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Tag Archives: project

Pro Tips to Streamline User Adoption For Your CRM Project

December 17, 2020   CRM News and Info

xUser Adoption Web Banners CRM Cloud Blog Blog Post 276x398 2 208x300.png.pagespeed.ic.KtFCpyLfUx Pro Tips to Streamline User Adoption For Your CRM ProjectAre you in the process of implementing a new CRM solution? Or do you plan to do so in the future? There’s no doubt that upgrading to a modern business management system is essential to support remote workers and to compete in a global, connected economy.

But that doesn’t mean user adoption will be without its challenges. A variety of factors can contribute to employees resisting the switch and dragging their feet during implementation.

By using these pro tips, you will be able to help your employees embrace change as you take your organization to the next level.

Download: 19 Brilliant Ways to Promote ERP & CRM User Adoption

Plan Thoroughly

Before you begin implementation, plan ahead to get all employees on board with the change. Notice a few ways you can support user adoption before the project even begins:

  • To help each department feel that their perspective is represented, include a variety of staff members on the CRM selection team.
  • Don’t simply replace a paper task with a digital one. Show that you have your employees’ interests in mind by designing a system that helps them accomplish more in a day with fewer headaches.
  • Give extra attention to long-time employees that may be particularly resistant to change.
  • Users need to know that they will have support to help them transition to the new system. Let them know right from the start what the ongoing support and training program will be.

Lead Proactively

Before they give their full support to the project, employees need to know that management is backing the decision 100%. Show leadership support from the beginning by doing the following:

  • Ensure all employees in leadership roles understand the reason and goals for the project and are able to explain them clearly.
  • Be on the lookout for “super users” – employees that are passionate about learning and are embracing the change. Develop a plan to share their enthusiasm and knowledge to help others throughout the onboarding process.
  • To drive user adoption at the individual level, set goals for everyone involved, not just the company.
  • When unexpected challenges come up, leaders should show their concern and proactive interest in finding a solution.

Manage Expectations

When employees meet with inevitable challenges throughout the project, they need to feel that they are understood and their needs are being given priority. Help them along the way through:

  • Maintaining clear communication. Project updates should be honest and informative to help users feel included in the entire process.
  • Employees should not be expected to maintain their full-time job responsibilities in addition to planning, testing, and training. Put plans in place to offset workloads and give employees the time they need to fully focus on their implementation assignments.
  • A CRM implementation project can be stressful for many of the individuals involved. Patience and tolerance for missed deadlines or mistakes will go a long way in supporting user adoption.

Train Effectively

Your new system will be of no benefit if your employees can’t use it properly. Take these steps to ensure proper training:

  • Provide an overview walkthrough before training to help users understand the big picture so they can understand how their role contributes to the process.
  • Demonstrate how the new system will benefit them specifically and how their effective use of the application will make their work more productive and fulfilling.
  • Make training sessions specific to your organization. For example, use industry-specific terminology instead of generic examples that are included in vendor training data.
  • Support learners of all kinds by providing a variety of training options, from one-on-one, group, or video training sessions.

Every CRM project will have its challenges. But by taking the appropriate steps, you can ensure the success of user adoption throughout your company- making the project smoother, quicker, and ultimately a success.

To hear from experts in the field and learn more steps you can take to make a success of user adoption in your company, download the full white paper “19 Brilliant Ways to Promote ERP & CRM User Adoption” at www.crmsoftwareblog.com/19brilliant.

Looking for a Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM Partner? Browse our Microsoft Dynamics 365 Partner Directory.

By CRM Software Blog writer

xUser Adoption Web Banners CRM Cloud Blog Blog Post 625x90 2.png.pagespeed.ic.iAmhJ5EgMk Pro Tips to Streamline User Adoption For Your CRM Project

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Alphabet’s Project Amber uses AI to try to diagnose depression from brain waves

November 3, 2020   Big Data

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X, Alphabet’s experimental R&D lab, today detailed Project Amber, a now-disbanded project which aimed to make brain waves as easy to interpret as blood glucose. The goal was to develop objective measurements of depression and anxiety that could be used to support diagnoses, treatment, and therapies.

