Current role: Enterprise Agility Practice Lead
Current organisation: Fujitsu Asia Pacific
Last role at PwC: IT Consultant, Assurance and Business Advisory Services (ABAS)
Time at PwC: 1996 - 1999
What’s the one career achievement you’re most proud of?
Certainly, my proudest achievement thus far was the first large-scale agile transformation within Fujitsu using the Scaled Agile Framework (aka SAFe). This required a two-month consulting arrangement with our Portfolio Offerings division leading up to the large scale “go-live”.
The impact was immediately noticeable. We were able to demonstrate the offerings that were being developed within two weeks and apply fast validated learning through stakeholder feedback and pivot quickly when required.
This implementation originated within Fujitsu Oceania but has now grown into a global agile portfolio within the global digital transformation arm, Fujitsu Uvance.
What’s been your biggest career challenge and how have you overcome it?
Perhaps my biggest career challenge was the move from a technical expert role to a management role. This took place in 2012 and required me to rapidly learn project management methodologies (Prince2 and PMBoK) and practices. It was a very challenging couple of months but also very rewarding as it allowed me to be a Project Manager and Senior Project Manager over the course of the following five years.
What’s the most valuable lesson you learnt during your career at PwC and how has that helped you get to where you are today?
The only constant is change – and with that continually learning and adapting is essential!
My time at PwC was brief, only three years, but during this time I had to develop skills rapidly and work with multiple hats such as business analysis, architecture, programming (in four different languages), IT software and hardware support and establishing a knowledge management framework.
Luckily, I had a mentor who was able to coach me on being adaptive to changing customer needs, provided programming support and guided me on self-learning.
What was your dream job ‘growing up’ and why?
My dream job growing up was to work within the computer sciences field. My mother had been provided a modem for her work when I was nine years old and she let me use it to connect to what was known as Bulletin Board Systems (BBS). From here I learnt about programming, communications, and other computer sciences where I developed a passion for “how things work”.
If you could have an hour lunch with anyone – dead or alive – who would it be and why?
Steve Jobs. This man was truly an inspiration and one of the most influential leaders of our time!
I’d love to learn about how he went from building PCs in his garage to creating perhaps the most widely recognisable brand in the world. He was crazy enough to think he could change the world, and he did!
How are you helping Fujitsu become more customer / client / citizen centric?
At Fujitsu, we apply several techniques to be more customer centric, these include:
- Design thinking: We actively engage users and consumers of products, services and solutions through empathy maps, customer journey maps, personas to understand the human perspective.
- Co-creation: Working with customers to design solutions collaboratively, as opposed to taking a transactional approach.
- Innovation: We provide designated time and space for innovation activities such as hack-a-thons, Shark Tanks/Dragon’s Dens, and incubation programs both internally and with our customers.
What are the top three challenges you’re seeing businesses face in the race to become agile, and how can they effectively respond?
- Lack of leadership and middle management support is by far the biggest challenge. Agile implementations that apply a “bottom-up” approach tend to run into roadblocks if their leadership still adheres to traditional management frameworks and mindsets. Furthermore, it is imperative that leaders “lead by example” to drive cultural change within their organisation using a “top-down” approach. Leadership must undergo training on lean-agile mindset and practices. It is also extremely important to engage qualified experts, agile coaches, to guide them through their change programs.
- Funding agile initiatives as “projects”. Agile initiatives require a different funding approach from the traditional Project Portfolio management mechanisms. Given agile development is incremental and iterative and welcomes changing requirements and prioritisation, the traditional iron triangle (fixed budget, scope, schedule) and big upfront planning becomes problematic. Instead, Lean Portfolio Management is being widely adopted as the preferred approach to funding agile initiatives given its alignment with agile practices, speed-to-market, flexibility and ability to pivot quickly.
- Do it yourself agile: I’ve come across countless organisations who attempt to “go agile” without engaging qualified agile transformation consultants. These implementations invariably fail and lead to lack of confidence within an organisation to adopt agile approaches. It is paramount that any organisation serious about the adoption of agile employ qualified consultants who can guide and coach a successful agile implementation from the executive to team levels.
From your global experience at Fujitsu, what trends do you expect Australian organisation’s to embrace over the next 10 years to maintain relevance, increase speed, innovation and competitiveness?
As we embrace the digital era, traditional managerial frameworks and methodologies will simply not be able to keep pace (eg. Project Portfolio Management, Waterfall Development, SDLC). I expect to see modern approaches such as Lean Portfolio Management, Agile at scale and DevOps to become the standard.
Business Agility will also become the standard across all elements of an organisation. Lean, Agile and DevOps were typically used for Software Development and IT Centric solution development, but you can expect to see these practices being applied to all aspects of an organisation including Marketing, People & Culture, Legal, Ops, Finance.
Finally, Value Stream Management (VSM) is going to be a key practice adopted by many IT and Digital transformations. In fact, Gartner predict "by 2024, 75% of Global 2000 IT organisations will have adopted VSM as a way to improve the flow of work through their DevOps pipelines, up from less than 10% in 2020." VSM is a highly effective practice that reduces or eliminates bottlenecks from cross department/silo handoffs and increases communication and collaboration across teams.
