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.
Given the challenging economic environment, I thought it would be a good time to revisit something that was an active part of my work for several years, namely IT cost optimization.
In the spirit of Excellence by Design, I don’t consider cost optimization to be a moment in time activity that becomes a priority on a periodic (“once every X years”) or reactive basis. Optimizing the value/cost ratio is something that should always be a priority in the interest of having disciplined operations, maintaining organizational agility, technical relevance, and competitive advantage.
In the consulting business, this is somewhat of a given, as most clients want more value for the money they spend on an annualized basis, especially if the service is something provided over a period of time. Complacency is the fastest path to lose a client and, consequently, there is a direct incentive to look for ways to get better at what you do or provide equivalent service at a lower cost to the degree the capability itself is already relatively optimized.
On the corporate side, however, where the longer-term ramifications of technology decisions bear out in accumulated technical debt and complexity, the choices become more complex as they are less about a project, program, or portfolio and become more focused on the technology footprint, operating model, and organizational structure as a whole.
To that end, I’ll explore various dimensions of how to think about the complexity and makeup of IT from a cost perspective along with the various levers to explore in how to optimize value/cost. I’m being deliberate in mentioning both because it is very easy to reduce costs and have an adverse impact on service quality or agility, and that’s why thoughtful analysis is important in making informed choices on improving cost-efficiency.
Framing the Problem
Before looking at the individual dimensions, I first wanted to cover the simple mental model I’ve used for many years in terms of driving operating performance:
The model above is based on three connected components that feed each other in a continuous cycle:
Transparency
We can’t govern what we can’t see. The first step in driving any level of thoughtful optimization is having a fact-based understanding of what is going on
This isn’t about seeing or monitoring “everything”. It is about understanding thecritical, minimum information that is needed to make informed decisions and then obtaining as accurate a set of data surrounding those points as possible.
Governance
With the above foundation in place, the next step is to have leadership engagement to review and understand the situation, and identify opportunities to improve.
This governance is a critical step in any optimization effort because, if there are not sustainable organizational or cultural changes made in the course of transforming, the likelihood of things returning to a similar condition will be relatively high.
Improvement
Once opportunities are identified, executing effectively on the various strategies becomes the focus, with the goal of achieving the outcomes defined through the governance process
The outcomes of this work should then be reflected in the next cycle of operating metrics and the cycle can be repeated on a continuing basis.
The process for optimizing IT costs is no different than what is expressed here: understand the situation first, then target areas of improvement, make adjustments, continue. It’s a process, not a destination. From here, we’ll explore the various dimensions of complexity and cost within IT, and the levers to consider in adjusting them.
At an Operating-Level
Before delving into the footprint itself, a couple areas to consider at an overall level are portfolio management and release strategy.
Portfolio management
Given that I am mid-way through writing an article on portfolio management and am also planning a separate one on workforce and sourcing strategy, I won’t explore this topic much beyond saying that having a mature portfolio management process can help influence cost-efficiency.
That being said, I don’t consider ineffective portfolio management to be a root cause of IT value/cost being imbalanced. An effective workforce and sourcing strategy that aligns variable capacity to sources of demand fluctuation (within reasonable cost constraints) should enable IT to deliver significant value even during periods of increased business demand. That being said, a lack of effective prioritization, disciplined estimation and planning, resource planning, and sourcing strategy in combination with each other can have significant and harmful effects on cost-efficiency and, therefore, generally provide opportunities for improvement.
Some questions to consider in this area:
Is prioritization effective in your organization? When “priority” effort arise, are other ongoing efforts stopped or delayed to account for them or is the general trend to take on more work without recalibrating existing commitments?
Are estimation and planning efforts benchmarked, reviewed, analyzed and improved, so the integrity of ongoing prioritization and slotting of projects can be done effectively?
Is there a defined workforce and sourcing strategy to align variable capacity to fluctuating demand so that internal capacity can be reallocated effectively and sourcing scaled in a way that doesn’t disproportionately have an adverse impact on cost? Conversely, can demand decline without significant need for recalibration of internal, fixed capacity? There is a situation I experienced where we and another part of the organization took the same level of financial adjustment, but they had to make 3x the level of staffing adjustment given we were operating under a defined sourcing strategy and the other organization wasn’t. This is an important reason to have a workforce and sourcing strategy.
Is resource planning handled on an FTE (e.g., role-based) or resource-basis (e.g., named resource), or some combination thereof? What is the average utilization of “critical” resources across the organization on an ongoing basis?
Release strategy
This is an area that often seems overlooked in my experience (outside product delivery environments) as a means to both improve delivery effectiveness, manage cost, and improve overall quality.
