In the News..

Featured comments from ADAPTOVATE USA Managing Director Nate Nelson, Project Lead Kayla Cartwright. As organizations are adopting more agile practices, we're diving into how they can benefit from creating cross-functional agile teams across multiple departments.

Purdue University produced an insightful infographic emphasizing that for the first time in history, there are five generations working side by side: traditionalists, baby boomers, Gen X, millennials and Gen Z. Each generation holds different motivational values, and these differences contribute greatly to how values are manifested into behaviors. In turn, this creates unique challenges and opportunities for organizations seeking greater agility to meet fast-changing market demands.

Today, many industries operate in real time, 24/7. Modern professionals must be able to think on their feet and shift direction quickly, sometimes with little or no guidance. While it is part of their job, without adequate support, having to constantly shift gears makes keeping up with daily tasks a challenge. Eventually, this can take a mental and emotional toll on employees, making it harder for their managers to lead them to success.

Kayla Cartwright - “My company and I have been continuously impressed with Miro, the ‘online whiteboard for visual collaboration.’ As agile transformation consultants, we help organizations across the globe to learn and apply new ways of working."

Kayla Cartwright, senior consultant at Adaptovate, uses several different video conferencing platforms, including Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Google Hangouts. In her opinion, Google Hangouts is the easiest to use. "I would recommend [Hangouts] for small-group conversations," Cartwright said. "The screen and sound quality are generally strong. As an added feature, if using the entire G Suite and Google Calendar, you can automatically add a Google Hangouts link to any event invitation for easy access, and the invitation will automatically add a Hangouts link and dial-in information."

Allocating a fixed amount of time every day for staying up to date is key. Some ideas include reading relevant publications, engaging in LinkedIn forums, speaking to two professionals in your network weekly to learn about problems that need solving, listening to podcasts on a walk and journaling about what got you most excited.

Give employees a sense of purpose. You can do this by creating a picture of what is most important to the customers and empowering people to determine how to get there. One way to achieve this is to establish aspirations, goals and measurable results that cascade across your organization. As results are achieved, individuals and teams have a clear line of sight into how they impact customers.

ADAPTOVATE has been announced as finalists in 3 categories in the 2020 Business Growth Awards.