An estimated 17.3 million adults in the U.S. have had at least one major depressive episode, according to the U.S. National Institutes of Health. Moreover, the percentage of adults in the U.S. experiencing serious thoughts of suicide increased 0.15% from 2016-2017 to 2017-2018 — 460,000 more people than last year’s dataset. But with 1,000 possible symptom combinations, depression manifests differently in different people. Today’s assessments mostly rely on conversations with clinicians or surveys like the PHQ-9 or GAD-7.

The Amber team sought to marry machine learning techniques with electroencephalography (EEG) to measure telling electrical activity in the brain. Inspiration arose from the observation that game-like tasks can be used to gauge processing within the brain’s reward system. Brain response following a win in a game is subdued in people who are depressed, compared with those who are not.

X isn’t the first to apply machine learning algorithms to EEG readings. In a paper published last April, IBM researchers claimed to have developed an algorithm that could classify seizures with upwards of 98.4% accuracy. Indeed, EEGs have been widely used to study swallowing, classify mental states, and diagnose neuropsychiatric disorders such as neurogenic pain and epilepsy, as well as to classify emotions.

 Alphabet’s Project Amber uses AI to try to diagnose depression from brain waves

It took three years for the Amber team to create a low-cost, portable, research-grade system designed to make it easier to collect EEG data. The headset slips on like a swim cap and takes around three minutes to configure, using three sensors along the midline at Fz, Cz, and Pz (key channels, or electrodes, for assessments of reward and cognitive functions). It features an accompanying bioamp that can support up to 32 channels, which can be used to collect resting state EEG and event-related potentials with software that time-locks a task to the EEG measurement.

Beyond the headset, the Amber team explored how new approaches in machine learning could be used to reduce unwanted noise in EEG recordings. Collaborating with Alphabet’s deep learning research lab DeepMind, they adapted methods from unsupervised representation learning, demonstrating that approaches like autoencoders could be tapped to denoise EEG signals without a human in the loop. (Autoencoders learn representations for sets of data by ignoring noise.) In addition, the Amber team offered a proof of concept that it’s possible to extract features relevant to mental health that could be used to predict clinical labels like major depressive disorder and generalized anxiety disorder based on an interview by a mental health expert. Unlike previous studies, the Amber team claimed they were able to do this for an individual participant rather than a group.

“The methods were capable of recovering usable signal representations from single EEG trials,” X head Obi Felten explained in a blog post. “This means that it may be possible to derive clinically useful information from brain electrophysiology with far fewer data samples than what is traditionally used in research labs, which often rely on hundreds of experimental trials.”

 Alphabet’s Project Amber uses AI to try to diagnose depression from brain waves

The Amber team was ultimately unsuccessful in finding a single biomarker for depression and anxiety. However, despite their setbacks, they’ve released the hardware designs, visualizer, and stimulus tools they developed in open source on GitHub. As of this morning, the headset and software is available with the results of a study conducted with Florida State University. In addition, the Amber team is making a pledge not to assert its patents on Amber’s hardware and donating 50 unused EEG headsets to Sapien Labs, which runs the Human Brain Diversity Project supporting EEG research in low-income countries and with underrepresented groups.

“We hope that open-sourcing our EEG system and publishing our machine learning techniques will be of value not just to EEG experts, but also to the wider mental health research community who were perhaps put off by the complexity and cost of working with EEG before,” Felten wrote. “There are many pitfalls on the path to making tech-enabled mental health measurement work in the real world, and more research needs to be done … Addressing today’s challenges will require new partnerships between scientists, clinicians, technologists, policymakers, and individuals with lived experience.”


