At Battiston Consulting our goal is to help our clients’ solve their problems and drive valuable outcomes.
Many of us know of friends who are looking for a job. Of course they have made a list of head hunters to look up, and they are monitoring the job sites and trawling the papers – but how do they best work the network?
We are not HR consultants – but over the last 10 years we have developed this technique for helping our friends. The purpose of this brief note is to share our approach so that you can help friends who are looking for a job.
It has been a core talking point for the last 20 years about how ICT should be run as a ‘business within a business’. ICT used to ‘manufacture’ most of their services but now, as we head towards the 2020s, we see an explosion of service choices – it is a new delivery model for ICT! So how can ICT best position itself to play a relevant and effective role in today’s enterprises – both manufacturing and sourcing services – and offering targeted end-to-end business solutions that meet the needs of the modern organisation?
Business systems projects are hard. At the start of the journey aspirations are high and investment constrained. Often by the end it’s the aspirations that are constrained and investment that is high. As a rule of thumb we see the results of systems projects falling into equal portions of success, disappointment and failure. So given that context it seems self-evident that taking on a significant systems implementation project is a challenging adventure, and not for the faint hearted.
Read the full ‘Hatching and Dispatching Systems Projects’ PDF
“For around five to six months, I was like God….I could get anything done quickly! But then the system started re-asserting itself. People asked “why wasn’t I told about this?”… or said “you can’t do that, it needs different approvals!”. What I want to know is, if things can be done quickly in an emergency, why can’t they be done quickly all the time?”….
In the office we were arguing about whether the things you have to do well to prosper as a consultant are all that different to those for a line manager. We have brainstormed five things that we think are important for a successful consultant to do well – and we have asked five client executives how these factors translate if you are to be a successful line manager. Interestingly enough – there is a strong correlation … read on and see whether you agree!
Read the full ‘Consultant skills vs. Line Management skills’ PDF
While communication maybe one factor, it is often not the only reason for why employees and customers are not ‘getting it’. But how much is due to a breakdown in communication and understanding? Or how much is due to more deep-rooted problems such as resistance to change, not enough stakeholder buy-in, passive leadership and decision-making, or worse still, a shaky strategy to begin with.
To borrow a football analogy – what does it mean for CIOs to be “in the game”. How can CIOs be relevant to their organisation, and be seen by their colleagues as being key contributors to the organisation? We asked a group of 30 CIOs this question, and there was strong agreement that they needed to demonstrate a track record of being “in the game” in order to be effective in their roles.
There is a story about two men who were walking through the bush when they spotted a tiger nearby. One man took off – running as fast as he could. The other man sat down to put on his running shoes. “What are you wasting time for? The tiger will catch you” asked the man who was running. The other man said “I don’t have to outrun the tiger, I just have to outrun you!”
Like the tiger story above – there some tips and techniques that make it easier to survive and prosper at work. In this Battiston Consulting note, we wanted to explore four ideas for a better life at work.