A new leader in an organization once asked to understand my role. My answer was very simple: “My role is to change mindsets.”
I’m fairly sure the expectation was something different: a laundry list of functional responsibilities, goals, in-flight activities or tasks that were top of mind, the makeup of my team, etc. All relevant aspects of a job, to be sure, but not my primary focus.
I explained that my goal was to help transform the organization, and if I couldn’t change people’s mindsets, everything else that needed to be done was going to be much more difficult. That’s how it is with change.
Complacency is the enemy. Excellence is a journey and you are never meant to reach the destination.
Having been part of and worked with organizations that enjoyed tremendous market share but then encountered adversity and lost their advantage, there were common characteristics, starting with basking in the glow of that success too long and losing the hunger and drive that made them successful in the first place.
The remainder of this article will explore the topic further in three dimensions: leadership, innovation, and transformation in the interest of providing some perspective on the things to look for when excellence is your goal.
Fall short of excellence, you can still be great. Try to be great and fail? You’re going to be average… and who wants to be part of something average? No one who wants to win.
Courageous Leadership
As with anything, excellence has to start with leadership. There is always resistance and friction associated with change. That’s healthy and good because it surfaces questions and risks and, in a perfect world, the more points of view you can leverage in setting direction, the more likely you’ll avoid blind spots or avoidable mistakes just for a lack of awareness or understanding of what you are doing.
There is a level of discipline needed to accomplish great things over time and courage is a requirement, because there will inevitably be challenges, surprises, and setbacks. How leaders respond to that adversity, through their adaptability, tenacity and resilience will ultimately have a substantial influence on what is possible overall.
Some questions to consider:
Is there enough risk tolerance to create space to try new ideas, fail, learn, and try again?
Is there discipline in your approach so that business choices are thoughtful, reasoned, intentional, measured, and driven towards clear outcomes?
Is there a healthy level of humility to understand that, no matter how much success there is right now, without continuing to evolve, there will always be a threat of obsolescence?
Relentless Innovation
In my article on Excellence by Design, I was deliberate in choosing the word “relentless” in terms of innovation, because I’ve seen so many instances over time of the next silver bullet meant to be a “game changer”, “disruptor”, etc. only to see that then be overtaken by the next big thing a year or so later.
One of the best things about working in technology is thatit constantly gives us opportunities to do new things: to be more productive and effective, produce better outcomes, create more customer value, and be more competitive.
Some people see that as a threat, because it requires a willingness to continue to evolve, adapt, and learn. You can’t place too much value on a deep understanding of X technology, because tomorrow Y may come along and make that knowledge fairly obsolete. While there is an aspect of that argument that is true at an implementation level, it gives too much importance to the tools and not enough to the problems we’re ultimately trying to solve, namely creating a better customer experience, delivering a better product or service, and so on.
We need to plan like the most important thing right now won’tbe the most important 6 months or even a year from now. Assume we will wantto replace it, or integrate something new to work with it, improving our overall capability and creating even more value over time.
What does that do? In a disciplined environment, it should change our mindset about how we approach implementing new tools and technologies in the first place. It should also influence how much exposure we create in the dependencies we place upon those tools in the process of utilizing them.
To take what could be a fairly controversial example: I’ve written multiple articles on Artificial Intelligence (AI), how to approach it, and how I think about it in various dimensions, including where it is going. The hype surrounding these technologies is deservedly very high right now, there is a surge in investment, and a significant number of tools are and will be hitting the market. It’s also reasonable to assume a number of “agentic” solutions will pop up, meant to solve this problem and that… ok… now what happens then? Are things better, worse, or just different? What is the sum of an organization that is fully deployed with all of the latest tools? I don’t believe we have any idea and I also believe it will be terribly inefficient if we don’t ask this question right now.
As a comparison, what history has taught us is that there will be a user plugged into these future ecosystems somewhere, with some role and responsibilities, to work in concert (and ideally in harmony) with all this automation (physical and virtual) that we’ve brought to bear on everyone’s behalf. How will they make sense of it all? If we drop an agent for everything, is it any different than giving someone a bunch of new applications, all of which spit recommendations and notifications and alerts at them, saying “this is what you need to do”, but leaving them to figure out which of those disconnected pieces of advice make the most sense, which should be the priority, and try somehow not to be overwhelmed? Maybe not, because the future state might be a combination of intelligent applications (something I wrote about in The Intelligent Enterprise) and purpose-built agents that fill gaps those applications don’t cover.
Ok, so why does any of that matter? I’m not making an argument against experimenting and leveraging AI. My point is that, every time there is surge towards the next technology advancement, we seldom think about the reality that it will eventually evolve or be replaced by something else and we should take that into consideration as we integrate those new technologies to begin with. The only constant is change and that’s a good thing, but we also need to be disciplined in how we think about it on an ongoing basis.
Some questions to consider:
Is there a thoughtful and disciplined approach to innovation in place?
Is there a full lifecycle-oriented view when introducing new technologies, to consider how to integrate them so they can be replaced or to retire other existing, potentially redundant solutions once they are introduced?
Are the new technologies being vetted, reviewed, and integrated as part of a defined ecosystem with an eye towards managing technical debt over time?
Continual Transformation
In the spirit of fostering change, it is very common for a “strategy” conversation to be rooted in a vision. A vision sets the stage for what the future environment is meant to look like. It is ideally compelling enough to create a clear understanding of the desired outcome and to generate momentum in the pursuit of that goal (or set of goals)… and experience has taught me this is actually NOT the first or only thing important to consider in that first step.
Sustainable change isn’t just about having a vision, it is about having the right culture.
The process for strategy definition isn’t terribly complicated at an overall level: define a vision, understand the current state, identify the gaps, develop a roadmap to fill those gaps, execute, adapt, and govern until you’re done.
The problem is that large transformation efforts are extremely difficult to deliver. I don’t fundamentally believe that difficulty is often rooted in the lack of a clear vision or as simple as having execution issues that ultimately undermine success. I believe successful transformation isn’t a destination to begin with. Transformation should be a continual journey towards excellence.
How that excellence is manifest can be articulated through one or more “visions” that communicate concepts of the desired state, but that picture can and will evolve as capabilities available through automation, process, and organizational change occur. What’s most important is having courageous leadership and the innovation mindset mentioned above, but also a culture driven to sustain that competitive advantage and hunger for success.
Said differently: With the right culture, you can likely accomplish almost any vision, but only some visions will be achievable without the right culture.
Some questions to consider in this regard:
Is there a vision in place for where the organization is heading today?
What was the “previous” vision, what happened to it, did it succeed or fail and, if so, why?
Is the current change viewed as a “project” or a “different way of working”? (I would argue the latter is the desired state nearly in all cases)
Wrapping Up
Having shared the above thoughts, it’s difficult to communicate what is so fundamental to excellence, which is the passion it takes to succeed in the first place.
Excellence is a choice. Success is a commitment. It takes tenacity and grit to make it happen and that isn’t always easy or popular.
There is always room to be better, even in some of the most mundane things we do every day. That’s why courageous leadership is so important and where culture becomes critical in providing the foundation for longer-term success.
I hope the ideas were worth considering. Thanks for spending the time to read them. Feedback is welcome as always.
First of all, know that character, values, and integrity matter. They are the foundation of who you are and the reputation you will have with others. Our beliefs and intentions often make their way to our words and actions, so strive to do what’s right, treat others with respect, take accountability for your choices, and know that, in the long term, those who bring kindness and a positive attitude into the world will succeed far more than those who don’t. They will also find themselves surrounded by many others, because a good heart and kindness are forces that will attract others to you over time.
Have faith, no matter what life brings. There will be times when life is challenging and it’s important to know that we are never alone, that God (in all His forms) has a plan, and we will find our way through, as long as we take one day at a time and keeping moving forward. There is a great quote from Winston Churchill, “When you’re going through Hell, keep going”, that I always remember in this regard. Faith is our greatest source of hope… and with hope, anything can be possible. With faith and hope, your possibilities in life will be limited only by your capacity to dream.
Work hard. It’s a simple point, but one that isn’t evident to everyone at a time that many seem to feel entitled. Earning your success is both an exercise in diligence and commitment as well as persistence and leadership. Oftentimes that effort is not glamorous, requires sacrifice, and will drag you through difficulty, but in struggling and overcoming those obstacles, we find out who we are and the strength we have inside us. No one can give that confidence and experience to you, you simply have to earn it, and it is well worth the effort over time.
Never stop learning. There is always something to understand about other people, new ideas or subjects, and the world around us. Always be looking for the people who can guide and advise you in the different aspects of your life. You will never reach a point where there isn’t an opportunity to grow as a person, and it will make you so much more aware, fulfilled, and worth knowing as time goes on.
Believe in yourself and speak your truth. In the great debate that life can be at times, you should know that your voice matters. At a time when so many take a free pass and just parrot the words, ideology, or biases of others, you do yourself and the world a service to educate yourself, form your own opinion, and respectfully speak your truth, including the times you speak for those who are afraid to do so on their own. Diversity in thought and opinion gives us strength and creates room for change. Let your voice be heard. You can make a difference.
Be humble and be kind. In concert with the previous point, strive to listen as well as you speak. Seek compassion and understanding, including those who differ most from you. They have their own form of truth, and it can be worth learning what that is, whether you agree with it or not. In a world consumed with egocentric thinking, what we do for others brings the world a little closer, creates the connections that bind us together, and reduces the divisiveness that so many waste their days promoting.
Never give up on your dreams but be ready to pursue new ones when you see them. Life can be like a series of bridges, taking you from one part of your journey to the next, and we often can’t see past the bridge that is immediately in front of us. While it takes tenacity and courage to pursue your life’s passion, understand that your goals will evolve as time progresses, and that’s not a bad thing.
Build upon your successes, learn from your failures. Remember that it’s relatively easy to succeed when you’re not doing anything worth doing or that’s not particularly difficult. Again, this is a relatively simple point, but it’s easy to lose the perspective that failures are a means to learn and become better, and they are definitely something that come with taking risks in life. There is no benefit to beating yourself up endlessly over your mistakes. Be thankful for the opportunity to learn and move forward, or likely life will give you the opportunity to learn that lesson again down the road.
Understand that true leaders emerge in adversity. Aspire to be the light that can lead others out of darkness to a better place, whether that is in your personal or professional life. It is easy to lead when everything is going well. It is when things go wrong that poor leaders assign blame and make excuses, and strong leaders take the reins, solve problems, and seek to inspire. It’s a choice that takes courage, but it’s worth remembering that it is also where character is built, reputations are made, and results are either accomplished or not.
Accept that life is rarely what we expect it to be. It’s the journey, along with its peaks and valleys, that makes it so worthwhile. Where possible, the best you can do for yourself and for others is to know when to set aside distractions, be present, and engage in the moments you have throughout your day. Make the most of the experience and don’t be a passenger in your own life.
Finally, take the time to express your care for those who matter to you. Life is unpredictable and you will never run out of love to give to others who are truly deserving of it. We spend far too much time waiting for “the right moment” when that time could be right now. Express your gratitude, express your love, express your support… both you and whomever is the recipient of those things will be better for it, and you will have an endless supply of those gifts available to give tomorrow as well, so no need to hold them in reserve.
I hope the words were helpful… all the best in the steps you take, in the choices you make, in finding happiness, and living the life of your dreams.
In my most recent articles on Approaching Artificial Intelligence and Transformation, I highlight the importance of discipline in achieving business outcomes. To that end, governance is a critical aspect of any large-scale transformation or delivery effort because it both serves to reduce risk and inform change on an ongoing basis, both of which are an inevitable reality of these kinds of programs.
The purpose of this article is to discuss ways to approach governance overall, to avoid common concerns, and to establish core elements that will increase the probability it will be successful. Having seen and established many PMOs and governance bodies over time, I can honestly say that they are difficult to put in place for as many intangible reasons as anything mechanical, hopefully the nature of which will be addressed below.
Have the Right Mindset
Before addressing the execution “dos” and “don’ts”, success starts with understanding that governance is about successful delivery, not pure oversight. Where delivery is the priority, the focus is typically on enablement and support. By contrast, where the focus is the latter, emphasis can be placed largely on controls and intervention. The reality is that both are needed, which will be discussed more below, but starting with an intention to help delivery teams generally should translate into a positive and supportive environment, where collaboration is encouraged. If, by comparison, the role of governance is relegated to finding “gotchas” and looking for issues without providing teams will guidance or solutions, the effort likely won’t succeed. Healthy relationships and trust are critical to effective governance, because they encourage transparent and open dialogue. Without that, likely the process will break down or be ineffective somewhere along the way.
In a perfect world, delivery teams should want to participate in a governance process because it helps them do their work.
Addressing the Challenges
Suggesting that you want to initiate a governance process can be a very uncomfortable conversation. As a consultant, clients can feel like it is something being done “to” them, with a third-party reporting on their work to management. As a corporate citizen, it can feel like someone is trying to exercise a level of control over their peers in a leadership team and, consequently, limiting individual autonomy and empowerment in some way. This is why relationships and trust are critically important. Governance is a partnership and it is about increasing the probability of successful outcomes, not adding a layer of management over people who are capable of doing their jobs with the right level of support.
That being said, three things are typically said when the idea of establishing governance is introduced: that it will slow things down, hinder value creation, and add unnecessary overhead to teams that are already “too busy” or rushing to a deadline. I’ll focus on each of these in turn, along with what can be done to address the concerns in how you approach things.
It Slows Things Down
As I wrote in my article on Excellence by Design, delivering at speed matters. Lack of oversight can lead to efforts going off the rails without the timely interventions and support that cause delays and budget overruns. That being said, if the process slows everything down, you aren’t necessarily helping teams deliver either.
A fundamental question is whether your governance process is meant to be a “gate” or a “checkpoint”.
In the case of a gate, they can be very disruptive, so there should be compliance or risk-driven concerns (e.g., security or data privacy) that necessitate stopping or delaying some or all of a project until certain defined criteria or standards are met. If a process is gated, then this should be factored into estimation and planning at the outset, so expectations are set and managed accordingly, and to avoid the “we don’t have time for this” discussion that otherwise could happen. Gating criteria and project debriefs / retrospectives should also be reviewed to ensure standards and guidelines are updated to help both mitigate risk and encourage accelerated delivery, which is a difficult balance to strike. In principle, the more disciplined an environment is, the less “gating” should be needed, because teams are already following standards, doing proper quality assurance, and so on, and risk management should be easier on an average effort.