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Tooning out the Lincoln Project

July 25, 2020   Humor

Stephen Colbert’s “Tooning Out the News” interviewed Rick Wilson from the Lincoln Project, makers of viral anti-Trump ads. I have to admit that as I watched this, I was alternately laughing, cringing, and shaking my head in disgust.

So what do you think? Is the Lincoln Project made up of good guys who are saving us from Donald Trump? Alternatively, are they actually comparatively responsible for the horror that is Trump, and are just trying to save their own skins (and will be back to their old tricks once Trump is gone)? Or are they merely amoral grifters who realized that there was lots of money to be made? Or all of the above?

 If you liked this, you might also like these related posts:
  1. Fauci v. Trump
  2. Trump’s Wall of Death
  3. You Know Their Names
  4. Dysfunctional Trumps
  5. 9/11 GOP NC

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Project Manager Benefits – 5 Things

May 27, 2020   Microsoft Dynamics CRM

Save Thousands of Dollars by Bringing on a Project Manager

Some may say paying to have a Project Manager is too costly, but I will be discussing 5 benefits of having a Project Manager to help manage your further project and how the benefits outweigh the cost.

5 Advantages of a Project Manager

Know What You Are Paying For and Save Thousands

Down below are some benefits that Project manager brings to a project:

1) Scheduling: our project managers have access to their entire teams’ schedules and can coordinate and schedule meetings as needed. By having this to coordinate with multiple parties it saves lots of time. When trying to coordinate with multiple parties, days or weeks can go by before a time is locked in. For you having to be the scheduler for meetings, the project manager can split that time in half.

2) Budget: amongst many of project managers main jobs is to monitor and hold the project team to stay within the budget for that specific project. With having to deal with project architects and developers, as much as they try to stay under budget, more often than not they go over budget because it’s not their main job to worry about the budget but to do their jobs. Having a Project Manager to help monitor that budget will help your team prioritize and maximize their time  so they don’t waste time. On projects without a project manager, teams often find going over budget as they don’t monitor the hours because of times spent on tasks.

3) Scope: one of many other key aspects to a project managers job is to monitor and manage the scope of the project. While working on projects it can be super easy to fall into a process where developers and other leads allow scope creep and modifications to the project that are outside of the scope. This leads to an additional budget that was not expected, and timelines that are longer than anticipated. The project manager can help make sure that scope creep will not  affect major deadlines and priorities.

4) Risks & Issues: a major reason many like to have a project manager on their projects is to help deal with any potential risks and or issues that could come up. Having someone or something that can assess those risks, what they may do or cost to the project and help identify the best way to assess those risks is a key factor to project success. A project manager helps manage those risks so they don’t affect your deadlines. Many times these risks postpone deadlines because there isn’t one resource dedicated to tackling these obstacles.

5) Efficiency & Direction: project managers directly work with the project team to assess tasks, and ensure that those tasks are taking the project down the right road. Most times without a project manager, tasks are identified too early or aren’t relevant for the immediate needs of the project. With project managers this efficiency can be avoided.

xProject Manager 625x415.jpg.pagespeed.ic.BeyrlZZEe  Project Manager Benefits – 5 Things

As you can see all 5 of these key points are beneficial to having a project manager. More often than not the time project manager cost is added into a quote and contract so you know what you are paying for. Although having to pay for a project manager is another cost for a project, you will save thousands of dollars by bringing on a project manager to help use your time and budget efficiently.

As a Microsoft US Partner of the Year and Inc. Magazine’s Best Places to Work winner, JourneyTEAM helps your organization with the right guidance and technologies for you. Contact us.