Having a structured release strategy that accounts for major and minor releases, with defined criteria and established deployment windows, versus an arbitrary or ad-hoc approach can be a significant benefit both from an IT delivery and business continuity perspective. Generally speaking, delivery cycles (in a non-CI/CD, DevSecOps-oriented environment) tend to consume time and energy that slows delivery progress. The more windows that exist, the more disruption that occurs over a calendar year. When those windows are allowed to occur on an ad-hoc basis, the complexities of integration testing, configuration management, and coordination from a project, program, and change management perspective tends to increase proportional to the number of release windows involved. Similarly, the risk of quality issues occurring within and across a connected ecosystem increases as the process for stabilizing and testing individual solutions, integrating across solutions, and managing post-deployment production issues is spread across multiple teams in overlapping efforts. Where standard integration patterns and reference architecture is in place to govern interactions across connected components, there are means to manage and mitigate risk, but generally speaking, it’s better and more cost-effective to manage a smaller set of larger, scheduled release windows than allow a more random or ad-hoc environment to exist at scale.
Applications
In the application footprint, larger organizations or those built through acquisition tend to have a fairly diverse and potentially redundant application landscape, which can lead to significant cost and complexity, both in maintaining and integrating the various systems in place. This is also true when there is a combination of significant internally (custom) developed solutions working in concert with external SaaS solutions or software packages.
Three main levers can have a significant influence along the lines of what I discuss in The Intelligent Enterprise:
Ecosystem Design
Whether one chooses to refer to this as business architecture, domain-driven design, component architecture, or something else, the goal is to identify and govern a set of well-defined connected ecosystems that are composable, made up of modular components that provide a clear business (or technical) capability or set of services
This is critical enabler to both optimizing the application footprint as well as promoting interoperability and innovation over time, as new capabilities can be more rapidly integrated into a standards-based environment
Where complexity comes about is where custom or SaaS/package solutions are integrated in a way that blurs these component boundaries and creates functional overlaps that create technical debt, redundancy, data integrity issues, etc.
Integration strategy
With a set of well-defined components, the secondary goal is to leverage standard integration patterns with canonical objects to promote interoperability, simplification, and ongoing evolution of the technology footprint over time.
Without standards for integration, an organization’s ability to adopt new, innovative technologies will be significantly hindered over time and the leverage of those investments marginalized, because of the complexity involved in bringing those capabilities into the existing environment rapidly without having refactor or rewrite a portion of what exists to leverage them.
At an overall level, it is hard to argue that technologies are advancing at a rate faster than any organization’s ability to adopt and integrate them, so having a well-defined and heavily leveraged enterprise integration strategy is critical to long-term value creation and competitive advantage.
Application Rationalization
Finally, with defined ecosystems and standards for integration, having the courage and organizational leadership to consolidate like solutions to a smaller set of standard solutions for various connected components can be a significant way to both reduce cost and increase speed-to-value over time.
I deliberately focused on the organizational aspects of rationalization, because one of the most significant obstacles in technology simplification is the courageous leadership needed to “pick a direction” and handle the objections that invariably result in those tradeoff decisions being made.
Technology proliferation can be caused by a number of things, but organizational behaviors can certainly contribute when two largely comparable solutions exist without one of them being retired solely based on resistance to change or perceived control or ownership associated with a given solution.
At a capability-level, evaluating similar solutions, understanding functional differences and associating the value with those dimensions is a good starting point for simplifying what is in place. That being said, the largest challenge in application rationalization doesn’t tend to be identifying the best solution, it’s having the courage to make the decision, commit the investment, and execute on the plan given “new projects” tend to get more organizational focus and priority in many companies than cleaning up what they already have in place. In a budget-constrained environment, the new, shiny thing tends to win in a prioritization process, which is something I’ll write about in a future article.
Overall, the larger the organization, the more opportunity may exist in the application domain, and the good news is that there are many things that can be done to simplify, standardize, rationalize, and ultimately optimize what’s in place in ways that both reduce cost and increase the agility, speed, and value that IT can deliver.
Data
The data landscape and associated technologies, especially when considering advanced analytics, has significantly added complexity (and likely associated cost) in the last five to ten years in particular. With the growing demand for AI/ML, NLP, and now Generative AI-enabled solutions, the ability to integrate, manage, and expose data, from producer to ultimate consumer has taken on significant criticality.
Some concepts that are directionally important in my opinion in relation to optimizing value/cost in data and analytics enablement:
Managing separation of concerns
Similar to the application environment, thinking of the data and analytics environment (OLTP included) as a set of connected components with defined responsibilities, connected through standard integration patterns is important to reducing complexity, enabling innovation, and accelerating speed-to-value over time
Significant technical debt can be created where the relationship of operational data stores (ODS), analytics technologies, purpose-built solutions (e.g., graph or time series databases) master data management tools, data lakes, lake houses, virtualization tools, visualization tools, data quality tools, and so on are not integrated in clear, purposeful ways.
Where I see value in “data centricity” is in the way it serves as a reminder to understand the value that can be created for organizations in leveraging the knowledge embedded within their workforce and solutions
I also, however, believe that value will be unlocked over time through intelligent applications that leverage knowledge and insights to accelerate business decisions, drive purposeful collaboration, and enable innovation and competitive advantage.Data isn’t the outcome, it’s an enabler of those outcomes when managed effectively.
Minimizing data movement
The larger the landscape and number of solutions involved in moving source data from the original producer (whether it’s a connected application, device, or piece of equipment) to the end consumer (however that consumption is enabled) has a significant impact on innovation and business agility.