When it comes to “checkpoints”, there should be no difference in terms of the level of standards and guidelines in place, it’s about how they are handled in the course of the review discussion itself. When critical criteria are missed in a gate, there is a “pause and adjust” approach, whereas a checkpoint would note the exception and requested remedy, ideally along with a timeframe for doing so. The team is allowed to continue forward, but with an explicit assumption that they will make adjustments so the overall solution integrity is maintained in line with expectations. This is where a significant amount of technical debt and delivery issues are created. There is a level of trust involved in a checkpoint process, because the delivery team may choose not to remediate any issues, in which case the purpose and value of standards can be undermined, and a significant amount of complexity and risk is introduced as a result. If this becomes a pattern over time, it may make sense to shift towards a more gated process if things like security, privacy, or other critical issues are being created.
Again, the goal of governance is to remove barriers, provide resources where required, and to enable successful delivery, but there is a handshake involved to the degree that the process integrity needs to be managed overall. My general point of view is to trust teams to do the right thing and to leverage a checkpoint versus a gated process, but that is predicated on ensuring standards and quality are maintained. To the delivery discipline isn’t where it needs to be, a stronger process may be appropriate.
It Erodes Value
To the extent that the process is perceived to be pure overhead, it is important to clarify the overall goals of the process and, to the extent possible, to identify some metrics that can be used to signal whether it is being effective in helping to promote a healthy delivery environment.
At an overall level, the process is about reducing risk, promoting speed and enablement, and increasing the probability of successful delivery. Whether that is measured in changes in budget and schedule variance, issues remediated pre-deployment, or by a downstream measure of business value created through initiatives delivered on time, there should be a clear understanding of what the desired outcomes are and a sanity check that they are being met.
Arguably, where standards are concerned, this can be difficult to evaluate and measure, but certainly the increase in technical debt that is created in an environment that lacks standards and governance, cost of operations, and percentage of effort directed and build versus run on an overall level can be monitored and evaluated.
It Adds Overhead
I remember taking an assignment to help clean up the governance of a delivery environment many years ago where the person leading the organization was receiving a stack of updates every week that was literally three feet of documents when printed, spanning hundreds of projects. It goes without saying that all of that reporting provided nothing actionable, beyond everyone being able to say that they were “reporting out” on their delivery efforts on an ongoing basis. It was also the case that the amount of time project and program managers were focused on updating all that documentation was substantial. This is not governance. This is administration and a waste of resources. Ultimately, by changing the structure of the process, defining standards, and level of information being reported, the outcome was a five-page summary that covered critical programs, ongoing maintenance, production, and key metrics that was produced with considerably less effort and provided much better transparency into the environment.
The goal of governance is providing support, not producing reams of documentation. Ideally, there should be a critical minimum amount of information requested from teams to support a discussion on what they are doing, where they are in the delivery process, the risks or challenges they are facing, and what help (if any) they may need. To the degree that you can leverage artifacts the team is already producing so there is little to no extra effort involved in preparing for a discussion, even better. And, as another litmus test, everything included in a governance discussion should serve a purpose and be actionable. Anything else likely is a waste of time and resources.
Making Governance Effective
Having addressed some of the common concerns and issues, there are also things that should be considered that increase the probability of success.
Allow for Evolution
As I mentioned in the opening, the right mindset has a significant influence on making governance successful. Part of that is understanding it will never be perfect. I believe very strongly in launching governance discussions and allowing feedback and time to mature the process and infrastructure given real experience with what works and what everyone needs.
One of the best things that can be done is to track and monitor delivery risks and technology-related issues and use those inputs to guide and prioritize the standards and guidelines in place. Said differently, you don’t need governance to improve things you already do well, you leverage it (primarily) to help you address risks and gaps you have and to promote quality.
Having seen an environment where a team was “working on” establishing a governance process over an extended period of time versus one that was stood up inside 30 days, I’d rather have the latter process in place and allow for it to evolve than one that is never launched.
Cover the Bases
In the previous section, I mentioned leveraging a critical minimum amount of information to facilitate the process, ideally utilizing artifacts a team already has. Again, it’s not about the process, it’s about the discussion and enabling outcomes.
That being said, since trust and partnership are important, even in a fairly bare bones governance environment, there should be transparency into what the process is, when it should be applied, who should attend, expectations of all participants, and a consistent cadence with which it is conducted.
It should be possible to have ad-hoc discussions if needed, but there is something contradictory to suggesting that governance is a key component to a disciplined environment and not being able to schedule the discussions themselves consistently. Anecdotally, when we conducted project review discussions in my time at Sapient, it was commonly understood that if a team was ever “too busy” to schedule their review, they probably needed to have it as soon as possible, so the reason they were overwhelmed or too busy was clear.
Satisfy Your Stakeholders
The final dimension to consider in making governance effective is understanding and satisfying the stakeholders surrounding it, starting with the teams. Any process can and should evolve, and that evolution should be based on experience obtained executing the process itself, monitoring operating metrics on an ongoing basis, and feedback that is continually gathered to make it more effective.
That being said, if the process never surfaces challenges and risks, it likely isn’t working properly, because governance is meant to do exactly that, along with providing teams with the support they need. Satisfying stakeholders doesn’t mean painting an unrealistically positive picture, especially if there are fundamental issues in the underlying environment.
I have seen situations where teams were encouraged to share inaccurate information about the health of their work in the interest of managing perceptions and avoiding difficult conversations that were critically needed. This is why having an experienced team leading the conversations and a healthy, supportive, and trusting environment is so important. Governance is needed because things do happen in delivery. Technology work is messy and complicated and there are always risks that materialize. The goal is to see them and respond before they have consequential impact.
Wrapping Up
Hopefully I’ve managed to hit some of the primary points to consider when establishing or evaluating a governance process. There are many dimensions, but the most important ones are first, focusing on value and, second, on having the right mindset, relationships, and trust. The process is too often the focus, and without the other parts, it will fail. People are at the center of making it work, nothing else.
I hope the ideas were worth considering. Thanks for spending the time to read them. Feedback is welcome as always.
“I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth.” – John F Kennedy, May 25, 1961
When JFK made his famous pronouncement in 1961, the United States was losing in the space race. The Soviet Union was visibly ahead, to the point that the government shuffled the deck, bringing together various agencies to form NASA, and set a target far out ahead of where anyone was focused at the time: landing on the Moon. The context is important as the U.S. was not operating from a position of strength and JFK didn’t shoot for parity or to remain in a defensive posture. Instead, he leaned in and set an audacious goal that redefined the playing field entirely.
I spoke at a town hall fairly recently about “The Saturn V Story”, a documentary that covers the space race and journey leading to the Apollo 11 moon landing on July 20, 1969. The scale and complexity of what accomplished in a relatively short timeframe was truly incredible and feels like a good way to introduce a Transformation discussion. The Apollo program engaged 375,000 people at its peak, required extremely thoughtful planning and coordination (including the Mercury and Gemini programs that preceded it), and presented a significant number of engineering challenges that needed to be overcome to achieve its ultimate goal. It’s an inspiring story, as any successful transformation effort should be.
The challenge is that true transformation is exceptionally difficult and many of these efforts fail or fall short of their stated objectives. The remainder of this article will highlight some key dimensions that I believe are critical in increasing the probability of success.
Transformation is a requirement of remaining competitive in a global digital economy. The disruptions (e.g., cloud computing, robotics, orchestration, artificial intelligence, cyber security exposure, quantum computing) have and will continue to occur, and success will be measured, in part, based on an organization’s ability to continuously transform, leveraging advanced capabilities to its’ maximum strategic benefit.
Successful Transformation
Culture versus Outcome
Before diving into the dimensions themselves, I want to emphasize the difference I see between changing culture and the kind of transformation I’m referencing in this article. Culture is an important aspect to affecting change, as I will discuss in the context of the dimensions themselves, but a change in culture that doesn’t lead to a corresponding change in results is relatively meaningless.
To that end, I would argue that it is important to think about “change management” as a way to transition between the current and desired ways of working in a future state environment, but with specific, defined outcomes attached to the goal.
It is insufficient, as an example, to express “we want to establish a more highly collaborative workplace that fosters innovation” without also being able to answer the questions: “To what end?” or “In the interest of accomplishing what?” Arguably, it is the desired outcome that sets the stage for the nature of the culture that will be required, both to get to the stated goal as well as to operate effectively once those goals are achieved. In my experience, this balance isn’t given enough thought when change efforts are initiated, and it’s important to make sure culture and desired outcomes are both clear and aligned with each other.
For more on the fundamental aspects of a healthy environment, please see my article on The Criticality of Culture.
What it Takes
Successful transformation efforts require focus on many levels and in various dimensions to manage what ultimately translates to risk.
The set that come to mind as most critical are having:
An audacious goal
Transformation is, in itself, a fundamental (not incremental) change in what an organization is able to accomplish
To the extent that substantial change is difficult, the value associated with the goal needs to outweigh the difficulties (and costs) that will be required to transition from where you are to where you need to be
If the goal also isn’t compelling enough, likely there won’t be the requisite level of individual and collective investment required to overcome the adversity that is typically part of these efforts. This is not just about having a business case. It’s a reason for people to care… and that level of investment matters where transformation is the goal
Courageous, committed leadership
Change is, by its’ nature, difficult and disruptive. There will be friction and resistance that comes from altering the status quo
The requirements of leadership in these efforts tend to be very high, because of the adversity and risk that can be involved, and a degree of fearlessness and willingness to ride through the difficulties is important
Where this level of leadership isn’t present, it will become easy to focus on obstacles versus solutions and to avoid taking risks that lead to suboptimized results or overall failure of the effort. If it was easy to transform, everyone would be doing it all the time
It is worth noting that, in the case of the Apollo missions, JFK wasn’t there to see the program through, yet it survived both his passing and significant events like the Apollo fire without compromising the goal itself
A question to consider in this regard: Is the goal so compelling that, if the vision holder / sponsor were to leave, the effort would still move forward? There are many large-scale efforts I’ve seen over the years where a change in leadership affects the commitment to a strategy. There may be valid reasons for this to be the case, but arguably both a worthy goal and strong leadership are necessary components in transformation overall
An aligned and supportive culture
There is a significant aspect of accomplishing a transformational agenda that places a burden on culture
On this point, the going-in position matters in the interest of mapping out the execution approach, because anything about the environment that isn’t conducive to facilitating and enabling collaboration and change will ultimately create friction that needs to be addressed and (hopefully) overcome
To the extent that the organization works in silos or that there is significant and potentially unhealthy internal competition within and across leaders, the implications of those conflicts need to be understood and mitigated early on (to the degree possible) so as to avoid what could lead to adverse impacts on the effort overall
As a leader said to me very early in my career, “There is room enough in success for everybody.” Defining success at an individual and collective level may be a worthwhile activity to consider depending on the nature of where an organization is when starting to pursue change
On this final point, I have been in the situation more than once professionally where a team worked to actively undermine transformation objectives because those efforts had an adverse impact to their broader role in an organization. This speaks, in part, to the importance of engaged, courageous leadership to bring teams into alignment, but where that leadership isn’t present, it definitely makes things more difficult. Said differently, the more established the status quo is, the harder it may resist change
A thoughtful approach
“Rome was not built in a day” is probably the best way to summarize this point
Depending on the level of complexity and degree of change involved, the more thought and attention that needs to be paid to planning out the approach itself
The Apollo program is a great example of this, because there were countless interim stages in the development of the Saturn V rocket, creating a safe environment for manned space flight, procedures for rendezvous and docking of the spacecraft, etc.
In a technology delivery environment, these can be program increments in a scaled Agile environment, selective “pilots” or “proof-of-concept” efforts, or interim deliveries in a more component-based (and service-driven) architecture. The overall point being that it’s important to map out the evolution of current to future state, allowing for testing and staging of interim goals that help reduce risk on the ultimate objectives
In a different example, when establishing an architecture capability in a large, complex organization, we established an operating model to define roles and responsibilities, but then operationalized the model in layers to help facilitate change with defined outcomes spread across multiple years. This was done purposefully and deliberately in the interest of making the changes sustainable and to gradually shift delivery culture to be more strategically-aligned, disciplined, and less siloed in the process
Agility and adaptiveness
The more advanced and innovative the transformation effort is, the more likely it will be that there is a higher degree of unknown (and knowledge risk) associated with the effort
To that end, it is highly probable that the approach to execution will evolve over time as knowledge gaps are uncovered and limitations and constraints need to be addressed and overcome
There are countless examples of this in the Apollo program, one of the early ones being the abandonment of the “Nova” rocket design, which involved a massive vehicle that ultimately was eliminated in deference to the multi-stage rocket and lunar lander / command module approach. In this case, the means for arriving at and landing on the moon was completely different than it was at the program’s inception, but the outcome was ultimately the same
I spend some time discussing these “points of inflection” in my article On Project Health and Transparency, but the important concept is not to be too prescriptive when planning a transformation effort, because execution will definitely evolve
Patience and discipline
My underlying assumption is that the level of change involved in transformation is significant and, as such, it will take time to accomplish
The balance to be struck is ultimately in managing interim deliveries in relation to the overall goals of the effort. This is where patience and discipline matter, because it is always tempting to take short cuts in the interest of “speed to market” while compromising fundamental design elements that are important to overall quality and program-level objectives (something I address in Fast and Cheap, Isn’t Good)
This isn’t to say that tradeoffs can’t or shouldn’t be made, because they often are, but rather that these be conscious choices, done through a governance process, and with a full understanding of the implications of the decisions on the ultimate transformation objectives
A relentless focus on delivery
The final dimension is somewhat obvious, but is important to mention, because I’ve encountered transformative efforts in the past that spent so much energy either on structural or theoretical aspects to their “program design” that they actually failed to deliver anything
In the case of the Apollo program, part of what makes the story so compelling is the number of times the team needed to innovate to overcome issues that arose, particularly to various design and engineering challenges
Again, this is why courageous, committed leadership is so important to transformation. The work is difficult and messy and it’s not for the faint of heart. Resilience and persistence are required to accomplish great things.