Article by: Dave Bollard – Head of Marketing | 801-436-6636

JourneyTEAM is an award-winning consulting firm with proven technology and measurable results. They take Microsoft products; Dynamics 365, SharePoint intranet, Office 365, Azure, CRM, GP, NAV, SL, AX, and modify them to work for you. The team has expert level, Microsoft Gold certified consultants that dive deep into the dynamics of your organization and solve complex issues. They have solutions for sales, marketing, productivity, collaboration, analytics, accounting, security and more. www.journeyteam.com

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Don’t Let the COVID-19 Economy Stop Important Initiatives: Here Are 3 Reasons to Get Started with Your CRM Software Project Now

April 22, 2020   Microsoft Dynamics CRM

Worried About the COVID-19 Economy? Here Are 3 Reasons to Get Started with Your CRM Software Project Now

With skyrocketing unemployment, $ 2 trillion (and counting) added to the national debt, and analysts predicting a global recession, businesses are understandably hesitant to take on new projects. But believe it or not, the current economic conditions are actually the ideal time to move forward with your organization’s CRM software project. Here are 3 reasons why from the experts at AKA.

1. Bull Markets and CRM Software Projects Don’t Always Mix

There’s no question that companies have had easy access to capital over the past decade — and in some ways, that’s made it easy to launch new CRM software projects. But a booming economy doesn’t necessarily lend itself to revamping your CRM software.

At AKA Enterprise Solutions, we focus on meeting our customers’ implementation needs. This often means sticking to urgent timelines, which are common in a booming economy. Companies often take on too many projects because of the amount of capital on hand, and then try to rush the projects along at the last minute by sinking more resources into them. But this can result in a lack of testing, which often leads to problems down the road.

A booming economy also means higher turnover of your company’s best talent, as competitors are able to extend attractive job offers. This organizational “brain drain” can lead to a lack of accountability for large CRM projects.

The bottom line: When your business isn’t running at 100% capacity to meet surging customer demand, you have more time to devote to a new CRM software project. This means better results and fewer errors.

2. Customer Relationship Management is Key for Thriving in a Shrinking Economy

During the last recession, AKA helped a number of businesses transform the way they processed their customer data by implementing new and up to date CRM software solutions. As a result, these businesses were able to better serve their loyal customers and take advantage of existing customer data — both of which helped them stay afloat in a shrinking economy.

Even in the best of economic circumstances, keeping existing customers is more cost efficient than attracting new ones. A recent article in the Harvard Business Review quantifies this fact, concluding that “loyalty leaders” manage to grow their revenue at 2.5x the rate of industry competitors. This is even more true during a recession, which is why it’s so important to make sure that you’re utilizing your existing customer data as effectively as possible.

The bottom line: Investing in a better CRM solution means improved customer data utilization, higher customer lifetime value, and better business performance during difficult economic times.

3. Digital Transformation Is No Longer Optional

Businesses across the country have suddenly found themselves faced with an enormous challenge: getting their employees set up to work remotely. For organizations without a robust digital strategy, this has been a difficult feat to accomplish.

The takeaway here is clear: if your business isn’t fully digitized, there’s never been a better time to undergo a full digital transformation. And if your organization is struggling, don’t despair. There’s still time to build a solution that enables your employees to work remotely.

The bottom line: In the face of COVID-19, businesses need remote access to customer data. Even after the current crisis subsides, this need will only continue to grow. A cloud-based CRM solution is the answer.

Next Steps for Your CRM Software Project 

Does your organization need to expand an existing CRM system? Are you considering transitioning to a new platform, or are you just getting started on your CRM journey? Whatever the case may be, now is an excellent time to get started with a new CRM software project.

Trying to decide which CRM solution is right for your business? Take a look at this blog, The Top 7 Reasons Companies Choose Microsoft Dynamics CRM Over Salesforce.com, to learn why Dynamics 365 is the perfect choice for organizations across a range of industries.

Ready to take the next step with your business’s new CRM solution? Contact the experts at AKA to find out how we can help.


ABOUT AKA ENTERPRISE SOLUTIONS
AKA specializes in making it easier to do business, simplifying processes and reducing risks. With agility, expertise, and original industry solutions, we embrace projects other technology firms avoid—regardless of their complexity. As a true strategic partner, we help organizations slay the dragons that are keeping them from innovating their way to greatness. Call us at 212-502-3900!


