July 20, 2011

Playing Position Ball in IT

Not including my childhood playing with computers both at home as well as at my father's company (my dad had a tech company in the 70's and 80's), I have been working in IT for over 25 years now. I've been President of DPCI for over 12 years, and have had the opportunity to help a great many companies reach their goals around content technology strategy and implementations.

Along the way, I spent a great deal of personal time studying and writing operational protocols for IT project management, functional analysis, and software development management. Quite a few of DPCI's customers have hired me to help them improve their internal operational protocols as well as the way their IT resources are organized.

In recent years, customers have started asking me how they measure up to similar companies in their capabilities around IT. First off, the executives that ask that question in the first place are, to me, head and shoulders above their peers. They're really concerned about whether they're doing the right things in terms of the kinds of resources they have staffed, how those resources work together, how they gather requirements, manage projects, control quality, scope, costs, schedules, 'expectations' and so forth. I decided that as a service to those customers -- and to anyone who might be reading my blog -- over the next few months I'd write my thoughts about what makes for optimal IT operations at any organization.

Observation #1: IT-optimized organizations play position ball.

I was watching my kids the other day playing soccer with their friends in the backyard. I noticed how they were all running around after the ball in a herd. Only the goalies seemed to know to stay in their position. Thus, the kids were all getting exhausted much more quickly and there didn't seem to be much scoring going on.

As an experiment, I had my younger daughter focused on staying closer to the opponent's goal (yes I know that is offsides, she'll learn about that when she's a bit older). Within minutes, she scored, then she scored again.

It dawned on me that one characteristic of well organized IT departments is that there are differentiated roles. Each participant in the organization understands what is expected of him or her, what their inputs are, what work they need to do and what outputs to create. They also understand who they rely on within the organization, what THOSE people's responsibilities are, and what work products that those resources will create and when in time they will do so.

As an example, I was hired by one company in 2010 to help them with their IT operational difficulties and to get to the root cause of why their IT initiatives kept failing more often than not. Whenever any decisions had to be made, they'd call everyone in a room and just talk, but it was unclear who was responsible for documenting the decisions, or how the work effort and tasks would be divvied up. In fact, most of the decisions were happening on phone calls between two people, without input from other stakeholders. The result was a lot of arguments as well as the need to continually redo work. As anyone knows, that is not a scalable approach to IT.

The other challenge this company had was that nobody understood what level of effort was required for other people in their organization to accomplish anything. Thus, it was just assumed that the 'IT guys' could continually get assigned anything from setting up a mail server to implementing a CRM, an accounting database, a new content management system, and so on. There was this culture where the business people disrespected the tech guys like they were lazy and unfocused, while the tech guys felt put upon in a very intense, everything-is-on-deadline culture from the business.

The first thing I did with this company was to work with them to get IT to start to understand the critical roles (positions) within the organization -- both those that current staff were fulfilling as well as those roles that were vacant at the company. For instance, there weren't any functional or business analysts on staff, nor were there any project managers. Of course requirements weren't being done properly and projects weren't being managed - at all!

I also went over some basic IT operational principles with the company, and within a very short time, the climate became much more collegial. The best part -- they actually started being successful on several of their initiatives.

Naturally just 'playing position ball' in IT isn't the panacea for all ills. However, I have found in the example above and many others that just tackling this simple organizational challenge has helped organizations become much more effective in delivering optimal results in IT.

Posted at 03:31 pm by Joseph Bachana

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