Who’s got talent?

In our previous post, we delved into the importance of innovation in the ADM space – and the value that a collaborative idea incubation center can deliver across your operations. But now, we’re looking at something even more important than innovation. We’re talking about talent – the people who create ideas and bring new offerings to life with innovative technologies.

At the core of every successful modern business, you’ll always find two Ts – talent and technology. We need good talent to develop and make the best use of current and emerging technology that’s essential for starting, running, or transforming businesses. Making the best use of technology is just as important as creating or developing new technology – and for success with both – nurturing your talent is the key success factor.

Continuous change, new technologies and techniques, and new ways of working

In today’s chaotic world, certainty has almost entirely lost its meaning – and as innovators in the technology space, we must always be on our toes. This means adapting to continuous change to innovate, adopting new technologies and techniques to transform, and implementing new ways of working to meet business demands:

• Adapting to continuous change: business needs are changing faster than we can anticipate – be it effects stemming from the pandemic, tense geo-political situations, or climate change
• Adopting new technologies and techniques: these are essential in augmenting your ability to respond to change. You can see Moore’s Law in action every day with new surprises on the technology front – be it innovation in Cloud, Data with AI, ML and IoT, blockchain, transformation with data fabric, composable applications, MLOps, etc.
• Implementing new ways of working: this is essential to keep pace with changes in business priorities and technology innovation. Agile and DevOps are the new guidance systems in responding on time and making your business viable.

And as you may have guessed, the key to adapting to continuous change, adopting new technologies and techniques, implementing new ways of working – and ultimately succeeding in this new normal – lies within your ability to attract, develop, and retain talent. But how should you get started here?

From “I” to “Pi” – Taking a fresh look at skill management, involvement and ownership, and effective training

With maturity in Agile ways of working, it’s been observed that for successful execution of projects and service management, there’s a real need to develop a totally new mindset and take a fresh look at skill management.

The main objective of a team should always be the solving of business challenges – rather than the fulfilment of specific skills. In the technology space, a business challenge could be the creation of a new application or platform, the efficient and cost-effective running of an application landscape, or the transformation of a legacy environment. Time and again, we have seen that individuals with broader knowledge bases (in addition to specializations) are better equipped to handle complex problems and can quickly adapt to new environments.

There’s a real need to nurture your talent to meet the expectations of this new normal, which should include fostering speed, agility, and out-of-box thinking. To accomplish this, it’s critical to take a fresh look at the skill management of your people on their journeys to Agile maturity – from I to T to Pi-shaped skill sets.

Personal ownership and involvement of individuals within teams

Addressing and aligning with the career aspirations and life goals of individuals is crucial. Some people may thrive on the familiarity of an environment and take pride in maintaining the stability and efficiency of business as usual, while others may be more adventurous in terms of learning new skills and trying out different things to come up with innovative solutions. Nurturing both these types of individuals is essential for your teams.

Additionally, enabling individuals to choose their own mode of engagement is also essential – whether it be time-boxed (depending on at what point value gets delivered) or more fluid. While onboarding needs to show every individual the plan for the success of the team, project, and customer engagement, along with conveying how the team is going to achieve its goals – which in turn relates to how we are going to solve future business problems.

Training is critical – but effective training is the real challenge

Getting away from stereotyping or typecasting – a developer can learn the necessary skills to address business expectations appropriately, while a business analyst could be interested in learning the basics of microservices, to visualize the changes required in business function workflow.

Rather than long, rigorous learning regimes, breaking down information into small, bite-sized learning chunks that are relevant and interesting enough to prompt learners to try out things and attain a sense of achievement can play a huge role. While trainings designed to nurture T and Pi-shaped skill sets help teams address pressing business issues without any feelings of being forced by compliance measures or a need to add another certification.

On-the-job training can help develop prototypes for solutions to a variety of business issues, as team members actively learn the skills required to solve specific problems. For example, maintaining applications hosted in the Cloud versus on premise (data center) requires different collaboration, coordination, and networking skills, in addition to technical and functional skills.

Enabling your people with the right training and tools can help transform your applications development to innovate faster, work smarter, improve operational efficiency and TCO, meet specific business goals in less time, and enhance collaboration between business and IT. Within Application Development and Maintenance (ADM) space, Low code/No code with ADMnext can bring your people the right tools that will enable them to seamlessly create applications using a graphical interface, with virtually no programming experience required.

While overall, Capgemini’s ADMnext provides a comprehensive platform with tools and techniques necessary to adopt and effectively use technology to address business challenges. ADMnext empowers your people to step outside of a ticket-focused mentality and into a value-based mentality by developing heightened human and business connections – and adding direct value to customers.

In our next post of this series, we’ll look at Cloud within the ADM space and how the right Cloud modernization strategy can take your business to new heights.

In the meantime, to learn more about Low code/No code with ADMnext can help nourish your talent and the overall ADMnext offering as a whole, shoot me a message here.