Article by: Matthew Case | 212-502-3900

Matthew Case has worked with CRM for 9 years and with Microsoft Dynamics since CRM 2011. Specializing in CRM architecture, interface design, user adoption, and change management, he is driven by the desire to help users find ways to easier, more efficient work through software innovation.

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Folding@home crowdsourced computing project passes 1 million downloads amid coronavirus research

March 31, 2020   Big Data

Folding@home software for donating compute for medical research passed 1 million downloads, director Greg Bowman said in a tweet today. The Folding@home Consortium is made up of 11 laboratories around the world studying the molecular structure of diseases like cancer, ALS, and influenza. Research into COVID-19 started earlier this month. The crowdsourced effort is now powered by hundreds of thousands of Nvidia GPUs and tens of thousands of AMD GPUs.

There are now over 1M devices running @foldingathome ! This includes over 356K @nvidia GPUs, over 79K @AMD GPUs, and over 593K CPUs! Thanks to all our volunteers! We’re planning more blog posts on our #COVID19 work/results this week, please stay tuned.

— Greg Bowman (@drGregBowman) March 30, 2020

According to an Nvidia blog post about the milestone, nearly 400,000 gamers donated GPUs to the effort in recent days.

Last week, Folding@home said it crossed the one exaflop in compute power milestone, or collectively larger than any supercomputer ever assembled. By comparison, the Summit supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee has repeatedly ranked first in Top500 supercomputing ranks and is able to muster 148 petaflops of compute power.

The compute is being used to simulate “potentially druggable protein targets” and understand how the virus that causes COVID-19 interacts with the ACE2 receptor, according to the Folding@home website.

 Folding@home crowdsourced computing project passes 1 million downloads amid coronavirus research

“While we will rapidly release the simulation datasets for others to use or analyze, we aim to look for alternative conformations and hidden pockets within the most promising drug targets, which can only be seen in simulation and not in static X-ray structures,” organizer John Chodera said in a March 10 blog post to launch a series of protein folding projects into production.

In another recent initiative at the intersection of gaming and medical research, earlier this month the University of Washington introduced FoldIt, a puzzle to solve protein folding challenges. In work at the intersection of protein folding and AI, Google’s DeepMind released predictions of understudied proteins associated with SARS-CoV-2 generated by the latest version of AlphaFold.

A number of open source projects are underway to accelerate progress toward a cure. Cloud computing providers in China like Alibaba, Baidu, and Tencent, as well as AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure in the U.S. are also lending compute to researchers. The CORD-19 data set is made up of tens of thousands of scholarly works and was made available last week for both medical and NLP researchers by a group including Microsoft Research, the Allen AI Institute, and the White House.

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IBM is bringing Project Debater to Watson

March 11, 2020   Big Data

IBM today announced plans to integrate Project Debater into Watson Group products like Watson NLP, Watson Knowledge Studio, and Watson Discovery later this year. This is the first commercialization of Project Debater since IBM Research introduced the AI capable of maintaining debate with human champions in June 2018.

In its first match, which took place for an audience of reporters and investors at offices in San Francisco, Project Debater argued against Israel International Debate Society president Dan Zafrir and 2016 national Israeli debate champion Noa Ovadia.

Work started on Debater six years ago, but the system only gained the ability to spar with humans about four years ago, Noam Slonim, IBM Research principal investigator and creator of Project Debater, told VentureBeat. Project Debater is trained on millions of news articles and other content.

The second debate about whether governments should subsidize preschool took place about a year ago against 2016 World Debating Championship Harish Natarajan for an episode of popular debate podcast Intelligence Squared.

In IBM Watson products, Debater will power Watson sentiment analysis, summarization, and clustering topics found in language.

 IBM is bringing Project Debater to Watson

“Those are, I’d say, three core capabilities that enable Debater to do what it can do, because you can’t really form an argument or form a debate if you can’t cluster topics, if you can’t summarize what you’ve heard, and you can’t do sentiment analysis,” IBM Data and AI general manager Rob Thomas told VentureBeat in an interview.

