When you need IT advice

September 25, 2012

When you ask for advice from an IT specialist, often the response is too technical, too closely tied to a commercial product, or simply off the mark because the underlying problems are management problems.  Who can you turn to for useful and practical advice?

What kind of technology advice do you need?

As a manager or executive you may have a variety of questions about “technology.”  Here is one way to classify those questions:

1. Pure technical analysis – what’s possible, what does it cost?

You already have a clear idea of the functions or capabilities you need.  But now you need to know what technologies can be used to get those functions, and what they are likely to cost.   An IT specialist with experience in building those functions can elaborate the technologies and give you a roadmap for building what you want.

If the specialist also has enough experience, you can get a fairly accurate estimate of how much it will cost – if things go well.  But always be prepared for bumps in the road.  Many time, due to evolving technologies, unforeseen glitches due to incompatibilities, and changing requirements, the costs will go up – even as much as doubling the initial estimates.

The best countermeasure to escalating costs is to define incremental delivery of the features.  Ask for demonstrations and delivery of working systems every few months, so that you can personally verify that things are on track – and that you’re getting what you want.

 

2. Help in selecting between competing alternatives – evaluating vendors and their products/services

When the times comes to select a vendor or to choose a team for building the capabilities you want, ask for help from someone who has done it before.  In other words, make sure the advice you get is from someone experienced in the particular functions and capabilities you’re asking for.

Be sure that your advisor is not “married” to a particular vendor.  Of course, this eliminates the sales representatives of the vendors from being the advice-givers you need.  Even your own IT staff may have prejudices based on their own history and experience with particular vendors’ products.  You may want to find a consultant who knows the field and can give you accurate information without being involved in the sale of a product.

Evaluating vendors also includes business aspects.  You need to know that the vendor will survive to support the product, has the infrastructure needed to provide what you need, and is willing to commit to meeting your service standards, whatever they may be.

 

3. Guidance in managing the implementation of new IT services

Once you’ve committed to implement a new capability, you form a team to carry out the project.  At this point, you may need help in assuring success of the project.

Projects fail all too often.  Most failures are due to one of the following:

•  Inadequate planning and scoping of the project

•  Unrealistic expectations about what can be done in what time

•  Unadequate management structures for coordinating the project

•  Unforeseen complexity and rapid change in the requirements

Hiring an experienced management consultant can insure you against project failure for a small fraction of the project cost.  You’ll want to find someone who speaks in business terms, has management experience, and knows technology well.

This third area — managing implementation — is the area in which I work.  I’ll be glad to offer you a free strategy session in which we examine your project and your plans in an initial consultation, to see if I can help raise your confidence that your project will succeed.  Simply contact me by any of the methods below.

 

SUBSCRIBE FREE: https://johnlevyconsulting.com/blog

Just complete the simple form. Takes about 10 seconds. And you’ll also get a free copy of my report, “9 Mistakes That Lead to IT Project Failure.”

 

John Levy Consulting                                415 663-1818

Deliver the promise of technology to business

https://johnlevyconsulting.com

PO Box 1419                  Point Reyes Station, CA 94956

 

Filed Under: Agile Management, Painless IT Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Eliminate your IT department?

September 10, 2012

Cloud-based services are transforming business IT in major ways.  What does this mean for the structure and mission of the enterprise’s IT department?  Is there anything left that can’t be done by the cloud and by cloud service vendors?

Yes!  There are three major areas in which every enterprise still needs a collection of people who focus on IT.  And it is best to have them gathered in a department where they are able to exchange information at high bandwidth – in other words, in an IT department.

1.    Expertise

While it can be advantageous to place IT specialists inside of business departments where they can advise their business counterparts on specifics of applications, data and cloud services, keeping up with the range of IT offerings is a job best done at a central location.

Building a center of expertise will enable IT specialists to respond to requests from business units for recommendations and advice on cloud vendors, facilities and functions of various IT packages, and general information on what solutions are now available.  In addition, the experts can create informative newsletters and workshops on what’s around the corner, the progress of corporate IT initiatives, and other current IT topics.

This type of dissemination of information cannot typically be done as well by department-captive IT specialists.

2.    Strategy

Your business has a business strategy.  Almost certainly, that strategy depends on certain IT initiatives.  Defining, aligning, and guiding those initiatives must be done by people who understand the business strategy and also understand IT deeply.  These people should be IT experts who also are involved in strategic planning for the business.