Wrapping Up
Hopefully this article has provided some areas to consider in either mapping out or evaluating the health of a transformational effort. As I covered in my article On Delivering at Speed, there are always opportunities to improve, even when you deliver a complex or high-risk effort. The point is to be disciplined and thoughtful in how you approach these efforts, so the bumps that inevitably occur are more manageable and the impact they have are minimized overall.
I hope the ideas were worth considering. Thanks for spending the time to read them. Feedback is welcome as always.
Having had multiple recent discussions related to portfolio management, I thought I’d share some thoughts relative to disciplined operations, in terms of the aforementioned subject and on the associated toolsets as well. This is a substantial topic, but I’ll try to hit the main points and address more detailed questions as and when they arise.
In getting started, given all the buzz around GenAI, I asked ChatGPT “What are the most important dimensions of portfolio management in technology?” What was interesting was that the response aligned with most discussions I’ve had over time, which is to say that it provided a process-oriented perspective on strategic alignment, financial management, and so on (a dozen dimensions overall), with a wonderfully summarized description of each (and it was both helpful and informative). The curious part was that it missed the two things I believe are most important: courageous leadership and culture.
The remainder of this article will focus more on the process dimensions (I’m not going to frame it the same as ChatGPT for simplicity), but I wanted to start with a fundamental point: these things have to be about partnership and value first and process second. If the focus becomes the process, there is generally something wrong in the partnership or the process is likely too cumbersome in how it is designed (or both).
Portfolio Management
Partnership
Portfolio management needs to start with a fundamental partnership and shared investment between business and technology leaders on the intended outcome. Fortunately, or unfortunately, where the process tends to get the most focus (and part of why I’ve heard it so much in the last couple years) is in a difficult market/economy where spend management is the focus, and the intention is largely related to optimizing costs. Broadly speaking, when times are good and businesses grow, the processes for prioritization and governance can become less rigorous in a speed-to-market mindset, the demand for IT services increases, and a significant amount of inefficiency, delivery and quality issues can arise as a result. The reality is that discipline should always be a part of the process because it’s in the best interest of creating value (long- and short-term) for an organization. That isn’t to suggest artificial constraints, unnecessary gates in a process, or anything to hinder speed-to-market. Rather, the goal of portfolio management should be to have a framework in place to manage demand through delivery in a way that facilitates predictable, timely, and quality delivery and a healthy, secure, robust, and modern underlying technology footprint that creates significant business value and competitive advantage over time. That overall objective is just as relevant during a demand surge as it is when spending is constrained.
This is where courageous leadership becomes the other critical overall dimension. It’s never possible to do everything and do it well. The key is to maintain the right mix of work, creating the right outcomes, at a sustainable pace, with quality. Where technology leaders become order takers is where a significant amount of risk can be introduced that actually hurts a business over time. The primary results being that taking on too much without thoughtful planning can result in critical resources being spread too thin, missed delivery commitments, poor quality, and substantial technical debt, all of which eventually undermine the originally intended goal of being “responsive”. This is why partnership and mutual investment in the intended outcomes matters. Not everything has to be “perfect” (and the concept itself doesn’t really exist in technology anyway), but the point is to make conscious choices on where to spend precious company resources to optimize the overall value created.
End-to-End Transparency
Shifting focus from the direction to the execution, portfolio management needs to start with visibility in three areas:
Demand management – the work being requested
Delivery monitoring – the work being executed
Value realization – the impact of what was delivered
In demand management, the focus should ideally be on both internal and external factors (e.g., business priorities, customer needs, competitive and industry trends), a thoughtful understanding of the short- and long-term value of the various opportunities, the requirements (internal and external) necessary to make them happen, and the desired timeframe for those results to be achieved. From a process standpoint, notice of involvement and request for estimate (RFE) processes tend to be important (depending on the scale and structure of an organization), along with ongoing resource allocation and forecast information to evaluate these opportunities as they arise.
Delivery monitoring is important, given the dependencies that can and do exist within and across efforts in a portfolio, the associated resource needs, and the expectations they place on customers, partners, or internal stakeholders once delivered. As and when things change, there should be awareness as to the impact of those changes on upcoming demand as well as other efforts within a managed portfolio.
Value realization is a generally underserved, but relatively important part of portfolio management, especially in spending constrained situations. This level of discipline (at an overall level) is important for two primary reasons: first, to understand the efficacy of estimation and planning processes in the interest of future prioritization and planning and, second, to ensure investments were made effectively in the right priorities. Where there is no “retrospective”, a lot of learnings may be being lost in the interest of continuous improvement and operational efficiency and effectiveness over time (ultimately having an adverse impact on business value created).
Maintaining a Balanced Portfolio
Two concepts that I believe are important to consider in how work is ultimately allocated/prioritized within an IT portfolio:
Portfolio allocation – the mix of work that is being executed on an ongoing basis
Prioritization – how work is ultimately selected and the process for doing so
A good mental model for portfolio allocation is a jigsaw puzzle. Some pieces fit together, others don’t, and whatever pieces are selected, you ultimately are striving to have an overall picture that matches what you originally saw “on the box”. While you also can operate in multiple areas of a puzzle at the same time, you also generally can’t focus in on all of them concurrently and expect to be efficient on the whole.
What I believe a “good” portfolio should include is four key areas (with an optional fifth):
Innovation – testing and experimenting in areas where you may achieve significant competitive advantage or differentiation
Business Projects – developing solutions that create or enable new or enhanced business capabilities
Modernization – using an “urban renewal” mindset to continue to maintain, simplify, rationalize, and advance your infrastructure to avoid significant end of life, technical debt, or other adverse impacts from an aging or diverse technology footprint
Security – continuing to leverage tools and technologies that manage the ever increasing exposure associated with cyber security threats (internal and external)
Compliance (where appropriate) – investing in efforts to ensure appropriate conformance and controls in regulatory environments / industries
I would argue that, regardless of the level of overall funding, these categories should always be part of an IT portfolio. There can obviously be projects or programs that provide forward momentum in more than one category above, but where there isn’t some level of investment in the “non-business project” areas, likely there will be a significant correction needed at some point of time that could be very disruptive from a business standpoint. It is probably also worth noting that I am not calling out a “technology projects” category above on purpose. From my perspective, if a project doesn’t drive one of the other categories, I’d question what value it creates. There is no value in technology for technology’s sake.
From a prioritization standpoint, I’ve seen both ends of the spectrum over the course of time: environments where there is no prioritization in place and everything with a positive business case (and even some without) are sent into execution to ones where there is an elaborate “scoring” methodology, with weights and factors and metrics organized into highly elaborate calculations that create a false sense of “rigor” in the efficacy of the process. My point of view overall is that, with the above portfolio allocation model in place, ensuring some balance in each of the critical categories of spend, a prioritization process should include some level of metrics, with an emphasis on short- and long-term business/financial impact as well as a conscious integration of the resource commitments required to execute the effort by comparison with other alternatives. As important as any process, however, is the discussions that should be happening from a business standpoint to ensure the engagement, partnership, and overall business value being delivered through the portfolio (the picture on the box) in the decisions made.
Release Management
Part of arriving at the right set of work to do also comes down to release management. A good analogy for release management is the game Tetris. In Tetris, you have various shaped blocks dropping continually into a grid, with the goal of rotating and aligning them to fit as cleanly with what is already on the radar as possible. There are and always will be gaps and the fit will never be perfect, but you can certainly approach Tetris in a way that is efficient and well-aligned or in a way that is very wasteful of the overall real estate with which you have to work.
This is great mental model for how project planning should occur. If you do a good job, resources are effectively utilized, outcomes are predictable, there is little waste, and things run fairly smoothly. If you don’t think about the process and continually inject new work into a portfolio without thoughtful planning as to dependencies and ongoing commitments, there can and likely will be significant waste, inefficiency, collateral impact, and issues in execution.
Release management comes down to two fundamental components:
Release strategy – the approach to how you organize and deliver major and minor changes to various stakeholder groups over time
Release calendar – an ongoing view of what will be delivered at various times, along with any critical “T-minus” dates and/or delivery milestones that can be part of a progress monitoring or gating process used in conjunction with delivery governance processes
From a release strategy standpoint, it is tempting in a world of product teams, DevSecOps, and CI/CD pipelines to assume everything comes down to individual product plans and their associated release schedules. The two primary issues here are the time and effort it generally takes to deploy new technology and the associated change management impact to the end users who are expected to adopt those changes as and when they occur. The more fragmented the planning process, the more business risk there is that ultimately end users or customers will be either under or overserved at any given point in time, where a thoughtful release strategy can help create predictable, manageable, and sustainable levels of change over time across a diverse set of stakeholders being served.
The release calendar, aside from being an overall summary of what will be delivered when and to whom, also should ideally provide transparency into other critical milestones in the major delivery efforts so that, in the event something moves off plan (which is a very normal occurrence in technology and medium to larger portfolios), the relationship to other ongoing efforts can be evaluated from a governance standpoint to determine whether any rebalancing or slotting of work is required.
Change Management
While I won’t spend a significant amount of time on this point, change management is often an area where I’ve seen the process managed very well and relatively poorly. The easy part is generally managing change relative to a specific project or program and that governance often exists in my experience. The issue that can arise is when the leadership overseeing a specific project is only taking into account the implications of change on that effort alone, and not the potential ripple effect of a schedule, scope, or financial adjustment on the rest of the portfolio, future demand, or on end users in the event that releases are being adjusted.
On Tooling
Pivoting from processes to tools, at an overall level, I’m generally not a fan of over-engineering the infrastructure associated with portfolio management. It is very easy for such an infrastructure to take a life of its own, become a significant administrative burden that creates little value (beyond transparency), or contain outdated and inaccurate information to the degree that the process involves too much data without underlying ownership and usage of the data obtained.
The goal is the outcome, not the tools.
To the extent that a process is being established, I’d generally want to focus on transparency (demand through delivery) and a healthy ongoing discussion of priorities in the interest of making informed decisions. Beyond that, I’ve seen a lot of reporting that doesn’t generally result in any level of actions being taken, which I consider to be very ineffective from a leadership and operational standpoint.
Again, if the process is meant to highlight a relationship problem, such as a dashboard being created requiring a large number of employees to capture timesheets to be rolled up, marked to various projects, all to have a management discussion to say “we’re over allocated and burning out our teams”, my question would be why all of that data and effort was required to “prove” something, whether there is actual trust and partnership, whether there are other underlying delivery performance issues, and so on. The process and tools are there to enable effective execution and the creation of business value, not drain effort and energy that could better be applied in delivery with administrivia.
Wrapping Up
Overall, having spent a number of years seeing well developed and executed processes as well as less robust versions of the same, effective portfolio management comes down to value creation. When the focus becomes about the process, the dashboard, the report, the metrics, something is amiss in my experience. It should about informing engaged leadership, fostering partnership, enabling decisions, and creating value. That is not to say that average utilization of critical resources (as an example) isn’t a good thing to monitor and keep in mind, but it’s what you do with that information that matters.
I hope the ideas were worth considering. Thanks for spending the time to read them. Feedback is welcome as always.
I’ve been thinking about writing this article for a while, with the premise of “what does IT look like in the future?” In a digital economy, the role of technology in The Intelligent Enterprise will certainly continue to be creating value and competitive business advantage. That being said, one can reasonably assume a few things that are true today for medium to large organizations will continue to be part of that reality as well, namely:
The technology footprint will be complex and heterogenous in its makeup. To the degree that there is a history of acquisitions, even more so
Cost will always be a concern, especially to the degree it exceeds value delivered (this is explored in my article on Optimizing the Value of IT)
Agility will be important in adopting and integrating new capabilities rapidly, especially given the rate of technology advancement only appears to be accelerating over time
Talent management will be complex given the variety of technologies present will be highly diverse (something I’ve started to address in my Workforce and Sourcing Strategy Overview article)
My hope is to provide some perspective in this article on where I believe things will ultimately move in technology, in the underlying makeup of the footprint itself, how we apply capabilities against it, and how to think about moving from our current reality to that environment. Certainly, all of the five dimensions of what I outlined in my article on Creating Value Through Strategy will continue to apply at an overall strategy level (four of which are referenced in the bullet points above).
A Note on My Selfish Bias…
Before diving further into the topic at hand, I want to acknowledge that I am coming from a place where I love software development and the process surrounding it. I taught myself to program in the third grade (in Apple Basic), got my degree in Computer Science, started as a software engineer, and taught myself Java and .Net for fun years after I stopped writing code as part of my “day job”. I love the creative process for conceptualizing a problem, taking a blank sheet of paper (or white board), designing a solution, pulling up a keyboard, putting on some loud music, shutting out distractions, and ultimately having technology that solves that problem. It is a very fun and rewarding thing to explore those boundaries of what’s possible and balance the creative aspects of conceptual design with the practical realities and physical constraints of technology development.
All that being said, insofar as this article is concerned, when we conceptualize the future of IT, I wanted to put a foundational position statement forward to frame where I’m going from here, which is:
Just because something is cool and I can do it, doesn’t mean I should.
That is a very difficult thing to internalize for those of us who live and breathe technology professionally. Pride of authorship is a real thing and, if we’re to embrace the possibilities of a more capable future, we need to apply our energies in the right way to maximize the value we want to create in what we do.
The Producer/Consumer Model
Where the Challenge Exists Today
The fundamental problem I see in technology as a whole today (I realize I’m generalizing here) is that we tend to want to be good at everything, build too much, customize more than we should, and throw caution to the wind when it comes to things like standards and governance as inconveniences that slow us down in the “deliver now” environment in which we generally operate (see my article Fast and Cheap, Isn’t Good for more on this point).
Where that leaves us is bloated, heavy, expensive, and slow… and it’s not good. For all of our good intentions, IT doesn’t always have the best reputation for understanding, articulating, or delivering value in business terms and, in quite a lot of situations I’ve seen over the years, our delivery story can be marred with issues that don’t create a lot of confidence when the next big idea comes along and we want to capitalize on the opportunity it presents.
