The Journey from Chaos to Clarity
Last week presented me with several interesting conversations with senior IT executives.
Several of the more interesting talks were with folks in the operational hot-seat.
There was a golden thread that ran through all of them.
Now these were not what I would call casual conversations. In fact, all but one of these folks were seeking advice on how to turn their massive mission-critical IT shops around.
What did they all share?
In nearly every case the senior IT executive had to leave the call several times to manage fires and interruptions.
Some even had to call me back later in the day or several days later. In most cases these folks were considering Visible Ops as a method to kick-start some process improvement or re-engineering.
In the process of lobbying for funds to do this work none of the IT executives felt comfortable answering the ROI questions asked by from their peers in the business.
These questions were not triggered by the dollar amount of the direct investment in process improvement but rather from the IT admission that some business projects may have to wait until some changes were made in the way handles its workload. It is so telling that IT managers could not even survive a half-hour lifeline call to someone on the outside from which they are soliciting advice without the current IT reality interrupting even the hope of change. This is often compounded by the seemingly endless requirements for new or changed services coming from the business.
These folks do not want to hear about the resources required for IT to get its act together.
If I could figure out a way to get paid for every time I have listened to a line-of-business manager complain because his / her project needed IT resources and those IT resources were busy fighting fires, I might be the wealthiest man alive. The new and more disturbing trend to me is the marked lack of business support for IT process improvement.
Does this scenario sound familiar to you?
- Amount of applications needing support from IT – Increasing
- Amount of human-resources available to support applications – Decreasing
- Amount of IT infrastructure needed to run new applications – Increasing
- Amount of IT resources available to support new infrastructure – Decreasing or Level
- Amount of work required to be complaint with external regulations – Increasing
- Amount of budget going to consultants to help with external regulations – Increasing
- Amount of resources needed to support business user trouble-calls – Increasing
- Frequency of IT outages – Increasing
- Staff morale - Decreasing
- Number of departmental reorgs - Increasing
- Business appetite for IT internal process and control improvement – As long as it doesn’t cause any interruption in anything that anyone in the business may ever need, go for it.
If so then the next several weeks will be of interest to you as I share what I have gleaned from the Visible Ops transformation projects I have been involved with. Starting with the conversations you may need to have with business executives in order to sell and gain support for these projects. *Hint* You will certainly need to recruit some loyal business –partners to help you pave the road to continual process improvement! This week I will discuss some strategies t you can use to recruit that support so the choir selling IT process improvement will include their voices as well.
Please leave me feedback and send me your comments along the way as I look forward to learning from your experiences as well!