Joanne Molesky

Joanne Molesky is a Principal Consultant with ThoughtWorks, where she works on internal IT Risk and Compliance, and provides consulting services to clients in the area of continuous delivery and process improvement, particularly as it applies to controls, risk, and compliance. She holds CISA and CRISC certifications from ISACA.

4 significant ways to improve your ability to innovate

Liberate teams from the annual budget cycle.

scaffolding

The use of the traditional annual fiscal cycle to determine resource allocation encourages a culture that thwarts our ability to experiment and innovate. It perpetuates spending on wasteful activities and ideas that are unlikely to deliver value. How can we get out of the rut that is the annual budget process and encourage experimentation and innovation within our organization?

When it comes to budgets, It is hard to let go of the long-held belief that strong, centralized control provides valuable efficiencies. However well it may have served us in an era of lower complexity and slower technical advances, it now creates barriers that prevent us from adapting quickly to emerging opportunities. In this context, the resources and efforts required to gather information, communicate, and monitor rigid centralized processes outweigh any efficiencies gained. As well, a strongly controlled centralized budget process encourages competitive, rather than collaborative, internal behavior. This is counter-productive to innovation, which requires teamwork and collaboration across the organization.

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