Top 4 Principles for IT Leaders to focus on

Experts predict that IT Leadership is taking a hit as the business is not happy with the value that IT delivers. The emergence of Cloud and SaaS based Applications have made the business leaders to think that they can get the needed IT support as services, though they are unaware of the issues or challenges with that idea. But this has certainly made the IT leaders to think and do a self-assessment in terms the focus area and the value delivery. Here are the four principles that may help IT leaders to continue delivering value to the business and thereby ensuring their very existence.


Embrace the Business Change

In today’s competitive world, Businesses need to revisit their vision, mission and strategies too often than they did in the past. This most of the times will call for change to the people, process and technology and depending on the priorities, such change may have to happen too soon. IT traditionally has been resisting changes, though with Agile and other approaches, Changes are welcome, but due to various other factors like the maintainability of the systems, cost of change etc, the IT is finding it a challenge to embrace such changes. This is why business leaders are trying to explore options to minimize their dependence on their own IT, so that they can move on with the desired changes quicker and reap the benefits of the change.

For IT leaders, embracing change is a challenge as most of them are still living with legacy systems which have very poor characteristics in terms of scalability and maintainability. The IT leaders should find ways to overcome these barriers and should be willing and ready to support business changes. The solutions include, revisiting their application design principles with a view to ensure that all their current and future custom applications are Service Oriented and are highly scalable, maintainable and performing. For other legacy systems, explore options to service enable them using appropriate tools and technologies, without changing systems themselves.


Focus on Value Delivery

Though traditionally IT has been a cost centre, most IT leaders have shown interest in treating IT as a profit centre. Most IT investments, though are evaluated in terms of the return (value) that this investment brings back, this is not monitored throughout its execution. Ideally, the focus on value should not be lost during the execution phase. This is true as the discoveries or problems encountered as the project execution progress may have a significant impact on the perceived value and in such cases, it would be wiser to take call to fail the project and call off further investment without waiting for the end result.

When something is offered for free, everyone will want it whether irrespective of there being a real use for it. Similarly, applying the 80/20 rule, 80% of the business functions are likely consume only 20% of the IT services. There need to be a method or process to keep accounting the service offerings and identify the 20% of services and prioritize the support for these services in terms of taking up changes around these and delivering them faster than expected by the business.

Bringing in a culture (at the least within the IT function) wherein the need for focus on value delivery is well understood and demonstrated by all would certainly help achieve greater benefits overall. Every member should know and be aware of the expected business value of every project or sub projects and that they are associated with and should take pride in ensuring that their actions in fact result in the business enjoying the perceived value.

IT Leaders should devise suitable process or systems which will help measure everything and use it in turn to calculate and publish the metrics or statistics around the business value delivered by different projects or investments. IT Governance frameworks like COBIT can help achieving this.


Communicate & Collaborate

IT leaders normally express their point of view technically, which the business users or leaders may not get it right and eventually the value proposition might not be understood well. This is where IT leaders should start putting across their proposals or point of views in a way that make sense to the business leaders. While the converse is also true that while Business leaders talk about business changes, IT leaders find it difficult to understand, which IT leaders should overcome. IT is important that the IT Leaders and the most part for their team should be willing to acquire the required business skills and should demonstrate the same in their communication and deliveries.

Similarly, it is important for the IT leaders to collaborate with the business proposals and get involved right from the initial stages, so that they are able to get to know the business requirements and priorities better and at the same time present them back with the various risks and caveats that related tools and technology that enables this change may bring in for them to manage.


Talent Development

With the technology landscape changing rapidly, and the business leaders are looking for such enabling technologies to gain competitive advantage or to improve the efficiencies at various levels, the IT team has a pressing need to cope up with such needs. This is where, IT leaders should now look for people with multiple technical and business skills and with the willingness and ability to learn newer technology and business skills faster. This should be best achieved through mentoring and not by force.

IT leaders together with the HR leaders should also provide the employees an environment, which is conducive to develop the abilities of the employees. The organization culture should also envision the need for continuous learning and devise a system to measure and monitor the efforts spent in learning. For instance, depending on the role, the employees may be asked to log certain number of learning hours in a year on specified technical and business areas.

The IT leaders should also be continuously learning and stay on top of the technology trends, so that they can identify the right technology and tools that can improve the service capabilities of the business functions and in turn could give competitive advantage.



Right strategies around these four areas would certainly help IT leaders stay focussed in the business benefits and in turn demonstrate measurable value on IT investments.

Leveraging Lessons Learned

Success = failure + failure + failure … Sounds familiar?

Leadership experts and management gurus have said enough about how failures lead to success. That is very true for the individuals when the respective person takes it in the right context and work on the causes of the failure to overcome it in the next opportunity. But how does this work in reality for the organization?

 

If you have been part of a project, which has failed to deliver the promised features on time or at the agreed cost, you are most likely out of that organization, as the management want to penalize those involved in it. In the process, the organization loses as it did not want to capitalize on the lessons learned by the team through the failed project and the new team that takes over might commit same or even different mistakes, which could again lead to failure. 

 

Agile projects are likely to fare better in this space as Agile project management calls for identifying things that went well and those did not went well at the end of every sprints. Here again the one question that remains to be answered is, how does the scrum master and the teams deal with the things that did not went well in the earlier sprint. Yet another question that needs to be answered is how open are the project team members in openly admitting their own errors and omissions, which could have adversely impacted the project. 

 

 

As far as the development teams, there are so much to be learnt on a daily basis, for example, the defects uncovered in unit testing, findings in the requirements, design and code reviews and even the project issues could lead to a great lesson to be learned by every other member of the team. 

 

 

Here are few ideas that will help the organization in leveraging the lessons learned by the teams through various errors, mistakes and omissions.

 

• Mentor the teams to the effect that they demonstrate accountability and responsibility and that admitting a mistake early on is a good thing. The earlier, the triggers are known, it is better as other members of the team would stay away from committing the same mistakes.
• Coach the teams to share, share and share with their peers and even across the teams. This can be accomplished by removing the mind blocks within the employees in admitting their own mistakes and they should be encouraged to share those for the good of themselves and the organization. It is the tendency of the employees that when they uncover any issues during unit testing and reviews, they would just fix it themselves and do not report it further.
• Encourage teams to share their previous experiences every now and then and for sure there will be some takeaways from such experiences for some members of the team.
• Bring in a culture within the organization which will discourage egos and emotions which are found to be the barriers for sharing.
• Promote risk management and encourage every employee to participate in it. It is needless to say that every identified risk has the potential of becoming an issue and soon can come in way to prevent the project from being successful. Past experience and lessons learned is a great source of risk identification.
• Above all, make the sharing the lessons easy by putting in place an appropriate knowledge base platform and train and encourage employees to use it.

 

Though the above ideas are more suitable for IT services organization, they can be practiced in any other organization as well with some tweaks.

 

Here is an interesting article to read on, where in Ken Bruss discusses about leveraging lessons learned for competitive advantage.

High Performance Workforce

For a sustained success of an IT services organization, it is important to have a high performance workforce backing the leaders. A quick peek into various resources on what is high performance workforce, found that the following are the three fundamental building blocks to setup a High Performance Workforce:

1. Accountability for Right Results, which requires the employees to have the ability to focus on the right priorities and in turn achieve the right results at right time.

2. Earn Trust, which requires continuous mentoring and recognition of people whom the organization depend on, so that they feel valued, confident and ready to give their best.

3. Talent Development, a continuous skill assessment and development program, with which, the workforce is always on the edge of the needed skills and is ready to tap the opportunities that comes through its way.