As such, concepts like data mesh / data fabric, enabling distributed sourcing of data in near-real time with minimized data movement to feed analytical solutions and/or deliver end user insights is critical in thinking through a longer-term data strategy.
In a perfect world, where data enrichment is not a critical requirement, the ability to virtualize, integrate, and expose data across various sources to conceptually “flatten” the layers of the analytics environment is an area where end consumer value can be increased while reducing cost typically associated with ETL, storage, and compute spread across various components of the data ecosystem
Concepts like zero ETL, data sharing, and virtualization are also key enablers that have promise in this regard
Limiting enabling technologies
As in the application domain, the more diverse and complex a data ecosystem is, the likelihood that a diverse set of overlapping technologies is in place, with overlapping or redundant capabilities.
At a minimum, a thoughtful process for reviewing and governing any new technology introductions, to evaluate how they complement, replace, or are potentially redundant or duplicative with solutions already in place is an important capability to have in place
Similarly, it is not uncommon to introduce new technologies with somewhat of a “silver bullet” mindset, without considering the implications for supporting or operating those solutions, which can increase cost and complexity, or having a deliberate plan to replace or retire other solutions that provide a similar capability in the process.
Simply said, technical debt accumulates over time, through a set of individually rationalized and justified, but overall suboptimized short-term decisions.
Rationalize, simplify, standardize
Finally, where defined components exist, data sourcing and movement is managed, and technologies introductions are governed, there should be an ongoing effort to modernize, simplify, and standardize what is already in place.
Data solutions can tend to be very “purpose-built” in their orientation to the degree that the enable a specific use case or outcome. The problem that occurs in this situation is if the desired business architecture becomes the de facto technical architecture and significant complexity is created in the process.
Using a parallel, smaller scale analogy, there is a reason that logical and physical data modeling are separate activities in application development (the former in traditional “business design” versus the latter being part of “technical design” in waterfall-based approaches). What makes sense from a business or logical standpoint likely won’t be optimized if architected as defined in that context (e.g., most business users don’t think intuitively in third normal form, nor should they have to).
Modern technologies allow for relatively cheap storage and giving thought to how the underlying physical landscape should be designed from producer to consumer is critical in both enabling insight delivery at speed, but also doing so within a managed, optimized technology environment.
Overall, similar to the application domain, there are significant opportunities to enable innovation and speed-to-value in the data and analytics domain, but a purposeful and thoughtful data strategy is the foundation for being cost-effective and creating long-term value.
Technologies
I’ve touched on technologies through the process of discussing optimization opportunities in both the application and data domains, but it’s important to understand the difference between technology rationalization (the tools and technologies you use to enable your IT environment) and application or data rationalization (the solutions that leverage those underlying technologies to solve business problems).
The process for technology simplification is the same as described in the other two domains, so I won’t repeat the concepts here beyond reiterating that a strong package or technology evaluation process (that considers the relationship to existing solutions in place) and governance of new technology introductions with explicit plans to replace or retire legacy equivalents and ensure organizational readiness to support the new technologies in production is critical to optimizing value/cost in this dimension.
Infrastructure
At an overall level, unless there is a significant compliance, competitive, privacy, or legal reason to do so, I would argue that no one should be in the infrastructure business unless it IS their business. That may be a somewhat controversial point-of-view, but at a time when cloud and hosting providers are both established and mature, arguing the differentiated value of providing (versus managing) these capabilities within a typical IT department is a significant leap of faith in my opinion. Internal and external customer value and innovation is created in the capabilities delivered through applications, not the infrastructure, networking, and storage underlying those solutions. This isn’t to say these capabilities aren’t a critical enabler. They definitely are, though, the overall organizational goal in infrastructure from my perspective should be to ensure quality of service at the right cost (through third party providers to the maximum extent possible), and then manage and govern the reliability and performance of that set of environments, focusing on continuous improvement and enabling innovation as required by consuming solutions over time.
There are a significant number of cost elements associated with infrastructure, a lot of financial allocations involved, and establishing TCO through these indirect expenses can be highly complex in most organizations. As a result, I’ll focus on three overall categories that I consider significant and acknowledge there is normally opportunity to optimize value/cost in this domain beyond these three alone (cloud, hosted solutions, and licensing). This is partially why working with a defined set of providers and managing and governing the process can be a way to focus on quality of service and desired service levels within established cost parameters versus taking on the challenge of operationalizing a substantial set of these capabilities internally.
Certainly, a level of core network and cyber security infrastructure is necessary and critical to an organization under any circumstances, something I will touch on in a future article on the minimum requirements to run an innovation-centric IT organization, but even in those cases, that does not imply or require that those capabilities be developed or managed internally.
