable, using well architected approaches will better enable robustness and reliability (improving control) while also improving resiliency and extensibility (adaptability to chaos).

Design for Change

• The most important strategic investment companies can make is to invest in capabilities that facilitate agility to change.  The ExD Design for Change theme includes a dozen specific characteristics that should be considered in any modern business, product, or IT solution, to improve its capability to support and thrive in an ever changing world fraught with unanticipated Chaos and new demands for Control.

Product as Platform

• Companies must act to shift from pursuing point, one of a kind applications and projects, to building resilient product platforms that provide broad capability and are extensible to future needs, easily combined with related offerings, and consistent in behavior, yet flexible in usage.

Cadence to Quality

• Paradoxically, even as the pace of change increases, the value of iteration, continuous improvement, and regular updating that drive customer trust becomes ever more important.  It also improves organizational effectiveness, and enables competitive longevity. It's interesting to note how accustomed iPhone users are to regular (and EASY!) updates to their apps, while many IT organization and even mature software vendors labor to do the same.

Craftsmanship to Community

• A successful organization must develop balance in having both strong competency and diversity of skills, combined with exceptional teaming and partnering…in a manner that rewards agility and resilience of outcomes.

Service Excellence

• Every organization of the 21at Century must develop an execution philosophy to better align the planning, development, and delivery of services in a holistic, accountable, and strategic way to better ensure consumer expectations are met, solutions are well designed, and operational execution is effective and efficient.