Project Debater’s demonstrated ability to hear arguments and then generate counterarguments will not be part of the release.

Like Watson’s evolution from a 2011 Jeopardy! champion to a commercial product, involving Project Debater in sales comes with risk. After the IBM Watson Group was formed — and as AI has mounted a resurgence in popularity in recent years — the business unit developed a reputation as a marketing machine that sold Watson AI as capable of virtually anything, from Jeopardy! and enterprise applications to fighting cancer and helping you do your taxes.

“So we’ve gotten more precise in how we do that,” Thomas said. “And so, the tools I talked about, all those tools are branded Watson so far as Watson Studio, Watson Machine Learning, Watson Open Scale, Watson Knowledge Catalog — those are all organic and built in collaboration, typically with IBM Research. I’d say that’s kind of the overarching branding strategy.”

IBM shared no specific date for when it plans to integrate Project Debater into its Watson product suite.

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an anti-innocence project: collect world leaders’ DNA for auction

February 20, 2020   Humor
 an anti innocence project: collect world leaders DNA for auction

Algernon: I keep science for Life. And, speaking of the science of Life, have you got the cucumber sandwiches cut for Lady Bracknell? (The Importance of Being Earnest)

Stunt for stunt. In the age of Trump the price of revealing the origin of DNA could be set at $ 130,000 an event.

If you had Donald Trump’s DNA, what would you do with it?

The idea isn’t as outlandish as it may seem: An anonymous organization called the Earnest Project is offering the chance to own DNA samples of a handful of world leaders and celebrities. The group claims it has surreptitiously collected items discarded by attendees of the 2018 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, that may contain their DNA. President Trump, French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and Elton John all attended the conference.

Now that genetic testing is getting cheaper and companies are developing hand-held DNA sequencing devices, it’s no longer a far-off possibility that someone could take your DNA, get it analyzed, and use it against you for blackmail, extortion, or discrimination.

onezero.medium.com/…

 an anti innocence project: collect world leaders DNA for auction

x

Trump’s DNA Is Reportedly For Sale. Here’s What Someone Could Do With It. https://t.co/c4cOTMuLSU

Artist/pranksters (?) The Earnest Project claim they recovered world leaders’ DNA from discarded coffee cups, dining implements, cigarette butts, napkins, etc at Davos.

1/

— Bernie Beats Trump (@doctorow) February 18, 2020

They allege they now possess waste with the DNA of various powerful people and are offering them for sale in something called “The Davos Collection” ($ 1200-$ 3000 for a hair, wine glass $ 65k, etc.
2/ 

They say they were planning on auctioning the collection on Feb 20, but postponed due to unspecificed legal issues.
US genetic privacy law is narrow and largely toothless, meaning that if the collection is real, it’s probably legal to sell.
3/ 

The samples could reveal paternity of secret children, susceptibility to some diseases, etc. Much of the potential risk of genomic leakage (things like “intelligence genes” or claims about racial identity) are bullshit promoted by the genomics-for-profit industry.
4/ 

But for the real risks, there’s the additional problems that accrue to any biometric leakage, which is that you can’t change your biometrics. If your genome ends up leaked all over the internet, you can’t get a new genome to replace it. If you think password leaks are bad…
5/ 

It’s been 12 years since CCC members published German interior minister Wolfgang Schauble’s fingerprints, lifted from a water-glass at a panel — Schauble was a prominent advocate of a national biometric identity scheme.
wired.com/2008/03/hacker…
6/ 

3 years ago, Martin Shkreli went to jail for calling on his followers to steal hair from Hillary Clinton’s head, with vague threats to do something with her genome.
7/ 

Presumably he planned to subject it to modern phrenology to announce that she was a mere 3% Viking or could not attain an IQ over 75.
nytimes.com/2017/09/13/bus…
8/ 

The prank/stunt does open a fascinating dialog about what comes next. Will this stampede the wealthy and powerful into passing meaningful genomic privacy laws? Ill-considered ones? Or just legal precedents that say the rich can sue to protect their genomes but the rest can’t?

