Abstract
In the IT industry, the continuous improvement approach as an established way for process management is doomed to fail at critical points. In particular, we consider the aspect of dealing with disruptive business changes requiring a disruptive process improvement response. This chapter is based on the experience of a significant disruption in a large IT company. First, we consider how easy it is to continue on an improvement path that, in such a context, leads to failure. We then explore the alternative non-continuous responses required to avoid failure. We look at elements that can help an organization to be better prepared for disruptive improvements, including experiences with the introduction and impact of Design Thinking and Agile Development.
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Acknowledgments
With great pleasure, I thank all colleagues from the SAP IT Process team that inspired this chapter by taking up the challenge to respond to a disruptive change with a disruptive process improvement response. Such a response does not always happen, and, when it happens, it does not always work. It was great to learn together from this challenge.
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Rösel, A. (2016). Are We Ready for Disruptive Improvement?. In: Kuhrmann, M., Münch, J., Richardson, I., Rausch, A., Zhang, H. (eds) Managing Software Process Evolution. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-31545-4_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-31545-4_5
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