Cloud
With the ever-expanding set of cloud-enabled capabilities, there are three critical watch items that I believe have significant impact on cost optimization over time:
Innovation
Cloud platform providers are making significant advancements in their capabilities on an annual basis, some of which can help enable innovation
To the extent that some of the architecture and integration principles above are leveraged, and a thoughtful, disciplined process is used to evaluate and manage introduction of new technologies over time, organizations can benefit from their leverage of cloud as a part of their infrastructure strategy
Multi-cloud Integration
The reality of cloud providers today is also that no one is good at everything and there is differentiated value in various services provided from each of them (GCP, Azure, AWS)
The challenge is how to integrate and synthesize these differentiated capabilities in a secure way without either creating significant complexity or cost in the process
Again, having a modular, composable architecture mindset with API- or service-based integration is critical in finding the right balance for leveraging these capabilities over time
Where significant complexity and cost can be created is where data egress comes into play from one cloud platform to another and, consequently, the need for such data movement should be minimized in my opinion to situations where the value of doing so (ideally without persisting the data in the target platform) greatly outweighs the cost to operate in that overall environment
FinOps Discipline
The promise of having managed platforms that convert traditional capex to opex is certainly an attractive argument for moving away from insourced and hosted solutions to the cloud (or a managed hosting provider for that matter). The challenge is in having a disciplined process for leveraging cloud services, understanding how they are being consumed across an organization, and optimizing their use on an ongoing basis.
Understandably, there is not a direct incentive for platform providers to optimize this on their own and tools largely provide transparency into spend related to consumption of various services over time.
Hopefully, as these providers mature, we’ll see more of an integrated platform within and across cloud providers to help continuously optimize a footprint so that it provides reliability and scalability, but also without promoting over provisioning or other costs that don’t provide end customer value in the process.
Given the focus of this article is cost optimization and not cloud strategy, I’m not getting into cloud modernization, automation and platform services, containerization of workloads, or serverless computing, though arguably some of those also can provide opportunities to enable innovation, improve reliability, enable edge-based computing, and optimize value/cost as well.
Internally Managed / Hosted
Given how far we are into the age of cloud computing, I’m assuming that legacy environments have largely been moved into converged infrastructure. In some organizations, this may not be the case and should be evaluated along with the potential for outsourcing the hosting and management of these environments where possible (and competitive) at a reasonable value/cost level.
One interesting anecdote is how organizations don’t tend to want to make significant investments in modernizing legacy environments, particularly those in financial services resting on mainframe or midrange computing solutions. That being said, given that they are normally shared resources, as the burden of those costs shift (where teams selectively modernize and move off those environments) and allocations of the remaining MIPS and other hosting charges are adjusted, the priority in revisiting those strategies tends to change. Being proactive on modernization should be a continuous, proactive process rather than a reactive one, because the resulting technology decisions can otherwise be suboptimized and turned into lift-and-shift based approaches versus true modernization or innovation opportunities (I’d consider this under the broader excellence topic of relentless innovation).
Licensing
The last infrastructure dimension that I’d call out in relation to licensing. While I’ve already addressed the opportunity to promote innovation and optimize expense through rationalizing applications, data solutions, or underlying technologies individually, there are three other dimensions that are worth consideration:
Partner Optimization
Between leverage of multi-year agreements on core, strategic platforms and consolidation of tools (even in a best-of-breed environment) to a smaller set of strategic, third-party providers, there are normally opportunities to reduce the number of technology partners and optimize costs in large organizations
The watch item would be to ensure such consolidation efforts consider volatility in the underlying technology environment (e.g., the commitment might be too long for situations where the pace of innovation is very high) while also ensuring conformance to the component and integration architecture strategies of the organization so as not to create dependencies that would make transition of those technologies more complex in the future
Governance and Utilization
Where licensing costs are either consumption-based or up for renewal, having established practices for revisiting the value and usage of core technologies over time can help in optimization. This can also be important in ensuring compliance to critical contract terms where appropriate (e.g., named user scenarios, concurrent versus per-seat agreements)
In one example a number of years ago, we decided to investigate indirect expense coming through software licenses and uncovered nearly a million dollars of software that had been renewed on an annual basis that wasn’t being utilized by anyone. The reality is that we treated these as bespoke, fixed charges and no one was looking at them at any interval. All we needed to do in that case was pay attention and do the homework.
Transition Planning
The most important of these three areas is akin to having a governance process in place.
With regard to transition, establishing a companion process to the software renewal cycle for critical, core technologies (i.e., those providing a critical capability or having significant associated expense). This process would involve a health check (similar to package selection, but including incumbent technologies/solutions) at a point commensurate with the window of time it would take to evaluate and replace the solution if it was no longer the best option to provide a given capability.
Unfortunately, depending on the level of dependency that exists for third-party solutions, it is not uncommon for organizations to lack a disciplined process to review technologies in advance of their contractual renewal period and be forced to extend their licenses because of a lack of time to do anything else.
The result can be that organizations deploy new technologies in parallel with ones that are no longer competitive purely because they didn’t plan in advance for those transitions to occur in an organic way
Similar to the other categories, where licensing is a substantial cost component of IT expense, the general point is to be proactive and disciplined about managing and governing it. This is a source of overhead that is easy to overlook and that can create undue burden on the overall value/cost equation.
Services
I’m going to write on workforce and sourcing strategy separately, so I won’t go deeply into this topic or direct labor in this article beyond a few points in each.