I’m being relatively negative on purpose here, but the point is to start with the humility of acknowledging the situation that exists in a lot of medium to large IT environments, because charting a path to the future requires a willingness to accept that reality and to create sustainable change in its place. The good news, from my experience, is there is one thing going for most IT organizations I’ve seen that can be a critical element in pivoting to where we need to be: a strong sense of ownership. That ownership may show up as frustration in the status quo depending on the organization itself, but I’ve rarely seen an IT environment where the practitioners themselves don’t feel ownership for the solutions they build, maintain, and operate or have a latent desire to make them better. There may be a lack of a strategy or commitment to change in many organizations, but the underlying potential to improve is there, and that’s a very good thing if capitalized upon.
Challenging the Status Quo
Pivoting to the future state has to start with a few critical questions:
Where does IT create value for the organization?
Which of those capabilities are available through commercially available solutions?
To what degree are “differentiated” capabilities or features truly creating value? Are they exceptions or the norm?
Using an example from the past, a delivery team was charged with solving a set of business problems that they routinely addressed through custom solutions, even though the same capabilities could be accomplished through integration of one or more commercially available technologies. From an internal standpoint, the team promoted the idea that they had a rapid delivery process, were highly responsive to the business needs they were meant to address, etc. The problem is that the custom approach actually cost more money to develop, maintain, and support, was considerably more difficult to scale. Given solutions were also continually developed with a lack of standards, their ability to adopt or integrate any new technologies available on the market was non-existent. Those situations inevitably led to new custom solutions and the costs of ownership skyrocketed over time.
This situation begs the question: if it’s possible to deliver equivalent business capability without building anything “in house”, why not do just that?
In the proverbial “buy versus build” argument, these are the reasons I believe it is valid to ultimately build a solution:
There is nothing commercially available that provides the capability at a reasonable cost
I’m referencing cost here, but it’s critical to understand the TCO implications of building and maintaining a solution over time. They are very often underestimated.
There is a commercially available solution that can provide the capability, but something about privacy, IP, confidentiality, security, or compliance-related concerns makes that solution infeasible in a way that contractual terms can’t address
I mention contracting purposefully here, because I’ve seen viable solutions eliminated from consideration over a lack of willingness to contract effectively, and that seems suboptimal by comparison with the cost of building alternative solutions instead
Ultimately, we create value in business capability enabled through technology, “who” built them doesn’t matter.
Rethinking the Model
My assertion is that we will obtain the most value and acceleration of business capabilities when we shift towards a producer/consumer model in technology as a whole.
What that suggests is that “corporate IT” largely adopts the mindset of the consumer of technologies (specifically services or components) developed by producers focused purely on building configurable, leverageable components that can be integrated in compelling ways into a connected ecosystem (or enterprise) of the future.
What corporate IT “produces” should be limited to differentiated capabilities that are not commercially available, and a limited set of foundational capabilities that will be outlined below. By trying to produce less and thinking more as a consumer, this should shift the focus internally towards how technology can more effectively enable business capability and innovation and externally towards understanding, evaluating, and selecting from the best-of-breed capabilities in the market that help deliver on those business needs.
The implication, of course for those focused on custom development, would be to move towards those differentiated capabilities or entirely towards the producer side (in a product-focused environment), which honestly could be more satisfying than corporate IT can be for those with a strong development inclination.
The cumulative effect of these adjustments should lead to an influx of talent into the product community, an associated expansion of available advanced capabilities in the market, and an accelerated ability to eventually adopt and integrate those components in the corporate environment (assuming the right infrastructure is then in place), creating more business value than is currently possible where everyone tries to do too much and sub-optimizes their collective potential.
Learning from the Evolution of Infrastructure
The Infrastructure Journey
You don’t need to look very far back in time to remember when the role of a CTO was largely focused on managing data centers and infrastructure in an internally hosted environment. Along the way, third parties emerged to provide hosting services and alleviate the need to be concerned with routine maintenance, patching, and upgrades. Then converged infrastructure and the software-defined data center provided opportunities to consolidate and optimize that footprint and manage cost more effectively. With the rapid evolution of public and private cloud offerings, the arguments for managing much of your own infrastructure beyond those related specifically to compliance or legal concerns are very limited and the trajectory of edge computing environments is still evolving fairly rapidly as specialized computing resources and appliances are developed. The learning being: it’s not what you manage in house that matters, it’s the services you provide relative to security, availability, scalability, and performance.
Ok, so what happens when we apply this conceptual model to data and applications? What if we were to become a consumer of services in these domains as well? The good news is that this journey is already underway, the question is how far we should take things in the interest of optimizing the value of IT within an organization.
The Path for Data and Analytics
In the case of data, I think about this area in two primary dimensions:
How we store, manage, and expose data
How we apply capabilities to that data and consume it
In terms of storage, the shift from hosted data to cloud-based solutions is already underway in many organizations. The key levers continue to be ensuring data quality and governance, finding ways to minimize data movement and optimize data sharing (while facilitating near real-time analytics), and establishing means to expose data in standard ways (e.g., virtualization) that enable downstream analytic capabilities and consumption methods to scale and work consistently across an enterprise. Certainly, the cost of ingress and egress of data across environments is a key consideration, especially where SaaS/PaaS solutions are concerned. Another opportunity continues to be the money wasted on building data lakes (beyond archival and unstructured data needs) when viable platform solutions in that space are available. From my perspective, the less time and resources spent on moving and storing data to no business benefit, the more energy that can be applied to exposing, analyzing, and consuming that data in ways that create actual value. Simply said, we don’t create value in how or where we store data, we create value in how consume it.
On the consumption side, having a standards-based environment with a consistent method for exposing data and enabling integration will lend itself well to tapping into the ever-expanding range of analytical tools on the market, as well as swapping out one technology for another as those tools continue to evolve and advance in their capabilities over time. The other major pivot being to minimize the amount of “traditional” analytical reporting and business intelligence solutions to more dynamic data apps that leverage AI to inform meaningful end-user actions, whether that’s for internal or external users of systems. Compliance-related needs aside, at an overall level, the primary goal of analytics should be informed action, not administrivia.
The Shift In Applications
The challenge in the applications environment is arbitrating the balance between monolithic (“all in”) solutions, like ERPs, and a fully distributed component-based environment that requires potentially significant management and coordination from an IT standpoint.
Conceptually, for smaller organizations, where the core applications (like an ERP suite + CRM solution) represent the majority of the overall footprint and there aren’t a significant number of specialized applications that must interoperate with them, it likely would be appropriate and effective to standardize based on those solutions, their data model, and integration technologies.
On the other hand, the more diverse and complex the underlying footprint is for a medium- to large-size organization, there is value in looking at ways to decompose these relatively monolithic environments to provide interoperability across solutions, enable rapid integration of new capabilities into a best-of-breed ecosystem, and facilitate analytics that span multiple platforms in ways that would be difficult, costly, or impossible to do within any one or two given solutions. What that translates to, in my mind, is an eventual decline of the monolithic ERP-centric environment to more of a service-driven ecosystem where individually configured capabilities are orchestrated through data and integration standards with components provided by various producers in the market. That doesn’t necessarily align to the product strategies of individual companies trying to grow through complementary vertical or horizontal solutions, but I would argue those products should create value at an individual component level and be configurable such that swapping out one component of a larger ecosystem should still be feasible without having to abandon the other products in that application suite (that may individually be best-of-breed) as well.
Whether shifting from a highly insourced to a highly outsourced/consumption-based model for data and applications will be feasible remains to be seen, but there was certainly a time not that long ago when hosting a substantial portion of an organization’s infrastructure footprint in the public cloud was a cultural challenge. Moving up the technology stack from the infrastructure layer to data and applications seems like a logical extension of that mindset, placing emphasis on capabilities provided and value delivered versus assets created over time.
Defining Critical Capabilities
Own Only What is Essential
Making an argument to shift to a consumption-oriented mindset in technology doesn’t mean there isn’t value in “owning” anything, rather it’s meant to be a call to evaluate and challenge assumptions related to where IT creates differentiated value and to apply our energies towards those things. What can be leveraged, configured, and orchestrated, I would buy and use. What should be built? Capabilities that are truly unique, create competitive advantage, can’t be sourced in the market overall, and that create a unified experience for end users. On the final point, I believe that shifting to a disaggregated applications environment could create complexity for end users in navigating end-to-end processes in intuitive ways, especially to the degree that data apps and integrated intelligence becomes a common way of working. To that end, building end user experiences that can leverage underlying capabilities provided by third parties feels like a thoughtful balance between a largely outsourced application environment and a highly effective and productive individual consumer of technology.
Recognize Orchestration is King
Workflow and business process management is not a new concept in the integration space, but it’s been elusive (in my experience) for many years for a number of reasons. What is clear at this point is that, with the rapid expansion in technology capabilities continuing to hit the market, our ability to synthesize a connected ecosystem that blends these unique technologies with existing core systems is critical. The more we can do this in consistent ways, the more we shift towards a configurable and dynamic environment that is framework-driven, the more business flexibility and agility we will provide… and that translates to innovation and competitive advantage over time. Orchestration is a critical piece of deciding which processes are critical enough that they shouldn’t be relegated to the internal workings of a platform solution or ERP, but taken in-house, mapped out, and coordinated with the intention of creating differentiated value that can be measured, evaluated, and optimized over time. Clearly the scalability and performance of this component is critical, especially to the degree there is a significant amount of activity being managed through this infrastructure, but I believe the transparency, agility, and control afforded in this kind of environment would greatly outweigh the complexity involved in its implementation.
Put Integration in the Center
In a service-driven environment, clearly the infrastructure for integration, streaming in particular, along with enabling a publish and subscribe model for event-driven processing, will be critical for high-priority enterprise transactions. The challenge in integration conversations in my experience tends to be defining the transactions that “matter”, in terms of facilitating interoperability and reuse, and those that are suitable for point-to-point, one off connections. There is ultimately a cost for reuse when you try to scale, and there is discipline needed to arbitrate those decisions to ensure they are appropriate to business needs.
Reassess Your Applications/Services
With any medium to large organization, there is likely technology sprawl to be addressed, particularly if there is a material level of custom development (because component boundaries likely won’t be well architected) and acquired technology (because of the duplication it can cause in solutions and instances of solutions) in the landscape. Another complicating factor could be the diversity of technologies and architectures in place, depending on whether or not a disciplined modernization effort exists, the level of architecture governance in place, and rate and means by which new technologies are introduced into the environment. All of these factors call for a thoughtful portfolio strategy, to identify critical business capabilities and ensure the technology solutions meant to enable them are modern, configurable, rationalized, and integrated effectively from an enterprise perspective.
Leverage Data and Insights, Then Optimize
With analytics and insights being a critical capability to differentiated business performance, an effective data governance program with business stewardship, selecting the right core, standard data sets to enable purposeful, actionable analytics, and process performance data associated with orchestrated workflows are critical components of any future IT infrastructure. This is not all data, it’s the subset that creates significant business value to justify the investment in making it actionable. As process performance data is gathered through the orchestration approach, analytics can be performed to look for opportunities to evolve processes, configurations, rules, and other characteristics of the environment based on key business metrics to improve performance over time.
Monitor and Manage
With the expansion of technologies and components, internal and external to the enterprise environment, having the ability to monitor and detect issues, proactively take action, and mitigate performance, security, or availability issues will become increasingly important. Today’s tools are too fragmented and siloed to achieve the level of holistic understanding that is needed between hosted and cloud-based environments, including internal and external security threats in the process.
Secure “Everything”
While zero trust and vulnerability management risk is expanding at a rate that exceeds an organization’s ability to mitigate it, treating security as a fundamental requirement of current and future IT environments is a given. The development of a purposeful cyber strategy, prioritizing areas for tooling and governance effectively, and continuing to evolve and adapt that infrastructure will be core to the DNA of operating successfully in any organization. Security is not a nice to have, it’s a requirement.
The Role of Standards and Governance
What makes the framework-driven environment of the future work is ultimately having meaningful standards and governance, particularly for data and integration, but extending into application and data architecture, along with how those environments are constructed and layered to facilitate evolution and change over time. Excellence takes discipline and, while that may require some additional investment in cost and time during the initial and ongoing stages of delivery, it will easily pay itself off in business agility, operating cost/ cost of ownership, and risk/exposure to cyber incidents over time.
The Lending Example
Having spent time a number of years ago understanding and developing strategy in the consumer lending domain, the similarities in process between direct and indirect lending, prime and specialty / sub-prime, from simple products like credit card to more complex ones like mortgage is difficult to ignore. That being said, it isn’t unusual for systems to exist in a fairly siloed manner, from application to booking, from document preparation, into the servicing process itself.
What’s interesting, from my perspective, is where the differentiation actually exists across these product sets: in the rules and workflow being applied across them, while the underlying functions themselves are relatively the same. As an example, one thing that differentiates a lender is their risk management policy, not necessarily the tool they use to assess to implement their underwriting rules or scoring models per se. Similarly, whether pulling a credit score is part of the front end of the process in something like credit card and an intermediate step in education lending, having a configurable workflow engine could enable origination across a diverse product set with essentially the same back-end capabilities and likely at a lower operating cost.
So why does it matter? Well, to the degree that the focus shifts from developing core components that implement relatively commoditized capability to the rules and processes that enable various products to be delivered to end consumers, the speed with which products can be developed, enhanced, modified, and deployed should be significantly improved.
Ok, Sounds Great, But Now What?
It Starts with Culture
At the end of the day, even the best designed solutions come down to culture. As I mentioned above, excellence takes discipline and, at times, patience and thoughtfulness that seems to contradict the speed with which we want to operate from a technology (and business) standpoint. That being said, given the challenges that ultimately arise when you operate without the right standards, discipline, and governance, the outcome is well worth the associated investments. This is why I placed courageous leadership as the first pillar in the five dimensions outlined in my article on Excellence by Design. Leadership is critical and, without it, everything else becomes much more difficult to accomplish.
Exploring the Right Operating Model
Once a strategy is established to define the desired future state and a culture to promote change and evolution is in place, looking at how to organize around managing that change is worth consideration. I don’t necessarily believe in “all in” operating approaches, whether it is a plan/build/run, product-based orientation, or some other relatively established model. I do believe that, given leadership and adaptability are critically needed for transformational change, looking at how the organization is aligned to maintaining and operating the legacy environment versus enabling establishment and transition to the future environment is something to explore. As an example, rather than assuming a pure product-based orientation, which could mushroom into a bloated organization design where not all leaders are well suited to manage change effectively, I’d consider organizing around a defined set of “transformation teams” that operate in a product-oriented/iterative model, but basically take on the scope of pieces of the technology environment, re-orient, optimize, modernize, and align them to the future operating model, then transition those working assets to different leaders that maintain or manage those solutions in the interest of moving to the next set of transformation targets. This should be done in concert with looking for ways to establish “common components” teams (where infrastructure like cloud platform enablement can be a component as well) that are driven to produce core, reusable services or assets that can be consumed in the interest of ultimately accelerating delivery and enabling wider adoption of the future operating model for IT.
