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IDC analysis: Key business productivity trends for 2024 and beyond

From Team '23

Tempo Team

Key Takeaways

The latest analysis from IDC on automation, AI, and how businesses are adapting

We teamed up with IDC to bring you the latest analysis on keeping your teams working as productive as they can alongside emerging AI adoption and supply chain challenges.

While our circumstances and technology change, the fundamental question always stays the same: How do we as business leaders stay competitive and keep our staff happy and working as effectively as possible? 

According to IDC's June 2024 Future Enterprise Resiliency and Spending Survey, staffing concerns are the top risk factor for technologies and budgets over the next 12 months.

To address that, companies have to work to ensure existing staff are kept around. It’s also crucial that those employees are putting their efforts in the right places – not burning away their morale, time, and energy on irrelevant projects.

The solution? IDC observes that many companies are finding ways to do more with existing resources instead of expanding their staff – turning to new working practices and technologies to better understand where resources are focused.

Combine that with opportunities with generative AI to take work automation data and help make it more useful – then companies have a lot of ways to take full advantage of emerging work practices to do more with less.

This blog is an overview of the analysis from IDC’s Optimizing Business Agility with Adaptive Planning and Effective Prioritizationsponsored by Tempo and released in October 2024.

Here is a detailed overview of the IDC’s latest findings on how businesses are adapting and evolving their processes as we head into 2025. 

Key issues and how to solve them

Lack of automation is seen as a core barrier to smooth project execution, along with poor use and adoption of existing tools. 

Modern organizations remain focused on project and portfolio management (PPO) to deliver at scale. No-one needs to be told that it is important to incorporate automation into your team's processes smoothly – but price and useability has slowed down adoption considerably.

So how are companies bringing in automation? Collaborative work management (CWM), project management tools, data analytics, and AI and GenAI assistants are receiving most of the attention. 

These can help analyze your existing data to generate patterns and insights on your team's working trends that would have been impossible before without a full team of analysts.

From there, you can use that data to make more informed decisions on what projects were effective, where time should be spent, and to understand how your team works best.

More areas of investment

According to IDC’s March 2024 Future Enterprise Resiliency and Spending Survey, the most impactful areas of investment for improving your team’s productivity include  intelligent digital workspaces (IDWs) to get access to people, tools, and data.

Additionally, the report recommends investing in collaboration and communication tools, workplace modernization, and space management for hybrid, flexible work. After all – remote work isn’t going anywhere but it does require investment to keep working well, just like any office space would.

IDC sees increasing adoption of value stream management (VSM) and value-centric planning. In 2024, 74.6% of organizations were expanding, using, or piloting the use of VSM, a 23% increase over the prior year.*

For a quick breakdown – VSM is a series of business practices designed to help re-organize workflows to bring maximum value to customers at every stage of our processes. 

VSM looks across steps in the software delivery process from idea to production as a value stream. VSM follows value progression, identifying silos, bottlenecks, and other inefficiencies in value flow as it moves toward delivery.

With companies reporting strong interest in doing more with existing resources, this serves as an indicator that resource constraints and volatility are becoming more impactful

Other key advantages the IDC survey found include scaling DevOps, tracking efficiency trends and the software development life cycle, and better mapping to business strategy.

Considerations

Humans change existing process approaches and workflow with great reluctance; one of the biggest barriers to the adoption of agile planning and work automation is rigidity and getting people to transition to consistent use.

Process change is challenging and needs support: Mentoring, pilot teams with committed leaders, a successful transition to more systemic adoption of automation, and agile planning processes. 

External support can help too, provided it leads to the independent evolution of the organization.

A crowded market for PPM and collaborative work management makes it challenging to parse the differences. Teams using more than one product must have effective integration strategies.

There is a lot of understanding and work that needs to be done before we can fully grasp the potential of work automation and agile planning. AI, machine learning, and Gen AI also require governance to tackle compliance, technical, and ethical concerns moving ahead.

Conclusion

To take full advantage of collaborative work automation and agile planning, organizations should do the following:

  • Assess existing workflow and processes, staff’s readiness to shift, and current use of automation tools for planning and collaboration as well as portfolio gaps.

  • Evaluate alternatives for automation, considering usability, strategic planning needs, resource management, process, program and portfolio management, and judicious incorporation of AI/GenAI and ML with effective AI governance models.

  • Partner effectively to transition to adaptive, value-centric, and agile planning processes in conjunction with core existing applications to enable automation and systemic adoption as well as to drive business innovation.

Many thanks to IDC for their invaluable analysis and data in compiling these reports. If you are one of those companies on the journey of using tools to improve your workflows – why not check out what Tempo can offer for project portfolio management?

Structure PPM takes the guesswork out of execution in Jira with a flexible project and program management solution that provides teams with unlimited ways to manage issues, track progress. From there, you can understand and report on work across multiple projects, product lines, and initiatives.

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*(see DevOps Practices, Perceptions, and Tooling Survey, 2024: Automation, Observability, GenAI, and Purchasing Trends, IDC #US52321924, June 2024).

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