In optimizing cost of third-party provided services, a few dimensions come to mind:
Sourcing Strategy
Understanding and having a deliberate mapping of primary, secondary and augmentation partners (as appropriate) for key capabilities or portfolios/solutions is the starting point for optimizing value/cost
Where a deliberate strategy doesn’t exist, the ability to monitor, benchmark, govern, manage, and optimize will be both complex and effective only on a limited basis
Effective sourcing and certain approaches to how partners are engaged can also be a key lever in both enabling rapid execution of key strategies, managing migration across legacy and modernized environments, establishing new capabilities where a talent base doesn’t currently exist internal to an organization, and in optimizing expense that may be either fragmented across multiple partners or enabled through contingency labor in ad-hoc ways, all of which can help optimize the value/cost ratio on an ongoing basis
Vendor Management
Worth noting that I’m using the word “vendor” here because the term is fairly well understood and standard when it comes to this process. In practice, I never use the word “vendor” in deference to “partner” as I believe the latter signals a healthy approach and mindset when it comes to working with third-parties.
Having worked in several consulting organizations over a number of years, it was very easy to tell which clients operated in a vendor versus a partnership mindset and the former of the two can be a disincentive to making the most of these relationships
That being said, organizations should have an ongoing, formalized process for reviewing key partner relationships, performance against contractual obligations, on-time delivery commitments, quality expectations, management of change, and achievement of strategic partner objectives.
There should also be a process in place to solicit ongoing feedback both on how to improve effectiveness and the relationship but also to understand and leverage knowledge and insights a partner has on industry and technology trends and innovation opportunities that can further increase value/cost performance over time.
Contract Management
Finally, having a defined, transparent, and effective process for managing contractual commitments and the associated incentives where appropriate can also be important to optimizing overall value/cost
It is generally true that partners don’t deliver to standards that aren’t established and governed
Defining service levels, quality expectations, utilizing fixed price or risk sharing models and so on and then reviewing and holding both partners and the internal organization working with those partners accountable to those standards is important in having both a disciplined operating and a disciplined delivery environment
There’s nothing wrong with assuming everyone will do their part when it comes to living into the terms of agreements, but there also isn’t harm in keeping an eye on those commitments and making sure that partner relationships are held to evolving standards that promote maturity, quality, and cost effectiveness over time
Similar to other categories, the level of investment in sourcing, whether through professional service firms or contingent labor, should drive the level of effort involved in understanding, governing, and optimizing it, but some level of process and discipline should be in place almost under any scenario.
Labor
The final dimension to optimizing value and cost is direct labor. I’m guessing, in writing this, that it’s fairly obvious I put this category last and I did so intentionally. It is often said that “employees are the greatest source of expense” in an organization. Interestingly enough “people are our greatest asset” has also been said many times as well.
In the section on portfolio management, I mentioned the importance of having a workforce and sourcing strategy and understanding the relationship between the alignment of people to demand on an ongoing basis. That is a given and should be understood and evaluated with a critical eye towards how things flex and adjust as demand fluctuates. It is also a given and assumed that an organization focused on excellence should be managing performance on a continuing basis (including times of favorable market conditions) so as not to create organizational bloat or ineffectiveness. Said differently, poor performance that is unmanaged in an organization drags down average productivity, has an adverse impact on quality, and ultimately a negative impact on value cost because the working capacity of an organization isn’t being applied to ongoing demand and delivery needs effectively. Where this is allowed to continue unchecked over too long a duration, the result may be an over-correction that also can have adverse impacts on performance, which is why it should be an ongoing area of focus by comparison with an episodic one.
Beyond performance management, I believe it’s important to think of all of the expense categories before this one to be variable, which is sometimes not the case in the way they are evaluated and managed. If non-direct labor expense is substantial, a different question to consider is the relative value of “working capacity” (i.e., “knowledge workers”) by comparison with expense consumed in other things. Said differently, a mental model that I used with a team in the past was that “every million dollars we save in X (insert dimension or cost element here… licensing, sourcing, infrastructure, applications) is Y people we can retain to do meaningful work.”
Wrapping Up
Understanding that this has been a relatively long article, but still only a high-level treatment of a number of these topics, hopefully it has been useful in calling out many of the opportunities that are available to promote excellence in operations and optimize value/cost over time.
In my experience, having been in multiple organizations that have realigned costs, it takes engaged and courageous leadership to make thoughtful changes versus expedient ones… it matters… and it’s worth the time invested to find the right balance overall. In a perfect world, disciplined operations should be a part of the makeup of an effectively led organization on an ongoing basis, not the result of a market correction or fluctuation in demand or business priorities.
Excellence always matters, quality and value always matter. The discipline it takes to create and manage that environment is worth the time it takes to do it effectively.
Thank you for taking the time to read the thoughts. As with everything I write, feedback and reactions are welcome. I hope this was worth the investment in time.
In discussing the five dimensions of Excellence By Design, I began with the criticality of courageous leadership, because of the influence it has on everything else.