Managing Transition
One of the consistent challenges with any kind of transformative change is moving between what is likely a very diverse, heterogenous environment to one that is standards-based, governed, and relatively optimized. While it’s tempting to take on too much scope and ultimately undermine the aspirations of change, I believe there is a balance to be struck in defining and establishing some core delivery capabilities that are part of the future infrastructure, but incrementally migrating individual capabilities into that future environment over time. This is another case where disciplined operations and disciplined delivery come into play so that changes are delivered consistently but also in a way that is sustainable and consistent with the desired future state.
Wrapping Up
While a certain level of evolution is guaranteed as part of working in technology, the primary question is whether we will define and shape that future or be continually reacting and responding to it. My belief is that we can, through a level of thoughtful planning and strategy, influence and shape the future environment to be one that enables rapid evolution as well as accelerated integration of best-of-breed capabilities at a pace and scale that is difficult to deliver today. Whether we’ll truly move to a full producer/consumer type environment that is service based, standardized, governed, orchestrated, fully secured, and optimized is unlikely, but falling short of excellence as an aspiration would still leave us in a considerably better place than where we are today… and it’s a journey worth making in my opinion.
I hope the ideas were worth considering. Thanks for spending the time to read them. Feedback is welcome as always.
It’s been nearly 20 years since I first worked on workforce and sourcing strategy for IT at Allstate Insurance and I’ve had this topic in my backlog for quite some time. Unfortunately (or fortunately depending on how you want to see it), in organizing my thoughts on the various dimensions that come into play, it became clear that this is a large landscape to cover, mostly because you can’t establish a workforce and sourcing strategy without exploring your overall IT operating model, so I’m going to break it down into a series of articles that will hopefully make sense independently as part of the whole.
Overall, this series should address a set of fundamental challenges facing IT today, namely:
How to address emerging technologies in relation to an existing portfolio of IT work
Advances like Artificial Intelligence (AI), Cloud Computing, and Cyber Security have added complexity to the IT landscape that isn’t easy to integrate into organizations effectively without a clear strategy
How to optimize value/cost in a challenging economic environment
Cost consciousness can drive adjustments in workforce and sourcing strategies that can have detrimental impact on operating performance if it not handled in a thoughtful manner
How to leverage sourcing to drive competitive advantage and enable relentless innovation
Sourcing capabilities in a thoughtful manner creates organizational agility whereas an ineffective strategy can do the opposite
How to monitor, govern, and manage change over time
Finally, even if all of the above are identified and approached effectively, technology capabilities continue to advance more rapidly than any organization can integrate it and the ability to evolve a strategy is critical if there will be sustainability over time
The remainder of this article will provide a brief overview of each of the areas I will explore in future posts.
Where You Are
Like any other strategy work, a foundation needs to be established on the current state, both in terms of internal and external capabilities. Without transparency, managing the overall workforce and understanding the labor components of operating cost becomes extremely difficult.
Some key questions that will be addressed in this area:
How to organize information around the mix of skills in place across IT and where they are coming from (internally, externally)
How and when a competency model becomes useful for core IT roles (business analyst, PM/Scrum Master, architect, data engineer, data scientist, etc.)
How organizational scale and demand fluctuation affects an IT operating model
How organizational design influences an IT operating model
How to think about the engagement of third-party providers (augmentation, consultants, integrators, product/service providers)
How to think about the distribution of resources against an overall IT portfolio of work
How enterprise standards and governance play a role in a sourced IT environment
As one would expect, laying the foundation for understanding the current IT operating model is a significant step in setting the stage for transforming and optimizing it and, consequently, how the data is organized can be important.
What You Need
This is the “crystal ball” step, because it involves a blend of the tangible and intangible, the combination of what you know (in terms of current and projected business demand and your overall technology strategy) and what is based on a level of speculation (in terms of industry/competitive strategy and technology innovation/trends). The good news is that, if you think about your workforce and sourcing strategy as a “living” thing you manage, govern, and adjust over time, the need to establish direction doesn’t need to be a cumbersome, time-consuming process, because it’s a snapshot meant to inform near-term decisions based on longer-term assumptions that can be adjusted as required. This is where a lot of strategy work breaks down in my experience: over-analyzing past the point of value being created, with a significant loss in agility being created in the process. “Operating with Agility” (as I refer to it in my Excellence By Design article) is really about understanding how to build for resiliency and adaptability, because change is a constant reality that no “long-term planning” is ever going to address. The goal is to build an IT operating model and associated culture that flexes and adjusts continuously, with minimal friction as changes in direction inevitably occur.
Some key questions that will be addressed in this area:
How to think about the relationship of internal needs and external business conditions in establishing demand for IT capabilities
How to align technology strategy and ongoing marketplace trends to evaluate the mix of capabilities and skills required in the near- and long-term
How to determine where it makes sense to retain versus source various capabilities required of IT over time
How to think about the level, role, and importance of standards and governance in an overall portfolio, especially where sourcing is involved
Again, the critical concept from my perspective in establishing strategy is not to ever assume it is a static, fixed thing. I think of strategy development as establishing goals and an associated operating framework that allows you to adjust as required without requiring a disruptive level of change, because the more disruptive a change is, the more likely it will have a negative impact on your ability to deliver meaningful business value, potentially for an extended period of time. Culture is an important component to all this as well because I’ve experienced situations over the years where, because a strategy has a significant investment associated with it (financial or otherwise), there is a reticence to evolve or adapt it. This is predicated on the presumption that evolution is a sign of poor leadership or a lack of vision in the original articulation of an opportunity when, in fact, the ability to adapt to changing circumstances is exactly the opposite, provided the overall value to be obtained is still there.
How You Supply It
In establishing a strategy, I think of it in three basic components: what you do yourself (your workforce strategy), what you leverage partners for (your sourcing strategy), and how you purchase those products/services (your procurement strategy). Again, my experience has been varied in this regard, where I’ve seen fairly developed and defined strategies in place and then ones that are not well defined. The consequence of a poorly defined strategy in any of these areas translates directly into adverse performance, excess cost, lost agility, or some combination of those things based on the circumstances, governance model, and partners involved.
Some key questions that will be addressed in this area:
How to think about the capabilities and skills that should be retained within an organization versus those that can be supplied by external providers
How to structure and organize a sourcing strategy to manage cost/quality, as well as provide resiliency and agility in relation to an IT portfolio
How to think about captive IT scenarios by comparison with outsourcing or working in a distributed team environment
How contracting and procurement decisions play a role in influencing quality and sustainability
The good news is that a workforce and sourcing strategy isn’t and doesn’t need to be rocket science. The bad news is that developing one takes a level of discipline and transparency that isn’t always easy to manage, especially in larger organizations. I would argue that the cost efficiency and quality/service level gains easily justify any necessary investments to having them established, but the hurdle to overcome, as with many things with pursuing excellence in IT, is in having the leadership mindset to make deliberate choices at an enterprise- (rather than at a transactional/project- or program-) level.
How You Develop It
“People are our greatest asset”… I’m sure at least half the readers of this article have heard that said (or seen it written) at least once if not many, many times if you’ve worked enough years and/or in multiple organizations. Unfortunately, the number of times I’ve seen either that or a variation of it expressed where no actual commitment to employee development or associated framework to provide for learning and development was in place is why I can’t write or say the expression without cringing. Again, the good news is that having a talent strategy isn’t complicated, the bad news is that the leadership commitment to living into one is generally the issue.
Some key questions that will be addressed in this area:
How to think about specialization versus core skills in the context of an IT operating model
How to organize an education curriculum in terms of just-in-time versus mandatory training
How to frame education needs in relation to ongoing delivery work
How to integrate employee development as part of a workforce strategy
How to think about demographics in the context of a workforce strategy
From my experiences of education requirements in my software development days at Price Waterhouse thirty-two years ago to the TechFluency program that was part of my team’s responsibilities (most recently) as the CTO of Georgia-Pacific, including what I experienced in various consulting and other organizations along the way, I’ve definitely seen a lot of variations in approach. What I would say at an overall level (connecting to “Investing in Employee Development” in my Creating Value Through Strategy article) is that, however structured and defined a talent strategy is, what shows up to employees is the commitment to their development in practice. Classes and coursework that no one is given time to take and development that isn’t supported as a core part of an organization’s culture will definitely have a negative impact on retention and operating performance over time.
Where You Want to Be
While the majority of topics (and associated articles) to this point will likely focus on concepts, structure, and operating mechanics related to people, this area is where I mostly likely will lean towards a point of view on “what good looks like” in terms of an IT operating model and how I think about it being constructed based on various scenarios/business needs. As with anything, there is no “right answer” in how to structure, staff, and source a technology organization, the point is thinking about how to do so in a way that is thoughtful, deliberate, and is aligned to the needs of the organization it supports.
Some key questions that will be addressed in this area:
How to think about the mix of skills (existing and emerging) in relation to your workforce
How to align partners to the right work in the right way to enable innovation and agility, while optimizing value/cost
My point of view on cloud computing, analytics, and cyber security in relation to an IT talent pool
Again, as there is no “right” way to define an IT organization, likely the way I will approach this topic is to consider a few different scenarios in terms of organizational/business needs and then offer ways to think about staffing and sourcing IT to support and enable those needs, likely with some core elements (like courageous leadership) that are critical for establishing a culture of excellence under any circumstance.
How You Manage It
With a model being establish for how to structure and operate an IT organization, there is a need to establish the ongoing mechanism to evolve over time. From an IT operation standpoint, this is made up of three primary component from my perspective: how you ensure you’re creating business value and desired outcomes (your IT governance processes), how you manage internal talent (your performance management process), and how you work with third-party partners (your vendor management process). There is a nuance on the third dimension where captive entities are involved, but for the sake of simplicity at a high-level, it’s reasonable to assume that can be managed through either the second or third capability or some combination thereof, depending on the operating model. Again, in my experience, I’ve seen and helped establish fairly robust processes for each of these things but also seen far less structured models as well. As with any form of governance, my personal bias is to focus on how these things enable delivery and create value, not to create administrative overhead.
Some key questions that will be addressed in this area:
How to clarify the relationship between workforce and sourcing strategy and business metrics that matter from an IT standpoint
How to think about where standards and governance are important in overall IT performance in relation to a portfolio of work
How proactive versus reactiveperformance management affects IT effectiveness and value/cost from a business standpoint
How to structure and approach partner governance in a consistent manner that promotes overall service and product quality
In my article on Optimizing the Value of IT, I write about the continuous improvement cycle that begins with transparency and governance that ultimately inform changes that will subsequently lead to future improvement and so on. There is little as important to establishing excellence in IT as managing the workforce and sourcing of work effectively. That being said, since technology is an ever-evolving landscape of change, the ability to monitor and adjust the various levers influencing operating performance is equally important. To the degree these dimensions are considered (e.g., “how are we going to measure that attribute/decision on an ongoing basis” or “how will we know that’s been successful”) when establishing the strategy itself can help promote the learning and adjustments needed to remain agile and responsive to change over time.
“Peeling the Onion”
With all of the above questions established, here is a quick preview of the next layer of the model being described above. What has been covered in the previous section is largely a level below each of the boxes presented, but this framework represents how I’ve broken down the topic for future exploration and discussion.
Wrapping Up
Having even written this overview, it’s probably clear why workforce and sourcing strategy has been on my backlog for such a long time. It’s a topic akin to describing the ocean. There isn’t a way to define and explore it at a high-level that does justice to the nuances and complexities involved, particularly if you want to develop one in a disciplined way that creates the most value. That being said, I believe having a structured approach is well worth the investment in the business value it unlocks (at the right level of cost).
How the subsequent articles will unfold is to be determined, as I haven’t written any of them yet, but I’m looking forward to seeing where the journey will lead and discussion that may ensue.
I hope the ideas were worth considering. Thanks for spending the time to read them. Feedback is welcome as always.
Having touched on the importance of quality in accelerating value in my latest article Creating Value Through Strategy, I wanted to dive a little deeper into the topic of “speed versus quality”.
For those who may be unfamiliar, there is a general concept in project delivery that the three primary dimensions against which you operate are good (the level of effort you put into ensuring a product is well architected and meets functional and non-functional requirements at the time of delivery), fast (how quickly or often you produce results), and cheap (your ability to deliver the product/solution at a reasonable cost).
The general assumption is that the realities of delivery lead you to having to prioritize two of the three (e.g., you can deliver a really good product fast, but it won’t be cheap; or you can deliver a really good product at a low cost, but it will take a lot of time [therefore not be “fast”]). What this translates to, in my experience, has nearly always been that speed and cost are prioritized highest, with quality being the item compromised.
Where this becomes an issue is in the nature of the tradeoff that was made and the longer-term implications of those decisions. Quality matters. My assertion is that, where quality is compromised, “cheap” is only true in the short-term and definitely not the case overall.
The remainder of this article will explore several dimensions to consider when making these decisions. This isn’t to say that there aren’t cases where there is a “good enough” level of quality to deliver a meaningful or value-added product or service. My experience, however, has historically been that the concepts like “we didn’t have the time” or “we want to launch and learn” are often used as a substitute for discipline in delivery and ultimately undermine business value creation.
Putting Things in Perspective
Dimensions That Matter
I included the diagram above to put how I think of product delivery into perspective. In the prioritization of good, fast, and cheap, what often occurs is that too much focus and energy goes into the time spent getting a new capability or solution to market, but not enough on what happens once it is there and the implications of that. The remainder of this section will explore aspects of that worth considering in the overall context of product/solution development.