Cloning a Trump might eventually be possible, but who would want one.

 an anti innocence project: collect world leaders DNA for auction

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Starting A Digital Transformation Project

January 31, 2020   SAP
 Starting A Digital Transformation Project

It seems like no day goes by without me hearing the word “transformation” tossed around, usually with the prefix “digital.” At a deep level, I think everyone knows and understands that transformation of any kind is not only difficult but, in most cases, has an extremely low probability of success.

The term digital transformation is a misnomer that has quite a lot of people confused. It is first and foremost transformation enabled by digital technologies. But people confuse this by making “digital” the operating word rather than “transformation.” This is probably where most of the trouble starts with all digital transformation projects.

And yet, everyone talks about digital transformation as if they are pretty sure that their project will not only see the light of the day but also be very successful.

In the past, people used terms like “innovation” and “disruption” so much and in so many different contexts with so many meanings that they lost relevance. It looks like digital transformation is going the same way.

Acceptance

I believe that to have even a shot at success, all {digital} transformation projects need to start from accepting the current reality or state of affairs. And true acceptance can only happen if we own the role that we have played in creating and shaping the current reality.

The questions that need to be answered at this stage are:

  • What is our current reality?
  • What was our role in creating this?
  • Are we happy with this reality?

If we are happy with our reality, there is nothing much to do except to continue doing what we have been doing. No transformation is needed. You can’t force-fit this onto a set of people who are happy with their reality.

If we are unhappy with our reality, the question then is: Does it hurt? And how much does it hurt? Does it hurt enough for the people to want to change? Change is difficult in and of itself, and it becomes a lot more difficult if it is done without wanting to change.

Vision

Once we decide that the current reality is hurting us enough and that we want to do something about it, we need to come up with a vision of what the future looks like. This is where taking on a leapfrog challenge would be a good start.

Leapfrog challenges, according to Porus Munshi, are challenges that force you to rethink the way you do things. This is your aspiration. The bigger and bolder the aspiration, the more you are talking about transformation.

A good example of digital transformation was the onset of ATM machines. They fundamentally changed how we interacted with banks. The same is happening now with peer-to-peer lending and the revolution that fintech firms are bringing.

The goal of any transformation project is to reimagine work, not to do the same thing faster or cheaper or better. There is a place for doing that; these projects are called continuous improvement projects.

Even if we are trying to make things better, faster, and cheaper, we need to look at the scale of impact. In his book Making Breakthrough Innovations Happen, Porus says it is better to take on 10x challenges rather than 20% or 30% challenges. When you are trying to do 20%, 30%, or even 40% improvement, you tend to do more of the same: work harder, reach out to more people, get more efficient, increase your sales conversion ratio, etc.

However, the moment you are attempting a 10x improvement, you know right away that doing more of the same is not going to help. You are forced to think differently, explore newer ways of working. You tend to look for completely new opportunities; you get permission to challenge the assumptions that the entire business or even industry is operating in, Therein lies the true opportunity to transform.

Alignment

Then comes the need to share this vision and get the teams rallying around the vision. This is not going to be easy. By definition, a 10x improvement project will sound too difficult. It will look improbable.

This will bring out all kinds of excuses from the team:

  • This is just impossible
  • No one has ever done this
  • We don’t have the ability or the talent to do this
  • We don’t have the budget for this
  • Our partners will not agree
  • Our margins don’t support this
  • And many more

This should tell you, the leader, that you are on the right path. If you don’t get these kinds of responses, it means that you haven’t aimed high enough.