The question is: What should the focus of a leader be to optimize value and effectiveness? The goal of this article is to explore this concept in a couple dimensions: how a leader engages with their team and how they engage with their customers.
Over the course of thirty years and seven organizations, I’ve had the benefit of working with pretty much every form of leader, and it’s relatively safe to say that almost no one operates with one “leadership style” 100% of the time. The question is how a leader engages in their work on an average basis, at what level of detail, and with what level of ownership. The implications on both their team and the operating performance of the organization as a whole can be significant, which is why considering these dimensions is important.
It’s somewhat discouraging to consider is how many “managers” there are in the world and so few “leaders”… and yet, this is what creates opportunity for leaders to truly make a difference…
It isn’t particularly noteworthy to say that engaged, motivational leadership can raise the performance of a team (and the individuals therein). Unfortunately, the converse is also true, which is that ineffective leadership can and likely will erode the value an otherwise capable group will produce as well.
The good news is that I believe any leader who is invested in developing their capabilities can be coached in a manner that will ultimately increase value and impact, but an awareness of their starting point and how they engage on an average basis is a critical foundation for that journey to begin.
For discussion’s sake, consider the following conceptual diagram:
Working With Teams
Looking first at team engagement, there are two opposing ends of the spectrum:
The Autocrat/Order Giver
On one end, there are managers who lead by intimidation and threats, or by micro-managing things to the point that individual creativity is nearly snuffed out
The impact on a working environment is likely one ruled by “compliance” behavior, fear, and apprehension
In these situations, risk taking seems ill-advised and team members will have to accept that, to the extent they express a more autonomous working approach, there will come a point where they may be labeled “insubordinate”, “difficult”, or “not a team player” because of being misaligned to leadership expectations
This situation simply doesn’t scale from a leadership standpoint. No one with any significant level of responsibility can possibly be involved in the details of every decision, no matter how competent they are. The result is either that the leader will become a bottleneck on decisions and the organization will lose agility or they will rush into making expedient and potentially short-sighted decisions that will also compromise long-term value and quality.
The Conscious Delegator
On the other hand, there are managers who fully delegate authority and decision making to the point where they can become disconnected with meaningful actions being taken on an ongoing basis
This type of environment is a double-edged sword for the team members, because they can have a significant amount of autonomy and freedom of action on an ongoing basis to execute on the responsibilities of their job. The flip side is that they will tend to take 100% of the blame if something goes wrong.
Consequently, while a fully delegated approach may initially seem to promote a high level of “empowerment”, the level of risk that team members will eventually take will be influenced by the trust they have in their leader providing air cover if things don’t go to plan. In the event that they believe they won’t have support, they will be less likely to take risks and provide courageous leadership themselves, and the quality or value coming from their work will be compromised
So where does the Engaged Leader fall by comparison? In terms of engaging with a team, I would argue that they should seek to be near the middle on average.
How I would describe the “ideal” environment:
The leader is engaged and aware of critical and high priority issues, where they stand, dependencies, challenges, etc. and are taking an active role in helping the team navigate those situations
They enable their team by providing direction and decisions, while promoting an inclusive and diverse environment, where individuals are encouraged to contribute, innovate, and take informed risks and action in the interest of maximizing value and enabling ongoing transformation (see the article The Power of N for more on this)
They are “informed” even where they are not heavily “engaged”, so they can take appropriate action and intervene as and when required in the interest of supporting and enabling their team
Where someone is closer to one of the endpoints described above, a “Conscious Delegator” can be encouraged to increase awareness and engagement and an “Order Giver” can be encouraged to trust and enable their team while relinquishing a degree of control.
Working With Customers
Looking at customer engagement, the two opposing ends of the spectrum are:
In the digital business environment of today, it is difficult to argue why leaders should be apprehensive about engaging on how advanced technologies can enable competitive advantage and differentiation.
There is a history of business-driven technology strategy that can and should become more balanced with the critical role that IT has in disrupting established models and helping to establish what’s possible in a world of connected ecosystems and The Intelligent Enterprise
The caveat being that, business value and strategies inform technology strategy, and therefore, being at an extreme end of the scale may suggest a leader isn’t receptive to or understanding of their business partners goals and needs, which would ultimately be ineffective for an organization
Order Taker
On the other hand, if a business relationship is best described as one of subservience, one could reasonably question why an IT leader is needed at all
In this situation, arguably you could accomplish the same level of operating results by having someone working directly for a business leader who takes direction and executes on assigned responsibilities without providing any level of feedback
The only way this type of model would be moderately effective is when the business leader is exceptionally capable both in setting business and technology strategy, and that is an extremely rare situation that likely would work only at a very limited or narrow scale (in terms of scope)
Looking back at operating performance of a broader team, there would likely be a limited amount of innovation occurring, because the team wouldn’t believe there is an avenue for such ideas to take hold with their customer and eventually stop trying to contribute in any material way
So where does the Engaged Leader fall by comparison? In terms of this dimension, as the star in the diagram indicates, I would argue that they should seek to be above the center line on average.