Some areas to consider in how a product is designed and delivered:
Architecture
Is the design of the solution modular and component- or service-based? This is important to the degree that capabilities may emerge over time that surpass what was originally delivered and, in a best-of-breed environment, you would ideally like to be able to replace part of a solution without having to fundamentally rearchitect or materially refactor the overall solution
Does the solution conform to enterprise standards and guidelines? I’ve seen multiple situations where concurrent, large-scale efforts were designed and developed without consideration for their interoperability and adherence to “enterprise” standards. By comparison, developing on a “program-“ or “project-level”, or in working with a monolithic technology/solution (e.g., with a relatively closed ERP system), creates technology silos that lead to a massive amount of technical debt as it is almost never the case that there is leadership appetite for refactoring or rewriting core aspects of those solutions over time
Is the solution cloud-native and does it support containerization to enable deployment of workloads across public and private clouds as well as the edge? In the highly complex computing environments of today, especially in industries like Manufacturing, the ability to operate and distribute solutions to optimize availability, performance, and security (at a minimum) is critical. Where these dimensions aren’t taken into account, there would likely be almost an immediate need for modernization to offset the risk of technology obsolescence at some point in the next year or two
Security
Does the product or service leverage enterprise technologies and security standards? Managing vulnerabilities and migrating towards “zero trust” is a critical aspect of today’s technology environment, especially to the degree that workloads are deployed on the public cloud. Where CI/CD pipelines are developed as part of a standard cloud platform strategy with integrated security tooling, the enterprise level ability to manage, monitor, and mitigate security risk will be significant improved
Integration
Does the product or service leverage enterprise technologies and integration standards? Interoperability with other internal and external systems, as well as your ability to introduce and leverage new capabilities and rationalize redundant solutions over time is fundamentally dependent on the manner in which applications are architected, designed, and integrated with the rest of a technology footprint. Having worked in environments with well-defined standards and strictly enforced governance versus ones where neither were in place, the level of associated complexity and costs in the ultimate operating environments was materially different
Data Standards
Does the product or service align to overall master data requirements for the organization? Master data management can be a significant challenge from a data governance standpoint, which is why giving this consideration up front in a product development lifecycle is extremely important. Where it isn’t considered in design, the end result could be master data that doesn’t map or align to other hierarchies in place, complicating integration and analytics intended to work across solutions and the “cleanup” required of data stewards (to the degree that they are in place) could be expensive and difficult post-deployment
Are advanced analytics aspirations taken into account in the design process itself? This is an area becoming increasingly important given AI-enabled (“intelligent”) applications as discussed in my article on The Intelligent Enterprise. Designing with data standards in mind and an eye towards how it will be used to enable and drive analytics, likely in concert with data in other adjacent or downstream systems is a step that can save considerable effort and cost downstream when properly addressed early in the product development cycle
“Good Enough”/Responsive Architecture
All the above points noted, I believe architecture needs to be appropriate to the nature of the solution being delivered. Having worked in environments where architecture standards were very “ivory tower”/theoretical in nature and made delivery extremely complex and costly versus ones where architecture was ignored and the delivery environment was essentially run with an “ask for forgiveness” or cowboy/superhero mentality, the ideal state in my mind should be somewhere in between, where architecture is appropriate to the delivery circumstances, but also mindful of longer-term implications of the solution being delivered so as to minimize technical debt and further interoperability in a connected enterprise ecosystem environment.
Thinking Total Cost of Ownership
What makes product/software development challenging is the level of unknowns that exist. At any given time, when estimating a new endeavor, you have the known, the known unknown, and the complete unknown (because what you’re doing is outside your team’s collective experience). The first two components can be incorporated into an estimation model that can be used for planning and the third component can be covered through some form of “contingency” load that is added to an estimate to account for those blind spots to a degree.
Where things get complicated is, once execution begins, the desire to meet delivery commitments (and the associated pressure thereof) can influence decisions being made on an ongoing basis. This is complicated by the normal number of surprises that occur during any delivery effort of reasonable scale and complexity (things don’t work as expected, decisions or deliverables are delayed, requirements become increasingly clear over time, etc.). The question is whether a project has both disciplined, courageous leadership in place and the appropriate level of governance to make sure that, as decisions need to made in the interest of arbitrating quality, cost, time, and scope, that they are done with total cost of ownership in mind.
As an example, there was a point in the past where I encountered a large implementation program ($100MM+ in scale) with a timeline of over a year to deploy an initial release. During the project, the team announced that all the pivotal architecture decisions needed to be made within a one-week window of time, suggesting that the “dates wouldn’t be met” if that wasn’t done. That logic was then used at a later point to decide that standards shouldn’t be followed for other key aspects of the implementation in the interest of “meeting delivery commitments”. What was unfortunate in this situation was that, not only were good architecture and standards not implemented, the project encountered technical challenges (likely due to one or two of those root causes, among other things) that caused it to be delivered over a year late regardless. The resulting solution was more difficult to maintain, integrate, scale, or leverage for future business needs. In retrospect, was any “speed” obtained through that decision making process and the lack of quality in the solution? Certainly not, and this situation unfortunately isn’t unique to larger scale implementations in my experience. In these cases, the ongoing run rate of the program itself can become an excuse to make tactical decisions that ultimately create a very costly and complex solution to manage and maintain in the production environment, none of which anyone typically wants to remediate or rewrite post-deployment.
So, given the above example, the argument could be made that the decisions were a result of inexperience or pure unknowns that existed when the work was estimated and planned to begin with, which is a fair point. Two questions come to mind in terms of addressing this situation:
Are ongoing changes being reviewed through a change control process in relation to project cost, scope, and deadline, or are the longer-term implications in terms of technical debt and operating cost of ownership also considered? Compromise is a reality of software delivery and there isn’t a “perfect world” situation pretty much ever in my experience. That being said, these choices should be conscious ones, made with full transparency and in a thoughtful manner, which is often not the case, especially when the pressures surrounding a project are high to begin with.
Are the “learnings” obtained on an ongoing basis factored into the estimation and planning process so as to mitigate future needs to compromise quality when issues arise? Having been part of and worked closely with large programs over many years, there isn’t a roadmap that ever plays out in practice how it is drawn up on paper at the outset. That being said, every time the roadmap is revised, as pivot points in the implementation are reached and plans adjusted, are learnings being incorporated such that mistakes or sacrifices to quality aren’t being repeated over and over again. This is a tangible thing that can be monitored and governed over time. In the case of Agile-driven efforts, it would be as simple as looking for patterns in the retrospectives (post-sprint) to see whether the process is improving or repeating the same mistakes (a very correctible situation with disciplined delivery leadership)
Speed on the Micro- Versus Macro-Scale
I touched on this somewhat in the previous point, but the point to call out here is that tactical decisions made in the interest of compromising quality for the “upcoming release” can and often do create technical issues that will ultimately make downstream delivery more difficult (i.e., slower and more costly).
As an example, there was a situation in the past where a team integrated technology from multiple vendors that provided the same underlying capability (i.e., the sourcing strategy didn’t have a “preferred provider”, so multiple buys were done over time using different partners, sometimes in parallel). In each case, the desire from the team was to deliver solutions as rapidly as possible in the interest of “meeting customer demand” and they were recognized and rewarded for doing so at speed. The problem with this situation was that the team perceived standards as an impediment to the delivery process and, therefore, either didn’t leverage any or did so on a transactional or project-level basis. Where this became problematic was where there became a need to:
Replace a given vendor – other partners couldn’t be leveraged because they weren’t integrated in a common way
Integrate across partners – the technology stack was different and defined unique to each use case
Run analytics across solutions – data standards weren’t in place so that underlying data structures were in a common format
The point of sharing the example is that, at a micro-level, the team’s approach seems fast, cheap, and appropriate. The accumulation of the technical debt, however, is substantial when you scale and operate under that mindset for an extended period of time, and it does both limit your ability to leverage those investments, migrate to new solutions, introduce new capabilities quickly and effectively, and integrate across individual point solutions where needed. Some form of balance should be in place to optimize the value created and cost of ownership over time. Without it, the technical debt will undermine the business value in time.
Consulting Versus Corporate Environments
Having worked in both corporate and consulting environments, it’s interesting to me that there can be a different perspective on quality depending on where you sit (and the level of governance in place) in relation to the overall delivery.
Generally speaking, it’s somewhat common on the corporate side of the equation to believe that consultants lack the knowledge of your systems and business to deliver solutions you could yourself “if you had the time”. By contrast, on the consulting side, ideally, you believe that clients are thinking of you as a “hired gun” when it comes to implementations, because you’re bringing in necessary skills and capacity to deliver on something they may not have the experience or bench strength to deliver on their own.
So, with both sides thinking they know more than the other and believing they are capable of doing a quality job (no one does a poor job on purpose), why is quality so often left unattended on larger scale efforts?
On this point:
The delivery pressures and unknowns I mentioned above apply regardless of who is executing a project.
A successful delivery in many cases requires a blend of internal and external resources (to the extent they are being leveraged) so there is a balance of internal knowledge and outside expertise to deliver the best possible solution from an objective standpoint.
Finally, you can’t deliver to standards of excellence that aren’t set. I’ve seen and worked in environments (both as a “client” and as a consultant) where there were very exacting standards and expectations of quality and ones where quality wasn’t governed at the level it should be
I didn’t want to belabor this aspect of delivery, but it is interesting how the perspective and influence over quality decisions can be different depending on one’s role in the delivery process (client, consultant, or otherwise).
Wrapping Up
Bringing things back to the overall level, the point of writing this article was to provide some food for thought on the good, fast, cheap concept and the reality that, in larger and more complex delivery situations, the cost of speed isn’t always evaluated effectively. There is no “perfect world”, for certain, but having discipline, thinking through some of the dimensions above, and making sure the tradeoffs made are thoughtful and transparent in nature could help improve value/cost delivered over time.
I hope the ideas were worth considering. Thanks for spending the time to read them. Feedback is welcome as always.
One of the things that I’ve come to appreciate over the course of time is the value of what I call “actionable strategy”. By this, I mean a blend of the conceptual and practical,a framework that can be used to set direction and organize execution without being too prescriptive, while still providing a vision and mental model for leadership and teams to understand and align on the things that matter.
Without a strategy, you can have an organization largely focused on execution, but that tends to create significant operating or technical debt and complexity over time, ultimately having an adverse impact on competitive advantage, slowing delivery, and driving significant operating cost. Similarly, a conceptual strategy that doesn’t provide enough structure to organize and facilitate execution tends to create little impact over time as teams don’t know how to apply it in a practical sense, or it can add significant overhead and cost in the administration required to map its strategic objectives to the actual work being done across the organization (given they aren’t aligned up front or at all). The root causes of these situations can vary, but the important point is to recognize the criticality of an actionable business-aligned technology strategy and its role in guiding execution (and thereby the value technology can create for an organization).
In reality, there are so many internal and external factors that can influence priorities in an organization over time, that one’s ability to provide continuity of direction with clear conceptual outcomes (while not being too hung up on specific “tasks”) can be important in both creating the conditions for transformation and sustainable change without having to “reset” that direction very often. This is the essence of why framework-centric thinking is so important in my mind. Sustainable change takes time, because it’s a mindset, a culture, and way of operating. If a strategy is well-conceived and directionally correct, the activities and priorities within that model may change, but the ability to continue to advance the organization’s goals and create value should still exist. Said differently: Strategies are difficult to establish and operationalize. The less you have to do a larger-scale reset of them, the better. It’s also far easier to adjust priorities and activities than higher-level strategies, given the time it takes (particularly in larger organizations) to establish awareness of a vision and strategy. This is especially true if the new direction represents a departure from what has been in place for some time.
To be clear, while there is a relationship between this topic and what I covered in my article on Excellence By Design, the focus there is more on the operation and execution of IT within an organization, not so much the vision and direction of what you’d ideally like to accomplish overall.
The rest of this article will focus on the various dimensions that I believe compromise a good strategy, how I think about them, and ways that they could create measurable impact. There is nothing particularly “IT-specific” about these categories (i.e., this is conceptually akin to ‘better, faster, cheaper’) and I would argue they could apply equally well to other areas of a business, but differ in how they translate on an operating level.
In relation to the Measures outlined in each of the sections below, a few notes for awareness:
I listed several potential areas to consider and explore in each section, along with some questions that come to mind with each.
The goal wasn’t to be exhaustive or suggest that I’d recommend tracking any or all of them on an “IT Scorecard”, rather to provide some food for thought
My general point of view is that it’s better to track as little as possible from an “IT reporting” standpoint,unless there is intention to leverage those metrics to drive action and decisions. My experience with IT metrics historically is that they are overreported and underleveraged (and therefore not a good use of company time and resources). I touch on some of these concepts in the article On Project Health and Transparency
Innovate
What It Is and Why It Matters
Stealing from my article on Excellence By Design: “Relentless innovation is the notion that anything we are doing today may be irrelevant tomorrow, and therefore we should continuously improve and reinvent our capabilities to ones that create the most long-term value.”
Technology is evolving at a rate faster than most organizations’ ability to adopt or integrate those capabilities effectively. As a result, a company’s ability to leverage these advances becomes increasingly challenging over time, especially to the degree that the underlying environment isn’t architected in a manner to facilitate their integration and adoption.
The upshot of this is that the benefits to be achieved could be marginalized as any attempts to capitalize on these innovations will likely become point solutions or one-off efforts that don’t scale or create a different form of technical debt over time. This is very evident in areas like analytics where capabilities like GenAI and other artificial intelligence-oriented solutions are only as effective as the underlying architecture of the environment into which they are integrated. Are wins possible that could be material from a business standpoint? Absolutely yes. Will it be easy to scale them if you don’t invest in foundational things to enable that? Very likely not.
The positive side of this is that technology is in a much different place than it was ten or twenty years ago, where it can significantly improve or enhance a company’s capabilities or competitive position. Even in the most arcane of circumstances, there likely is an opportunity for technology to fuel change and growth in a digital business environment, whether that is internal to the operations of a company, or through its interactions with customers, suppliers, or partners (or some combination thereof).
