Skip to content

Winning Together

By Dominica Degrandis, Ana Torres, Elisabeth Hendrickson, Levi Geinert, Jeffrey Fredrick

A Playbook for Aligning Technology & Business

Free

This paper is for Technology leaders who would like to improve their partnership with the Business. As a technology leader, you may have tried to partner in the past and struggled to bring your business counterpart along. Or perhaps you feel that you lack the political capital to shift your relationship.
This playbook provides concrete advice for making a deep and lasting change in your relationship, shifting from what may have been a fraught or transactional relationship to a more productive partnership.
  • Publication Date: 2021
  • Pages 18

Features

  • Business and Tech Alignment

    This playbook provides concrete advice for making deep and lasting change in the business/technology relationship.

  • Expert Authors

    This paper is written by experienced leaders across industries who have led project to product transformations.

  • Patterns and Antipatterns

    This paper helps readers understand and apply the lessons to their organizations through the use of clear patterns and antipatterns.

  • All Levels

    Change Agents can come from anywhere on the org chart. This paper directly provides guidance on how to lead change no matter your role or title.

About the Resource

At this point it is largely taken as a given that the ability to develop and leverage technology is a competitive advantage in any industry. Every company is a technology company regardless of their market segment or product category. Digital transformation is a strategic investment that promises dramatic business results. In order to achieve these results, Technology must become a strategic partner to the Business.
Although this is not a new insight—far from it—many companies still struggle with establishing this strategic partnership between Technology and the Business. Both sides express frustration. Business leaders report feeling stymied by what they perceive as the high costs and rigidity of their technology groups, and thus seek to work around those groups with so-called “Shadow IT.”
On the flip side, technology leaders express frustration with business leaders who view Technology as a cost center, seem to expect a purely transactional funding based relationship, and who push back on any investment that does not yield immediate and tangible benefits for business initiatives.
Of course, the underlying issues are not one-sided. This is not a technology problem or a business problem but rather an organizational problem. What is missing is true partnership: a relationship characterized by shared goals, mutual respect, true collaboration, joint commitment, and shared accountability.
We wrote this paper for Technology leaders who would like to improve their partnership with the Business. As a technology leader, you may have tried to partner in the past and struggled to bring your business counterpart along. Or perhaps you feel that you lack the political capital to shift your relationship.
This playbook provides concrete advice for making a deep and lasting change in your relationship, shifting from what may have been a fraught or transactional relationship to a more productive partnership.

Dominica Degrandis
Ana Torres
Elisabeth Hendrickson
Levi Geinert
Jeffrey Fredrick
Dominica Degrandis

Dominica Degrandis

Dominica DeGrandis is the foremost expert in Kanban Flow within the IT industry today. Her work has shown working IT teams how effectively improve workflow and optimize throughput to produce the best result throughout the value stream. Her passion involves the use of visual cues and transparency across teams and organizations to reveal mutually critical information. As Director of Training & Coaching at LeanKit, Dominica combines experience, practice and theory to help teams level up their capability. She blogs at ddegrandis.com and tweets at @dominicad.

To Author Archive
Ana Torres

Ana Torres

Passionate change leader, problem-solver, and communicator ensuring sustainable enterprise digital transformation.

To Author Archive
Elisabeth Hendrickson

Elisabeth Hendrickson

Experienced technology leader building what I have learned into simulations so others can learn in minutes what it took me years to figure out.

To Author Archive
Levi Geinert

Levi Geinert

Levi is currently SVP, and Head of Engineering Advocacy and Innovation at U.S. Bank, where he is responsible for supporting, and refining the DevOps and software engineering practices, patterns, and tools to better support our Product, Agile, and DevOps ways of working. He has held multiple roles including leading the Developer Experience product engineering and agile teams. He advocates for developers, empowers engineers, and strives to create an environment of psychological safety to create an engineering culture. Prior to the Bank he was a Director of Engineering in the Target Dojo, after transitioning from Principal Engineer and helped to operate the Target Dojo which successfully helped drive Agile, DevOps, and Product adoption across Target.

To Author Archive
Jeffrey Fredrick

Jeffrey Fredrick

Coauthor of Agile Conversations

To Author Archive

Similar Resources