Remember if there is no business, all those best practices and the processes will have no meaning. A fundamental point to keep in mind that you joined a “startup” that is not a Fortune 500 company, yet. However, you have a chance to make it one – so do your best, they need your leadership, make it count.
The senior management, human resources department, and other authorities in companies are hungry for under the hood information. Believe it or not, they want you to be successful (which includes your promotion). After all, your success defines their success.
If one can implement a solution in an existing platform with marginal expense on top of the current team and licensing costs, probably, it would be worth considering.
While assigning a budget to any IT program, the senior leadership assumes that their managers will implement creative and innovative solutions. After all, the top dollars are used to fund the so-called “experts” and “consultants” to help the IT teams. One of the solutions could be in the commoditization of the IT work that teams would do in an assembly line factory mode.
The focus of the process improvement must be to support the core business, not the core business itself. The actual implementation of the best practices is subjective that depends on a specific environment or situation.
The approval boards and committees should applaud the forthright open and honest behavior of cost savings and funding adjustments; rather than punishing it by making a red mark on the virtual credit rating of the team for future funding and budget approval
IT Tools are as good as the people-process using them. Pay attention to the people and their processes more than the tool. After all, the people define the processes, and tools are there to serve, not the other way round.
The business thinking fosters the design thinking, agility, innovation, and creativity at its core encapsulated under the cross-division people collaboration. The Brad Pitt’s movie “Moneyball” was an awesome example of how one can do great things with teamwork using everyone’s strengths, even if everyone is not an “A-grade” player.
Corporate entrepreneurs do things like Matt Damon did in the movie, The Martian (2015), where he grew potatoes at an uninhabited planet with almost no resources and millions of obstacles, only with his sheer will, wit, hard-work, and instincts to survive in the uncooperative environment.
Handle IT customers and PMs with kids gloves. The opinions disguised or construed as the requirements may act as initial cracks in the foundation of the product for which the development has not even begun yet. Ask why? why not? what if?