Key Dimensions to Consider
Thinking about this area, a number of dimensions came to mind:
Promoting Courageous Leadership
This begins by acknowledging that leadership is critical to setting the stage for innovation over time
There are countless examples of organizations that were market leaders who ultimately lost their competitive advantage due to complacency or an inability to see or respond to changing market conditions effectively
Fueling Competitive Advantage
This is about understanding how technology helps create competitive advantage for a company and focusing in on those areas rather than trying to do everything in an unstructured or broad-based way, which would likely diffuse focus, spread critical resources, and marginalize realized benefits over time
Investing in Disciplined Experimentation
This is about having a well-defined process to enable testing out new business and technology capabilities in a way that is purposeful and that creates longer-term benefits
The process aspect of this important as it is relatively easy to spin up a lot of “innovation and improvement” efforts without taking the time to understand and evaluate the value and implications of those activities in advance. The problem of this being that you can either end up wasting money where the return on investment isn’t significant or that you can develop concepts that can’t easily be scaled to production-level solutions, which will limit their value in practice
Enabling Rapid Technology Adoption
This dimension is about understanding the role of architecture, standards, and governance in integrating and adopting new technical capabilities over time
As an example, an organization with an established component (or micro-service) architecture and integration strategy should be able to test and adopt new technologies much faster than one without them. That isn’t to suggest it can’t be done, but rather that the cost and time to execute those objectives will increase as delivery becomes more of a brute force situation than one enabled by a well-architected environment
Establishing a Culture of Sustainability
Following onto the prior point, as new solutions are considered, tested, and adopted, product lifecycle considerations should come into play.
Specifically, as part of the introduction of something new, is it possible to replace or retire something that currently exists?
At some point, when new technologies and solutions are introduced in a relatively ungoverned manner, it will only be a matter of time before the cost and complexity of the technology footprint will choke an organization’s ability to continue to both leverage those investments and to introduce new capabilities rapidly.
Measuring Impact
Several ways to think about impact:
Competitive Advantage
What is a company’s absolute position relative to its competition in markets where they compete and on metrics relative to those markets?
Market Differentiation
Is innovation fueling new capabilities not offered by competitors?
Is the capability gap widening or narrowing over time?
I separated these first two points, though they are arguably flavors of the same thing, to emphasize the importance of looking at both capabilities and outcomes from a competitive standpoint. One can be doing very well from a competitive standpoint relative to a given market, but have competitors developing or extending their capabilities faster, in which case, there could be risk of the overall competitive position changing in time
Reduced Time to Adopt New Solutions
What is the average length of time between a major technology advancement (e.g., cloud computing, artificial intelligence) becoming available and an organization’s ability to perform meaningful experiments and/or deploy it in a production setting?
What is the ratio of investment on infrastructure in relation to new technologies meant to leverage it over time?
Reduced Technical Debt
What percentage of experiments turn into production solutions?
How easy is to scale those production solutions (vertically or horizontally) across an enterprise?
Are new innovations enabling the elimination of other legacy solutions? Are they additive and complementary or redundant at some level?
Accelerate
What It Is and Why It Matters
“Take as much as time as you need, let’s make sure we do it right, no matter what.” This is a declaration that I don’t think I’ve ever heard in nearly thirty-two years in technology. Speed matters, “first mover advantage”, or any other label one could place upon the desire to produce value at a pace that is at or beyond an organization’s ability to integrate and assimilate all the changes.
That being said, the means to speed is not just a rush to iterative methodology. The number of times I’ve heard or seen “Agile Transformation” (normally followed by months of training people on concepts like “Scrum meetings”, “Sprints”, and “User Stories”) posed as a silver bullet to providing disproportionate delivery results goes beyond my ability to count and it’s unfortunate. Similarly, I’ve heard glorified versions of perpetual hackathons championed, where the delivery process involves cobbling together solutions in a “launch and learn” mindset that ultimately are poorly architected, can’t scale, aren’t repeatable, create massive amounts of technical debt, and never are remediated in production. These are cases where things done in the interest of “speed” actually destroy value over time.
That being said, moving from monolithic to iterative (or product-centric) approaches and DevSecOps is generally a good thing to do. Does this remedy issues in a business/IT relationship, solve for a lack of architecture, standards and governance, address an overall lack of portfolio-level prioritization, or a host of other issues that also affect operating performance and value creation over time? Absolutely not.
The dimensions discussed in this section are meant to highlight a few areas beyond methodology that I believe contribute to delivering value at speed, and ones that are often overlooked in the interest of a “quick fix” (which changing methodology generally isn’t).
Key Dimensions to Consider
Dimensions that are top of mind in relation to this area:
Optimizing Portfolio Investments
Accelerating delivery begins by first taking a look at the overall portfolio makeup and ensuring the level of ongoing delivery is appropriate to the capabilities of the organization. This includes utilization of critical knowledge resources (e.g., planning on a named resource versus an FTE-basis), leverage of an overall release strategy, alignment of variable capacity to the right efforts, etc.
Said differently, when an organization tries to do too much, it tends to do a lot of things ineffectively, even under the best of circumstances. This does not help enhance speed to value at the overall level
Promoting Reuse, Standards, and Governance
This dimension is about recognizing the value that frameworks, standards and governance (along with architecture strategy) play in accelerating delivery over time, because they become assets and artifacts that can be leveraged on projects to reduce risk as well as effort
Where these things don’t exist, there almost certainly will be an increase in project effort (and duration) and technical debt that ultimately will slow progress on developing and integrating new solutions into the landscape
Facilitating Continuous Improvement
This dimension is about establishing an environment where learning from mistakes is encouraged and leveraged proactively on an ongoing basis to improve the efficacy of estimation, planning, execution, and deployment of solutions
It’s worth noting that this is as much an issue of culture as of process, because teams need to know that it is safe, expected, and appreciated to share learnings on delivery efforts if there is to be sustainable improvement over time
Promoting Speed to Value
This is about understanding the delivery process, exploring iterative approaches, ensuring scope is managed and prioritized to maximize impact, and so on
I’ve written separately that methodology only provides a process, not necessarily a solution to underlying cultural or delivery issues that may exist. As such, it is part of what should be examined and understood in the interest of breaking down monolithic approaches and delivering value at a reasonable pace and frequency, but it is definitely not a silver bullet. They don’t, nor will they ever exist.
Establishing a Culture of Quality
In the proverbial “Good, Fast, or Cheap” triangle, the general assumption is that you can only choose two of the three as priorities and accept that the third will be compromised. Given that most organizations want results to be delivered quickly and don’t have unlimited financial resources, the implication is that quality will be the dimension that suffers.
The irony of this premise is that, where quality is compromised repeatedly on projects, the general outcome is that technical debt will be increased, maintenance effort along with it, and future delivery efforts will be hampered as a consequence of those choices
As a result, in any environment where speed is important, quality needs to be a significant focus so ongoing delivery can be focused as much as possible on developing new capabilities and not fixing things that were not delivered properly to begin with
Measuring Impact
Several ways to think about impact:
Reduced Time to Market
What is the average time from approval to delivery?
What is the percentage of user stories/use cases delivered per sprint (in an iterative model)? What level of spillover/deferral is occurring on an ongoing basis (this can be an indicator of estimation, planning, or execution-related issues)?
Are retrospectives part of the delivery process and valuable in terms of their learnings?
Increase in Leverage of Standards
Is there an architecture review process in place? Are standards documented, accessible, and in use? Are findings from reviews being implemented as an outcome of the governance process?
What percentage of projects are establishing or leveraging reusable common components, services/APIs, etc.?
Increased Quality
Are defect injection rates trending in a positive direction?
What level of severity 1/2 issues are uncovered post-production in relation to those discovered in testing pre-deployment (efficacy of testing)?
Are criteria in place and leveraged for production deployment (whether leveraging CI/CD processes or otherwise)?
Is production support effort for critical solutions decreasing over time (non-maintenance related)?
Lower Average Project Cost
Is the average labor cost/effort per delivery reducing on an ongoing basis?
Optimize
What It Is and Why It Matters
Along with the pursuit of speed, it is equally important to pursue “simplicity” in today’s complex technology environment. With so many layers now being present, from hosted to cloud-based solutions, package and custom software, internal and externally integrated SaaS and PaaS solutions, digital equipment and devices, cyber security requirements, analytics solutions, and monitoring tools… complexity is everywhere. In large organizations, the complexity tends to be magnified for many reasons, which can create additional complexities in and across the technology footprint and organizations required to design, deliver, and support integrated solutions at scale.
My experience with optimization historically is that it tends to be too reactive of a process, and generally falls by the wayside when business conditions are favorable. The problem with this is the bloat and inefficiency that tends to be bred in a growth environment, that ultimately reduces the value created by IT with increasing levels of spend. That is why a purposeful approach that is part of a larger portfolio allocation strategy is important. Things like workforce and sourcing strategy, modernization, ongoing rationalization and simplification, standardization and continuous improvement are important to offset what otherwise could lead to a massive “correction” the minute conditions change. I would argue that, similar to performance improvement in software development, an organization should never be so cost inefficient that a massive correction is even possible. For that to be the case, something extremely disruptive should have occurred, otherwise the discipline in delivery and operations likely wasn’t where it needed to be leading up to that adjustment.
I’ve highlighted a few dimensions that are top of mind in regard to ongoing optimization, but have written an entire article on optimizing value over cost that is a more thorough exploration of this topic if this is of interest (Optimizing the Value of IT).
Key Dimensions to Consider
Dimensions that are top of mind in relation to this area:
Reducing Complexity
There is some very simple math related to complexity in an IT environment, which is that increasing complexity drives a (sometimes disproportionate) increase in cost and time to deliver solutions, especially where there is a lack of architecture standards and governance
In areas like Integration and Analytics, this is particularly important, given they are both foundational and enable a significant amount of business capabilities when done well
It is also important to clarify that reducing complexity doesn’t necessarily equate to reducing assets (applications, data solutions, technologies, devices, integration endpoints, etc.), because it could be the case that the number of desired capabilities in an organization requires an increasing number of solutions over time. That being said, with the right integration architecture and associated standards, as an example, the ability to integrate and rationalize solutions will be significantly easier and faster than without them (which is complexity of a different kind)
Optimizing Ongoing Costs
I recently wrote an article on Optimizing the Value of IT, so I won’t cover all that material again here
The overall point is that there are many levers available to increase value while managing or reducing technology costs in an enterprise
That being said, aggregate IT spend can and may increase over time, and be entirely appropriate depending on the circumstances, as long as the value delivered increases proportionately (or in excess of that amount)
Continually Modernizing
The mental model that I’ve had for support for a number of years is to liken it to city planning and urban renewal. Modernizing a footprint is never a one-time event, it needs to be a continuous process
Where this tends to break down in many organizations is the “Keep the Lights On” concept, which suggests that maintenance spend should be minimized on an ongoing basis to allow the maximum amount of funding for discretionary efforts that advance new capabilities
The problem with this logic is that it can tend to lead to neglect of core infrastructure and solutions that then become obsolete, unsupportable, pose security risks, and that approach end of life with only very expensive and disruptive paths to upgrade or modernize them
It would be far easier to carve out a portion of the annual spend allocation for a thoughtful and continuous modernization where these become ongoing efforts, are less disruptive, and longer-term costs are managed more effectively at lower overall risk
Establishing and Maintaining a Workforce Strategy
I have an article in my backlog for this blog around workforce and sourcing strategy, having spent time developing both in the past, so I won’t elaborate too much on this right now other than to say it’s an important component in an organizational strategy for multiple reasons, the largest being that it enables you to flex delivery capability (up and down) to match demand while maintaining quality and a reasonable cost structure
Proactively Managing Performance
Unpopular though it is, my experience in many of the organizations in which I’ve worked over the years has been that performance management is handled on a reactive basis
Particularly when an organization is in a period of growth, notwithstanding extreme situations, the tendency can be to add people and neglect the performance management process with an “all hands, on deck” mentality that ultimately has a negative impact on quality, productivity, morale, and other measures that matter
This isn’t an argument for formula-driven processes, as I’ve worked in organizations that have forced performance curves against an employee population, and sometimes to significant, detrimental effect. My primary argument is that I’d rather have an environment with 2% involuntary annual attrition (conceptually), than one where it isn’t managed at all, market conditions change, and suddenly there is a push for a 10% reduction every three years, where competent “average” talent is caught in the crossfire. These over-corrections cause significant disruption, have material impact on employee loyalty, productivity, and morale, and generally (in my opinion) are the result of neglecting performance management on an ongoing basis
Measuring Impact
Several ways to think about impact:
Increased Value/Cost Ratio
Is the value delivered for IT-related effort increasing in relation to cost (whether the latter is increasing, decreasing, or remaining flat)?
Reduced Overall Assets
Have the number of duplicated/functionally equivalent/redundant assets (applications, technologies, data solutions, devices, etc.) reduced over time?
Lower Complexity
Is the percentage of effort on the average delivery project spent on addressing issues related to a lack of standards, unique technologies, redundant systems, etc. reducing over time?
Lower Technical Debt
What percentage of overall IT spend is committed to addressing quality, technology, end-of-life, or non-conformant solutions (to standards) in production on an ongoing basis?
Inspire
What It Is and Why It Matters
Having written my last article on culture, I’m not going to dive deeply into the topic, but I believe the subject of employee engagement and retention (“People are our greatest asset…”) is often spoken about, but not proportionately acted on in deliberate ways. It is far different, as an example, to tell employees their learning and development is important, but then either not provide the means for them to receive training and education or put “delivery” needs above that growth on an ongoing basis. It’s expedient on a short-term level, but the cost to an organization in loyalty, morale, and ultimately productivity (and results) is significant.
Inspiration matters. I fundamentally believe you achieve excellence as an organization by enrolling everyone possible in creating a differentiated and special workplace. Having worked in environments where there was a contagious enthusiasm in what we were doing and also in ones I’d consider relatively toxic and unhealthy, there’s no doubt on the impact it has on the investment people make in doing their best work.
Following onto this, I believe there is also a distinction to be drawn in engaging the “average” employees across the organization versus targeting the “top performers”. I have written about this previously, but top performers, while important to recognize and leverage effectively, don’t generally struggle with motivation (it’s part of what makes them top performers to begin with). The problem is that placing a disproportionate amount of management focus on this subset of the employee population can have a significant adverse impact, because the majority of an organization is not “top performers” and that’s completely fine. If the engagement, output, and productivity of the average employee is elevated even marginally, the net impact to organizational results should be fairly significant in most environments.
The dimensions below represent a few ways that I think about employee engagement and creating an inspired workplace.