However, it is now your responsibility to get the teams aligned and agree to the vision you want to aim for. Two ways to do this are:

  • Burning platform scenario: Show the team the grim reality of the present course of action and what that means for all. Make them feel the pain the team will have to endure if everything remains as-is, then show them that the only option is to burn your ships and march forward toward the new reality. The idea is to scare them enough about the current course that everyone wants to change and move toward the new vision.
  • Garden of Eden scenario: Talk about all the great things that the new reality can bring. This is when you motivate the team with a vision that is so much better than their current reality that there is no doubt in everyone’s minds that the new reality is where their future lies. This is all about enticing them with the gifts that the new vision will bring them, once realized.

It’s easier to use the burning platform, as humans typically react much stronger to negative than positive emotions. However, leaders need to be careful about which strategy to use, as people are not dumb and can easily see through any kind of deception. So, if you are not on a burning platform, don’t use one, or find a way to create one that all can agree with, then use it to kickstart your transformation project.

In conclusion

Two of the most important success criteria of a transformation project – digital or otherwise – are the scale of transformation you’re aiming for and getting buy-in from the people who will be working on the project. These are necessary (but not sufficient) conditions for any transformation project to become successful.

Strong execution is another necessary (but not sufficient) condition for successful transformation projects. I will talk about execution in a future post.

Want To Transform Your Business? Transform Your People

This post first appeared on Musings of a Neo-Generalist and has been republished here with permission.

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GitHub now uses AI to recommend open issues in project repositories

January 22, 2020   Big Data

Large open source projects on GitHub have intimidatingly long lists of problems that require addressing. To make it easier to spot the most pressing, GitHub recently introduced the “good first issues” feature, which matches contributors with issues that are likely to fit their interests. The initial version, which launched in May 2019, surfaced recommendations based on labels applied to issues by project maintainers. But an updated release shipped last month incorporates an AI algorithm that GitHub claims surfaces issues in about 70% of repositories recommended to users.

GitHub notes that it’s the first deep-learning-enabled product to launch on Github.com.

According to GitHub senior machine learning engineer Tiferet Gazit, GitHub last year conducted an analysis and manual curation to create a list of 300 label names used by popular open source repositories. (All were synonyms for either “good first issue” or “documentation,” like “beginner friendly,” “easy bug fix,” and “low-hanging-fruit.”) But relying on these meant that only about 40% of the recommended repositories had issues that could be surfaced. Plus, it left project maintainers with the burden of triaging and labeling issues themselves.

The new AI recommender system is largely automatic, by contrast. But building it required crafting an annotated training set of hundreds of thousands of samples.

 GitHub now uses AI to recommend open issues in project repositories

GitHub began with issues that had any of the roughly 300 labels in the curated list, which it supplemented with a few sets of issues that were also likely to be beginner-friendly. (This included those that were closed by a user who had never previously contributed to the repository, as well as issues closed that touched only a few lines of code in a single file.) After detecting and removing near-duplicate issues, several training, validation, and test sets were separated across repositories to prevent data leakage from similar content, and GitHub trained the AI system using only preprocessed and denoised issue titles and bodies to ensure it detected good issues as soon as they’re opened.

In production, each issue for which the AI algorithm predicts a probability above the required threshold is slated for recommendation, with a confidence score equal to its predicted probability. Open issues from non-archived public repositories that have at least one of the labels from the curated label list are given a confidence score based on the relevance of their labels, with synonyms of “good first issue” awarded higher confidence than synonyms of “documentation.” At the repository level, all detected issues are ranked primarily based on their confidence score (though label-based detections are generally given higher confidence than ML-based detections), along with a penalty on issue age.

Data acquisition, training, and inference pipelines run daily, according to Gazit, using scheduled workflows to ensure the results remain “fresh” and “relevant.” In the future, GitHub intends to add better signals to its repository recommendations and a mechanism for maintainers and triagers to approve or remove AI-based recommendations in their repositories. And it plans to extend issue recommendations to offer personalized suggestions on next issues to tackle for anyone who has already made contributions to a project.

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Big Data – VentureBeat

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