As a result, they are strategists for IT as well as for the business.  So they need to keep up with the latest trends and possibilities in IT as well as know a lot about all of the enterprise’s current IT implementations.  These people are natural members of a central IT department.

3.    Management

IT management involves several different perspectives.

First is managing the IT-business interface across all IT initiatives and across the functional components of the business.

Second is managing the IT department and its initiatives, including developing, training and promoting IT specialists.

Finally, there is management of vendors, including cloud service vendors – and increasingly crucial portion of the management workload.

All three of these aspects of IT require an IT department – or an equivalent – that concentrates IT expertise and IT-related missions into a place where communications are very frequent and easy.

Don’t eliminate IT, transform it

As cloud-based services begin to transform the way in which IT functions are accomplished, the IT department should concentrate on developing its expertise in the following areas:

Cross-connecting siloed business functions and helping to eliminate duplication in IT activities and services.

Teaching, training and informing business leaders about IT, including which cloud-based services can best help get their jobs done.

Monitoring, measuring and rewarding vendors who are supporting business functions in the enterprise.  This includes setting standards for performance, helping with contractual arrangements with vendors, and monitoring both positive performance and negative incidents surrounding IT vendors.

Creating IT strategic plans, including corroborating those plans with enterprise strategies and plans.  And finally, adapting the enterprise to the rapidly-shifting cloud services environment.

In other words, there’s plenty left to do in an IT department.  Don’t eliminate it.

John’s webinar titled will be held on September 25 at 10:00 AM Pacific time.

Designing, implementing and integrating major IT systems has numerous pitfalls that don’t appear, for example, in building construction. If you’re responsible for delivering a major IT project – or if you are paying for one – you need to be aware of what indicators are red flags for possible failure of the project.

See more information and register at 

SUBSCRIBE FREE: https://johnlevyconsulting.com/blog

Just complete the simple form. Takes about 10 seconds. And you’ll also get a free copy of my report, “9 Mistakes That Lead to IT Project Failure.”

John Levy Consulting

Deliver the promise of technology to business


https://johnlevyconsulting.com

PO Box 1419, Point Reyes Station, CA 94956    415 663-1818

Filed Under: Agile Management, Painless IT Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

Trust, truth and talking things through

April 10, 2012

Collaboration thrives on trust, truth and a willingness to talk things through.  When these elements are present for people in a team or in a department, those people take responsibility, use their authority wisely, and develop a climate of openness.

Here are key principles and other aspects of each of these elements.

Trust

I trust you if you speak and act with respect and maintain that respect when you communicate with others about me

Team members gain trust by doing what they say they will do.  But even more important in gaining trust is being respectful when speaking to a person or to someone else about a person.

In addition, a manager should always defend the team’s boundaries.  This includes alerting the team when there is a potential conflict with another team or manager and backing up the team when it needed.

Truth

If you believe you’re never wrong, you should not be on a team or in management.

Truthfulness is, of course, saying what’s true and not saying what’s false.  But much more important is being willing to own your own mistakes and misunderstandings.  By being open to correcting yourself, you make space for me to do the same.  You also make willingness to adapt and learn part of our shared culture.

A lot of the work of business is finding out what’s true – about a market, about a product, or about the world.  As long as we’re open to learning, which means there are things we don’t know, we encourage real inquiry that leads to knowledge and good decisions.

Talking things through

 “Talking things through” is being willing to address conflict.

Since conflict is inevitable, we need healthy ways to deal with it.  The best way is to acknowledge its existence right away, but not by making the other person wrong.  We can state what we see as disagreement without disrespect or rancor.  Start from assuming that the other person has a valid reason for their view.  Then start listening rather than arguing.

While compromise is one way to resolve conflict, there is a better way.  Begin by understanding the values and intentions of the other person.  Then search for ways to resolve the conflict while advancing both your own and the other person’s values.

What about incentives?  People who are collaborating successfully need very little additional incentives, because the process of collaboration – and the successes it generates – are rewarding enough.  Create an environment where there is trust, truth and talking things through, and you need only get out of the way.

Filed Under: Agile Management Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

It’s actually easier to do the right thing

March 26, 2012

The right thing is to plan, organize and execute with long-term results in mind.  But nearly every manager is so driven by short-term metrics that they fail to account for longer-term effects of their decisions and actions.  As a result, they accomplish less for themselves and for their organizations, making them less effective and less competitive.

Here are three ways to incorporate longer-term thinking:

1. People working for you know when they’re being put at a disadvantage due to short-term thinking.  For example, if you won’t spend the capital needed to buy the right tools, they’ll keep working, but they’ll resent both the inefficiency of the work and the lack of regard it shows for them as workers.