Key Dimensions to Consider
Dimensions that are top of mind in relation to this area:
Becoming an Employer of Choice
Reputation matters. Very simple, but relevant point
This becomes real in how employees are treated on a cultural and day-to-day level, compensated, and managed even in the situation where they exit the company (willingly or otherwise)
Having worked for and with organizations that have had a “reputation” that is unflattering in certain ways, the thing I’ve come to be aware of over time is how important that quality is, not only when you work for a company, but the perception of it that then becomes attached to you afterwards
Two very simple questions to employees that could serve as a litmus test in this regard:
If you were looking for a job today, knowing what you know now, would you come work here again?
How likely would you be to recommend this as a place to work to a friend?
Promoting a Healthy Culture
Following onto the previous point, I recently wrote about The Criticality of Culture, so I won’t delve into the mechanics of this beyond the fact that dedicated, talented employees are critical to every organization, of any size, and the way in which they are treated and the environment in which they work is crucial to optimizing the experience for them and the results that will be obtained for the organization as a whole
Investing in Employee Development
Having worked in organizations where there was both an explicit, dedicated commitment to ongoing education and development and others where there was “never time” to invest in or “delivery commitments” that interfered with people’s learning and growth, the consequent impact on productivity and organizational performance has always been fairly obvious and very negative from my perspective
A healthy culture should create space for people to learn and grow their skills, particularly in technology, where the landscape is constantly changing and there is a substantial risk of skills becoming atrophied if not reinforced and evolved as things change.
This isn’t an argument for random training, of course, as there should be applicability for the skills into which an organization invests on behalf of its employees, but it should be an ongoing priority as much as any delivery effort so you maintain your ability to integrate new technology capabilities as and when they become available over time
Facilitating Collaboration
This and the next dimension are both discussed in the above article on culture, but the overall point is that creating a productive workplace goes beyond the individual employee to encouraging collaboration and seeking the kind of results discussed in my article on The Power of N
The secondary benefit from a collaborative environment is the sense of “connectedness” it creates across teams when it’s present, which would certainly help productivity and creativity/solutioning when part of a healthy, positive culture
Creating an Environment of Transparency
Understanding there are always certain things that require confidentiality or limited distribution (or both), the level of transparency in an environment helps create connection between the individual and the organization as well as helping to foster and engender trust
Reinforcing the criticality of communication in creating an inspiring workplace is extremely obvious, but having seen situations where the opposite is in place, it’s worth noting regardless
Measuring Impact
Several ways to think about impact:
Improved Productivity
Is more output being produced on a per FTE basis over time?
Are technologies like Copilot being leveraged effectively where appropriate?
Improved Average Utilization
Are utilization statistics reflecting healthy levels (i.e., not significantly over or under allocated) on an ongoing basis (assuming plan/actuals are reasonably reflected)?
Improved Employee Satisfaction
Are employee surveys trending in a positive direction in terms of job satisfaction?
Lower Voluntary Attrition
Are metrics declining in relation to voluntary attrition?
Perform
What It Is and Why It Matters
Very simply said: all the aspirations to innovate, grow, and develop capabilities don’t mean a lot if your production environment doesn’t support business and customer needs exceptionally well on a day-to-day basis.
As a former account executive and engagement manager in consulting at various organizations, any account strategy for me always began with one statement: “Deliver with quality”. If you don’t block and tackle well in your execution, the best vision and set of strategic goals will quickly be set aside until you do. This is fundamentally about managing infrastructure, availability, performance of critical solutions, and security. In all cases, it can be easy to operate in a reactive capacity and be very complacent about it, rather than looking for ways to improve, simplify, and drive greater stability, security, and performance over time.
As an example, I experienced a situation where an organization spent tens of millions of dollars annually on production support, planning for things that essentially hadn’t broken yet, but had no explicit plan or spend targeted at addressing the root cause of the issues themselves. Thankfully, we were able to reverse that situation, plan for some proactive efforts that ultimately took millions out of that spend by simply executing a couple projects. In that case, the issue was the mindset, assuming that we had to operate in a reactive rather than proactive way, while the effort and dollars being consumed could have been better applied developing new business capabilities rather than continuing to band-aid issues we’d never addressed.
Another situation that is fairly prevalent today is the role of FinOps in managing cloud costs. Without governance, the convenience of spinning up cloud assets and services can add considerable complexity, cost, and security exposure, all under the promise of shifting from a CapEx to OpEx environment. The reality is that the maturity and discipline required to manage it effectively requires focus so it doesn’t become problematic over time.
There are many ways to think about managing and optimizing production, but the dimensions that come to mind as worthy of some attention are expressed below.
Key Dimensions to Consider
Dimensions that are top of mind in relation to this area:
Providing Reliability of Critical Solutions
Having worked with a client where the health of critical production solutions was in a state where that became the top IT priority, this can’t be overlooked as a critical priority in any strategy
It’s great to advance capabilities through ongoing delivery work, but if you can’t operate and support critical business needs on a daily level, it doesn’t matter
Effectively Managing Vulnerabilities
With the increase in complexity in managing technology environments today, internal and external to an organization, cyber exposure is growing at a rate faster than anyone can manage it fully
To that end, having a comprehensive security strategy, from managing external to internal threats, ransomware, etc. (from the “outside-in”) is critical to ensuring ongoing operations with minimal risk
Evolving Towards a “Zero Trust” Environment
Similar to the previous point, while the definition of “zero trust” continues to evolve, managing a conceptual “least privilege” environment (from the “inside-out”) that protects critical assets, applications, and data is an imperative in today’s complex operating environment
Improving Integrated Solution Performance
Again, with the increasing complexity and distribution of solutions in a connected enterprise (including third party suppliers, partners, and customers), the end user experience of these solutions is an important consideration that will only increase in importance
While there are various solutions for application performance monitoring (APM) on the market today, the need for integrated monitoring, analytics, and optimization tools will likely increase over time to help govern and manage critical solutions where performance characteristics matter
Developing a Culture Surrounding Security
Finally, in relation to managing an effective (physical and cyber) security posture, while a deliberate strategy for managing vulnerability and zero trust are the methods by which risk is managed and mitigated, equally there is a mindset that needs to be established and integrated into an organization for risk to be effectively managed
This dimension is meant to recognize the need to provide adequate training, review key delivery processes (along with associated roles and responsibilities), and evaluate tools and safeguards to create an environment conducive to managing security overall
Measuring Impact
Several ways to think about impact:
Increased Availability
Is the reliability of critical production solutions improving over time and within SLAs?
Lower Cybersecurity Exposure
Is a thoughtful plan for managing cyber security in place, being executed, monitored, and managed on a continuous basis?
Do disaster recovery and business continuity plans exist and are they being tested?
Improved Systems Performance
Are end user SLAs met for critical solutions on an ongoing basis?
Lower Unplanned Outages
Are unplanned outages or events declining over time?
Wrapping Up
Overall, the goal of this article was to share some concepts surrounding where I see the value of strategy for IT in enabling a business at an overall level. I didn’t delve into what the makeup of the underlying technology landscape is or should be (things I discuss in articles like The Intelligent Enterprise and Perspective on Impact Driven Analytics), because the point is to think about how to create momentum at an overall level in areas that matter… innovation, speed, value/cost, productivity, and performance/reliability.
Feedback is certainly welcome… I hope this was worth the time to read it.
Having spent time on an extended road trip the last couple months, I had the ability to reflect on a number of things, both personal and professional. In the professional sense: the journey I’ve been on across nearly thirty-two years and seven employers, what has worked, where I’ve had challenges, what I’ve learned, and, looking forward, what I’d like to learn and to be part of my next opportunity on the road ahead. A critical element in that experience certainly relates to culture and the ability to both be valued and make a difference as part of an organization.
To that end, while the backlog of topics for this blog is quite expansive already, I thought that it would be worth sharing some thoughts on culture as a critical component in setting the stage for excellence in an organization.
The remainder of this article will focus on culture at an overall level as well as a set of core values that I believe are a good starting point for what healthy workplace environment should include… As with all things on my blog, this is my point of view and I’m definitely interested in other ways of thinking about this, values that are important that I may have overlooked, or questions on what is presented… the insight gained through the dialogue, especially where culture is concerned, can be extremely valuable.
Looking Beyond the Language
Culture in Action
Action, Not Words.
This simple phrase pretty well sums up how I feel about culture at an overall level. Culture is not about what you write down or say publicly, culture is about how you behave and what you value when it matters or when no one is looking. The latter point is akin to the question of whether you would run a red light in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night. Some people definitely would… and it’s the same way with culture.
Having been employed by seven organizations and worked with many clients who have had cultures of their own, I’ve seen many variations of this over the years. From places where the culture is relegated to a tagline printed across a set of internal collateral, to sets of values or principles that are a combination of words or phrases and a contextual explanation of what they are meant to represent in practice. I’ve seen them referenced rarely and frequently, depending on the organization. I’ve also seen where what is said publicly is completely different than what happens privately through words, actions, or both. And, in one case, I’ve seen where there was a wonderful alignment of what was said to what was put into practice and reinforced across the organization…
The last example was in my early days at Sapient and its core values in the late 90s. While I feel strongly about not mentioning any specific companies in the course of my writing, this is a case where there was such a concerted effort to live into the culture that it seems appropriate to acknowledge the organizational accomplishment. Arguably, as the company grew and went through a period of acquisitions, evolving and adapting that culture became a challenge, but it was something that went far beyond words on a page to something we, as employees, aspired to, and that’s definitely a good thing. The fact that I remember the original and (eventually) modified core values over twenty years since I left the organization says something about the level to which we internalized them at the time. I also remember how the phrase “In the spirit of Openness…” (one of our core values) as the opening to a sentence meant that you were about to get some direct, unfiltered feedback about something you needed to do differently, because it didn’t align to the culture or expectations of the organization as a whole. It was brutal feedback at times, but it applied equally to everyone, from the co-CEOs to the developers, and something about that made it feel more acceptable and genuine, however it may have been delivered in the moment. I also remember a client remarking to us in a sales meeting that, when they asked us about our culture, everyone in the team nearly jumped out of their chair or had a story to tell. It was something we fundamentally believed in, and that energy and excitement was palpable. It also translated into the experience we created for our clients (as part of “Client-Focused Delivery”) as well as a non-existent attrition rate we used to talk about in Chicago because we didn’t lose a single employee for the first eighteen months I was in the office which, in consulting, is nearly unheard of.
So, with that as the benchmark on the positive side, suffice is to say that I’ve seen other organizations show up differently, and with varying levels of impact on morale, performance, attrition, and other things that matter from a business perspective. The point is consistency in words and actions, because values become the pillars upon which an organization establishes the foundation for operating performance. They are the rules of the road and, when they aren’t followed consistently, employee experience and ultimately business performance will suffer.
Culture in Applicability
All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others. (Animal Farm, George Orwell)
In concert with culture being action-oriented within an organization, the concept that it apply equally is also critical to giving it credibility at a broader level, which is why I thought of the Orwell quote in this regard.
To the degree that there is a different set of rules that apply to “leadership” from the remainder of an organization, it can cause a ripple effect whereby people develop an “us and them” mentality and, by extension, a negative perception and lack of trust in senior leaders, regardless of the messaging they hear in public forums. That perception can extend to strong performers not wanting to contribute at a stand out level for fear of becoming part of that environment, which clearly can and would hinder overall organizational results over time. I do believe the standards for behavior and expectations of senior leaders should be higher as a consequence of their increased responsibilities to an organization, but with regard to the subject of this article, that would translate into being more true to the culture as its principal advocates.
The Foundation for a Healthy Environment
So, if given a blank sheet of paper, below are the core values I would start with (as part of a leadership discussion) in the interest of trying to establish a healthy and productive workplace.
Integrity
Culture has to start with an intention to do the right thing, promote honesty, and discourage passive aggressive behaviors. This applies to how business matters are handled internally and externally, with high ethical standards that are fair but don’t waiver. This is probably the most challenging core value to establish consistently in an organization in my experience, which is why I put it first on the list.
Respect
This core value is about treating everyone fairly and consistently, regardless of their background and experience, ensuring their voice is heard, and that inclusive diversity is part of the workplace, including its representation in leadership.
Transparency
Transparency is critical in establishing an environment of trust, free of unspoken agendas, promoting an environment where employees can seek understanding, ask questions, and engage in dialogue surrounding critical decisions and actions in the interest of advancing the organization overall. People with nothing to hide, hide nothing… and, notwithstanding situations that require confidentiality for business reasons, my experience of people who are not open with their intentions and actions has generally not been very positive.
Collaboration
An environment that promotes respect also should recognize that there is power in collaboration that extends the capabilities of an organization far more than a group of “individual contributors” working in silos ever could (something I discuss in The Power of N). This also implies a degree of humility within and across an organization, as the idea an individual or team is “better than” others in some form or fashion can create an environment that excludes people or ideas in a way that ultimately hinders growth and evolution.
Leadership
This core value can be somewhat of a catchall given its implications are fairly broad. I will fall back on the Sapient definition of “getting a group of people from where they are to where they need to be” as a characterization, but the overall point is to accept, drive, and encourage innovation, change, and evolution as critical to business success.
Impact
Finally, I believe it’s important to focus on value creation, in whatever way that manifests itself. Results ultimately matter and should be part of how a culture and set of behaviors across an organization are established and evaluated on an ongoing basis.
Wrapping Up
I know there are many dimensions to establishing a healthy and thriving culture beyond what I’ve covered here, but minimally I wanted to share some concepts in the interest of stirring discussion on something that is critical to establishing operating agility and performance.
Above anything else, one thing is definitely true: culture can change in a negative direction quickly, particularly with poor and/or inexperienced leadership, but to make culture healthy and thrive to the extent it becomes a sustainable part of an organization takes a lot of time and reinforcement because of the level of behavioral change involved.
Some questions to consider:
Are the core values in an organization well established and defined in a manner such that they can be applied to people’s work on a daily basis?
Do senior leaders live by those values at a level equal or greater to that which they expect from the average employee?
Is the culture strong enough and understood to create value at a level that the average employee would advocate it as a reason to join or work with the organization to a third-party?
To what extent is “culture” a reason articulated as a reason people stay or exit an organization?
I hope the ideas were worth considering. Thanks for taking the time to read them. Feedback is welcome as always.
Organized Chaos 