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If you're a business leader, frustrated that your technology provision isn't keeping pace with growth. You're probably already thinking about some kind of transformation. And the real measure of success in transformation isn't the technology itself. It's what the business can achieve because of it. Transformation should deliver more than just a polished PowerPoint deck. It should deliver real, tangible and sustainable business outcomes. Ideally leaving the business in a position where they no longer have to do transformation ever again. In this video I talk about 5 specific examples of real tangible business value from transformation programmes I've led. If you are considering transformation in any aspect of your technology provision and you want tangible, business outcome focused success, send me a message or leave me a comment below and let's start the conversation. matt@stepthinking.com

Are you a business leader who wonders why the tech team always seems so busy, but progress is slower than you need it to be? There's lots of reasons why that can happen, and not always to do with the technology teams themselves. Three very common reasons are: 1. Constantly changing priorities 2. Unclear ownership leading to slow decision-making 3. Excessive governance and reporting overlaid on top of work in an attempt to speed it up when things aren't going as fast as you want them to, which just ultimately results in slowing it down further. Most technology teams don't suddenly get faster just by being asked to work harder. They become faster when the business creates the conditions for better delivery. If you recognise yourself or your business in that scenario, ask yourself some searching questions. Is your technology team not up to the job, or actually, do you just need to create better conditions for them to succeed

Many businesses say that technology is critical, but then treat it like a support function, and that gap is costing them more than they realise. We talk a lot about how important technology is to modern businesses. We say it's strategic. We say it's critical. We say it underpins everything. But if you actually look at how many organisations operate, there's still a gap. Over the course of my career I've found a handful of things that consistently help technology leaders establish credibility and earn that voice at that top table. By the end of this video (6 minutes from now) you'll know what those things are too! www.stepthinking.com

Most leaders don't get caught out because they're incompetent. They get caught out because they trusted the first answer they were given. As a leader, you're often under time pressure and you're relying on your team to furnish you with information. So when something sounds reasonable on first answering the temptation is to go with it. And to be fair, you'll get away with that seven or eight times out of 10, but it's the other two or three times out of 10, where the answer wasn't right, that will come back to bite you in the future. And it's not because people are generally trying to mislead you, that's quite rare. It's just that they've got a narrow field of view and they're working with partial information as well. So a simple technique that I use is triangulation, not because I don't believe the first person, I'm absolutely sure that they've given you what they believe to be the right answer. But another two or three people might have a different lens that just adds to the mix. If I hear the same thing from two or three other people, I can move forward with greater confidence knowing that that answer is more likely to be correct. And if I don't get the same answer, I know that I've gotta dig a bit deeper. It might take a little bit more time, but it saves all sorts of headaches later. One perspective on a problem is an opinion. Two or three matching opinions becomes a reality. For more tech leadership insights, subscribe to the channel or follow me.

Lots of leaders fall into the trap of confusing urgency with importance. Just because something's loud, last minute and gets chased for every five seconds doesn't mean it's the most important thing you should be working on right now. A lot of leaders get dragged into false urgency. Someone shouts loudly, an email suddenly appears a deadline suddenly looms. Before you know it, your whole day has been hijacked. But importance is different. Importance is about value, consequence, and strategic relevance. It's about the things that genuinely move the business forward, reduce risk, or improve performance. Urgency is often about noise and importance is about strategic impact. Most people know this as the Eisenhower Matrix, but not many people use it properly. We end up living in the urgent work. And not moving forward the important things that will actually move the dial on your business. Now, obviously some things are urgent and important and you do have to deal with them, but plenty of things are urgent only because somebody else has failed to plan properly or because they want an answer faster, not because the issue actually matters more than other things on your list. Good leaders learn to pause and ask: - Is this genuinely important? - What happens if it waits? - What will I be neglecting if I jump on this now? Because if you spend all day reacting to the urgent things, you'll start missing your commitments to other people for things you were already doing. You'll constantly feel like you're just chasing your tail and you'll end up progressing somebody else's priorities and not your own. Urgent does not necessarily equal importance. Be really clear about the distinction in your own mind. Subscribe for more leadership tips and insights. @Stepthinking www.stepthinking.com

Most leaders don't get caught out because they're incompetent. They get caught out because they trusted the first answer they were given. As a leader, you're often under time pressure and you're relying on your team to furnish you with information. So when something sounds reasonable on first answering the temptation is to go with it. And to be fair, you'll get away with that seven or eight times out of 10, but it's the other two or three times out of 10, where the answer wasn't right, that will come back to bite you in the future. And it's not because people are generally trying to mislead you, that's quite rare. It's just that they've got a narrow field of view and they're working with partial information as well. So a simple technique that I use is triangulation, not because I don't believe the first person, I'm absolutely sure that they've given you what they believe to be the right answer. But another two or three people might have a different lens that just adds to the mix. If I hear the same thing from two or three other people, I can move forward with greater confidence knowing that that answer is more likely to be correct. And if I don't get the same answer, I know that I've gotta dig a bit deeper. It might take a little bit more time, but it saves all sorts of headaches later. One perspective on a problem is an opinion. Two or three matching opinions becomes a reality. For more tech leadership insights, subscribe to the channel or follow me. www.stepthinking.com

Most transformation programmes don't fail partway through. They're set up wrong from day one and for very understandable reasons. Here are the three most common reasons I see where transformation programmes fail. First of all, a lack of clarity about why transformation is even needed. Teams often jump straight into "we need a new platform", but that's not really a strategy. The best transformations I've led didn't replace everything. They kept the things that worked, fixed or replaced the things that didn't, and focused on the business outcomes. Reason number two. Treating a transformation programme like it has to be an entire reset / refresh. In reality, most businesses end up here because they've grown and evolved over time and the business just hasn't kept up. So a good transformation doesn't just fix today's problems, it sets the business up so they never need to do a big transformation program again. And the third reason is programmes that assume that all of the value delivery happens at the end, but that's a high risk strategy because it can take a long time and cost a lot of money to get there. And by the time you do get there, what you deliver may not be what the business needs anymore. So a better approach is to phase work so that you can deliver value incrementally, early, and often. Get those three things right and your transformation has a much better chance of actually delivering value. Subscribe for more practical tech leadership advice.

Here's a controversial opinion. CTO might be the most meaningless job title in tech. And I say that as somebody who's been doing that job for many years because two people can be called CTO and do completely different jobs. At one end of the spectrum, CTO might be the only or most senior developer in a small startup still writing code, building the product, and leading a small growing team. At the other end of the scale, you've got the CTO In a large multinational financial institution, for example, they might be leading hundreds and hundreds of people in tech, but not be that close to technology themselves anymore. And then there's everything else in between. Now that's not to say either end of that spectrum is better or worse than the. They're just different. But it does illustrate why the title CTO on its own is not particularly helpful. I sit somewhere in the middle of that spectrum focusing on strategy and transformation, for the most part. I help businesses modernize their technology, scale their teams, and get more value from their technology functions. So when somebody tells you they're a CTO, don't assume you know what they mean. You need to ask "what kind of CTO are you?" If you are operating as a CTO, leave me a comment below to tell me whereabouts on that spectrum you reside. And if you're a business leader with A CTO in your team, have a think about where they sit on that spectrum. www.stepthinking.com matt@stepthinking.com