Is a win-lose strategy a good choice?

February 6, 2021March 5, 2021Mohamed Sami

In most of our daily conversations and discussions, whether with coworkers, friends, or family members, we argue and exchange opinions and recommendations, and suggestions.

Sometimes, we want an agreement on our opinion and assure that those shared thoughts and opinions are heard and applied. So, we try to persuade and convince others, and we try to minimize the resistance against our opinion for our own interest irrespective of the implied loss to others, or for all of our interests and have a beneficial outcome for all, that satisfies each one’s concerns.

This process of going back and forth discussion to reach an agreement between two parties or more is called negotiation. When you are asking someone to get you a cup of tea, asking your kids to do something or study, proposing a solution to a customer, discussing your job offer with an employer, asking your team to do certain tasks, and lots of other similar examples that we are doing daily without noticing, all are NEGOTIATIONS.

Negotiation is when a person wants another person to do or not do something for him or her.

8 principles to consider in the Digital World

November 20, 2020November 21, 2020Mohamed Sami

Throughout my career in the information technology industry, I have observed different aspects which turned to be a set of personal principles and beliefs that I consider at any digital solution implementation that I would like to share with the community, I am sure they will resonate with you.

1- There are no IT projects

If you are working in the IT department in your organization, you will always hear common words, such as, the Business team wants, and business team needs, we need to align with business strategy, the Business team wants to work remotely, the Business team is considering our department as an isolated island that is not aligned with what we need. With time, you will see the shadow IT, and the business team will start to use their skills, and get any ready-made tools to finish their tasks to not face a bottleneck from the IT department.

This is mainly because IT staff is still thinking of these projects as IT projects, and the business team is seeing IT as a cost center that only consumes lots of money and resources without a return as per the business expectations.

Change starts with YOU!

September 26, 2020September 27, 2020Mohamed Sami

The most difficult change is the change in people’s mindset, especially when they are used to perform and do the same activities for a quite long time in the same way.

People minds are usually wired to only see the value of their used traditional methods and techniques, and their daily routines. It is hard to convince them to even try to think if there is a better way to do this or that, I feel empathy with those mindsets because most of the time, this routine drags us and prevents us to pause and think about what can be improved!

Types of Technological Changes

July 12, 2019August 16, 2019Mohamed Sami

At a former article, I have discussed the change management theories and practices through reading various research papers that discussed the change management in the organization. Change management is everywhere when there is a new project, new process, new improvements, starting a new business, or even a change of career or joining a new company. As you may know that Change management is a systematic approach to dealing with the transition or transformation of an organization’s goals, processes or technologies.

Nowadays, these transitions happen every day, new technologies, new job roles, new projects, new strategies, new challenges, and new opportunities are introduced. These transitions need a change framework to ensure proper management of this change for the benefit of the organization and the people.

In this article, I would like to discuss the types of changes to have a better understanding of the change behavior and pattern.

Change management from Theory to Practice

February 2, 2019July 12, 2020Mohamed Sami

Change management theories and methods have been a hot topic for decades in strategic management, change implementation, and innovation implementation. Nowadays, in the information and technology industry, we see trends, such as, the digital transformation, digitization, automation, Digital Experience, and Customer and Citizen-centric approaches that lead to infinite change motives in the organizations and society that lead to new innovations.

Moreover, Change management projects have many different themes, for example, quality improvement, process improvement, re-engineering, reorganization, and organizations restructure. Although most of the organizations are trying to align with new trends and apply new changes effectively, the reported successful applied change projects were few and under specific circumstances and context (Kotter, 1995).

Change management is not only a theory, it is a practice that we can use not only in the organizations but within our daily lives, for example, pursuing a job or an academic scholarship, or even changing family habits. These types of motives, goals, or dreams lead to actions and a lot of hard work to satisfy these motives. I partially agree with (Dunphy 1996) who stated that:

“The basic tension that underlies many discussions of organizational change is that it would not be necessary if people had done their jobs right in the first place. Planned change is usually triggered by the failure of people to create continuously adaptive organizations”
(Dunphy 1996 as cited in Weick & Quinn, 1999)

In order to make people do their jobs right at any organization, their organization should empower them, the executives and managers should prepare those people and align their priorities with the organization strategy, and ensure that those people have the right capabilities to perform their jobs in the right way and to the intent expectation.

The successful failure of the Software Projects

November 20, 2017November 10, 2018Mohamed Sami

The IT systems and applications are everywhere now, from simple to complex systems to run basic data entry to control autonomous cars and autonomous planes and more complicated systems.

Unfortunately, after a lot of research in software process models and project management frameworks, Software and IT projects still have a very high failure rate. According to a study has been made by Mckinsey in 2012

On average, large IT projects run 45% over budget and 7% over time while delivering 56% less value than predicted. That’s beside the common issues of deliverable quality of final software product according to specifications.

Another study from McKinsey in 2014 regarding how to achieve success in large, complex IT projects.