People will find ways to correct problems and to self-organize to be more efficient if you will only give the room to operate.  This includes trusting them to find the best way to organize and giving them enough budget to execute the plan.    Your main contribution after that is to give them enough of the bigger picture so they know how their work fits in with your objectives.

2. If you’re committed to personal growth, then you need to track your effectiveness over a longer term.  Your monthly or quarterly objectives are the table stakes in this game.  Cranking out regular results will guard your job, but it won’t make you ready for a larger role unless you include a vision of what’s possible in the longer term

If you want to be seen as an emerging leader, then you have to champion longer-term growth and improvement.  To do that, you’ll need to solicit feedback and actually listen to it.  And you’ll need ways to identify short-term objectives that are actually causing damage to longer-term results.

For example, a client company refused for years to convert to better programming language tools because changing tools would make the first project to use them take longer.  As a result, they went for years at a disadvantage compared to their competitors.   Eventually, they changed – when they merged with a competitor that was already using the tools.

3. In some areas, such as product development, experimentation is essential.  You may think that Engineering is a deductive, forward-only process; but in fact a lot of development involves eliminating the unworkable by trying it out.

Once you realize that experimentation is part of the process, you stop regarding abandoned directions as a waste of time and resources.  In fact, experiments lead to better decisions and stronger platforms on which good products are based. Since the result of having stronger platforms is not visible until the next product, you could harm your product line significantly by insisting on maximum-speed implementation.

The alternative to backtracking after an experiment is to fall off a cliff – with failure of the process.  It’s better to insist on high-quality, incremental progress.  And how do you know you are seeing incremental progress?  You have to have a longer-term vision and plan to measure it against.

Once you have the vision and the plan, it’s actually easier to do the right thing.

 

How are you keeping longer-term results in mind?  Post your comments below.

Filed Under: Agile Management, Painless IT Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

How can IT management fail to understand business goals?

January 10, 2012

“Now more than ever, IT must invest the time to understand specific business goals and translate IT metrics to reflect an impact against these business goals.  Often there is a gap between what IT reports and what is of interest to the business.”   — An Introductory Overview of ITIL V3, itSMF, 2007, p. 38

There’s been a lot written about how IT and business are misaligned.  See for example, Susan Cramm’s excellent book.[1]  But how do they get that way?  One cause is that many IT people don’t understand business.  Another is financial invisibility of IT due to budgeting processes.  But these are not the big killer causes.

I believe there are three major causes:  physical distance, psychological distance, and IT overload.

Physical distance of IT from the business leads to isolation in many ways.  One of my client companies had their IT people in a city 750 miles away from the home office.  Not only did this impose communication barriers, it meant that the IT people were living in a different culture from the home office people – even though both locations are in the United States.  Of course, when you add in the distance to some of the offshore contractors who are handling some IT services, physical distance means even more cultural distance.

Psychological distance can be caused by having objectives that don’t relate to business goals and by being managed in a “silo.”  For example, IT may report in to the CFO, and management metrics may relate only to financial performance.  As long as IT is budgeted as an operational expense, then no amount of encouragement will get IT managers to view what they’re doing as a strategic investment.  This can be aggravated by failing to include IT people in business planning.  Finally, I’ve seen IT organizations where the business tools used by the rest of the business are not in use in IT.

IT management overload is the third major cause of misalignment.  Beyond the usual overload caused by rapidly changing technology and shifting responsibilities (associated with Cloud services, for example), IT management is typically trying to do more with less budget.  As the pressure to perform increases, IT management concentrates on operational measures rather than business metrics.  In addition, technology shifts are raising the cost and complexity of legacy system support.  So IT managers tend to focus on reducing these burdens, rather than looking for new initiatives to support.

Where can we start to correct the lack of alignment between IT and business?  After addressing physical location and reporting structures, the most productive way to get alignment is with common metrics.  Look for business metrics that are relevant to concrete business results and are particularly dependent on IT service delivery.  Then make sure that IT managers understand the business metrics.  Finally, make sure that they buy in to being measured by these metrics.  To do that, of course, it is best to include them in business planning processes – and not just as number-providers.

What are your experiences with IT – Business alignment?  I welcome your comments.

[1] 8 Things We Hate About IT by Susan Cramm, Harvard Business Press, 2010 http://www.eighthates.com/

Filed Under: Painless IT Tagged With: , , , , , ,