How I would describe the “ideal” environment:
A collaborative partnership exists where technology innovation opportunities are actively discussed and integrated with business strategies and priorities where appropriate
Technology leaders understand not only the overall business direction, but the “why” behind operating and market strategies to better inform their efforts to enable their partners to leverage strategic technologies in the most effective manner possible
Where someone is closer to one of the endpoints described above, a “Thought Leader” can be asked to make sure they are balancing business needs with proactive ideas and an “Order Taker” can be encouraged to develop trust with their customer and build a more collaborative partnership over time.
Wrapping Up
Hopefully the above concepts were useful food for thought. Again, no leader in my experience acts in a completely consistent manner, and that’s probably a good thing, because adaptive leadership is ultimately about placing focus where it needs to be, when it needs to be there.
One final point in line with a concept in the Engaged Leadership and Setting the Tone is that regardless of the leadership style of someone’s immediate manager or customer, every leader has the ability to decide what kind of leader they want to be themselves. That is ultimately an individual accountability and not something to “externalize” to someone else.
Ultimately, we all can make a difference.
We can all strive to maximize value and impact in the work we do every day.
I hope the ideas were helpful. As always, feedback is welcome and appreciated.
In line with establishing the right environment to achieve Excellence by Design, I thought it would be worthwhile to explore the various dimensions that define a great workplace.
In my experience, these conversations can tend to be skewed in one or two directions, but rarely seem holistic in terms of thinking through the various aspects of the employee experience. Maintaining a healthy workplace and driving retention is ultimately about striking the right balance for an individual on terms ultimately defined by them.
I’ll cover the concept at an overall level, then address each of the dimensions in how I think of them in our current post-covid and employee-driven environment.
The Seven Dimensions
At a broad-level, the attributes that I believe define an employee’s experience are:
What you do
Who you work for
Who you work with
Where you work
What you earn
Culture
Work/life balance
In terms of maintaining a productive workplace, I believe that a motivated, engaged employee will ultimately want the majority of the above dimensions to be in line with their expectations.
As a litmus test, take a look at each of the above attributes and ask whether that aspect of your current job is where it should be (in a “yes”/”no”/”sort of” context). If “sort of” was an answer, I’d argue that should be counted as a “no”, because you’re presumably not excited, or you would have said “yes” in the first place. If three or more of your answers are “no”, you probably aren’t satisfied with your job and would consider the prospect of a change if one arose.
While it can be the case that a single attribute (e.g., being significantly undercompensated, having serious issues with your immediate manager) can lead to dissatisfaction and (ultimately) attrition, my belief is that each of us tend to consider most of the above dimensions when we evaluate the conditions of our employment or other opportunities when they arise.
From the perspective of the employer, the key is to think through how the above dimensions are being addressed to create balance and a positive environment for the employees at an individual level. Anecdotally, that balance translates into how someone might describe their job to a third-party, such as “I work a lot of long hours… BUT… I’m paid very well for what I do”. In this example, while work/life balance may be difficult, compensation is indexed in a way that it makes up for the difference and puts things into balance. Similarly, someone could say “I don’t make a lot of money… BUT… I love the people I work with and what I get to do each day.”
The key question from a leadership standpoint is whether we only consider one or two dimensions in “attracting and retaining the best talent” or if instead we are thoughtful and deliberate about considering the other mechanisms that drive true engagement. What we do with intention turns into meaningful action… and what we leave to chance, puts employees in a potentially unhealthy situation that exposes companies to unnecessary risk of attrition (not to mention a poor reputation in the marketplace as a prospective employer).
Having laid that overall foundation, I’ll provide some additional thoughts on the things that I believe matter in each dimension.
What you do
Fundamental to the employee experience is the role you play, the title you hold, how well it aligns to your aspirations, and whether you derive your desired level satisfaction from it, even if that manifestation is as simple as a paycheck.
Not everyone wants to solve world hunger and that’s ok. Aligning individual needs and capabilities to what people do every day creates the conditions for success and job satisfaction.
One simple thing that can be done from an employer’s standpoint beyond looking for the above alignment is to recognize and thank people for the work they do on an ongoing basis. It amazes me how the easiest thing to do is say “thank you” when people do a good job, and yet how often that isn’t acknowledged. Recognition can mean so much to the individual, to know their work is appreciated and valued, yet it is something I’ve seen lacking in nearly every organization I’ve worked over the last thirty years. Often the reasoning given is that leaders are “too busy”, which is unfortunate, because no one should ever be so busy that a “thank you” isn’t worth the time it takes to send it.
Who you work for
There is an undeniable criticality to the relationship between an employee and their immediate manager, but I believe the perception of the broader leadership in the organization matters as well.
Starting at the manager, the litmus test for a healthy situation could be some of the following questions:
Is there trust between the individual and their manager?
Does the employee believe their manager has their best interest at heart and is invested in them, personally and professionally?
Does the employee believe their manager will be an effective advocate for them in terms of compensation, advancement, exposure to other opportunities, etc.?
Does the employee see their manager as an enabler or as an obstacle when it comes to decision making?
Does the employee derive meaningful feedback and coaching that helps them learn and develop their capabilities over time?
Does the employee feel comfortable, supported, and recognized in their day-to-day work, especially when they take risks in the interest of pursuing innovation and stretch goals?
At an organizational level, the questions are slightly different, but influence the situation as well:
Does the organization recognize, appreciate, and promote individual contributions and accomplishments?
Does the organization promote and demonstrate a healthy and collaborative climate amidst and across its leadership?
Do the actions of leaders follow their words? Is there integrity and transparency overall?
Again, while the tendency is to think about the employee experience in terms of their immediate manager, how they perceive the organizational leadership as a whole matters, because it can contribute to their willingness to stay and possibly become part of that leadership team down the road. Is that environment a desirable place for an employee to be? If not, why would they contribute at a level that could lead them there?
Who you work with
The people you work with in the context of your job can take on multiple dimensions, especially when you are in a services business (like consulting), where your environment is a combination of people from your organization and the clients with whom you work on an ongoing basis. Having worked with some highly collaborative and also some very aggressive clients over the years, those interactions can definitely have an impact on your satisfaction with what you do, particularly if those engagements are longer-term assignments.
From an “internal” standpoint, your team (for those leading others), your peers, your internal customers, and so on tend to define your daily experience. While I consider culture separate from the immediate team, there is obviously a relationship between the two.
Regardless of the overall culture of the organization, as I wrote about in my Engaged Leadership and Setting the Tone article, our day-to-day interactions with those directly collaborating with us can be very different.
Some questions to consider in this regard:
Do individuals contribute in a healthy way, collaborate and partner effectively, and maintain a generally positive work environment?
Do people listen and are they accepting of alternate points of view?
Does the environment support both diversity and inclusion?
Is there a “we” versus a “me” mentality in place?
Do you trust the people with whom you’re working on an ongoing basis?
Can you count on the people with whom you work to deliver on their commitments, take accountability, communicate with you effectively, and help you out when you need it?
Again, there are many dimensions that come into the daily experience of an employee, and it depends on the circumstances and role in terms of what to consider in evaluating the situation.
Where you work
In the post-covid era, I think of location in terms of three dimensions, the physical location of where you work, whether you can work remotely, and the level of travel that is required as part of your job.
For base location, there can be various considerations that weigh in on the employee experience, assuming they physically need to go to the workplace. Ease of access (e.g., if it’s in a congested metropolitan area), nearby access to other points of interest (e.g., something major cities offer, but smaller, rural locations generally don’t), the level and nature of commuting involved (and whether that is manageable), cost of living considerations, the safety of the area surrounding the workplace itself, etc.
Where remote work is an option, I’m strongly biased towards leaning in the direction of employee preference. If an individual wants to be in the office, then there should be reasonable accommodation for it, but conversely, if they prefer a fully remote environment, then that should be supported as well. In the world of technology, given that distributed teams and offshoring have been in place for decades, it’s difficult to argue that it’s impossible to be effective in an environment where people aren’t physically co-located. Where collaboration is beneficial, certainly it is possible to bring people together in a workshop-type setting and hammer out specific things. My belief is, however, that it’s possible to work in a largely remote setting and maintain healthy relationships so long as people are more deliberate (e.g., scheduling individual meetings to connect) than when they are physically co-located.
Finally, when it comes to travel, this is again measured on the preferences of an individual. I’ve gone from jobs where there was little to no travel involved to one where I did the “road warrior” life and traveled thirty-three weeks in one year… and it was grueling. That being said, I have friends who have lived on the road for many years (largely in consulting) and loved it, so empirically the impact of travel on job satisfaction depends on lot on the person and whether they enjoy it.
What you earn
Compensation is actually one of the easier dimensions to cover, because it’s tangible and measurable. As an employer, you either compensate people in relation to the market value of the work they are performing, or you don’t, but the data is available and employees can do their own due diligence to ascertain whether your compensation philosophy is to be competitive or not. With market conditions being what they are, it seems self-defeating to not be competitive in this regard, because there are always abundant opportunities out there for capable people, and not paying someone fairly seems like a very avoidable reason to lose talent.
Where I have apprehension in the discussion, both as an employee and a person who has communicated it to individuals, is when an organization approaches the conversation as “let’s educate you on how to think about total compensation”… and then presents a discussion on everything other than base pay. Is there a person who doesn’t consider their paycheck as their effective compensation on an ongoing basis? Conversely, is there anyone who has left a job because the primary reason was they didn’t like the choice in healthcare provider in the benefit plan or the level of a 401(k) matching contribution? The latter scenarios are certainly possible, though I doubt they represent the majority of compensation-related attrition situations.
Of course, variable compensation can and does matter from an overall perspective, as do other forms of incentives such as options, equity, and so forth. I’ve worked in organizations and seen models that involve pretty much every permutation, including where variable compensation is formula-based (with or without performance inputs), fixed at certain thresholds, or determined on a largely subjective basis. That being said, in a tough economy with the cost of about everything on the rise, most people aren’t going to look towards a non-guaranteed variable income component (discretionary or otherwise) to help them cover their ongoing living expenses. Nice to have? Absolutely. The foundation for a sense of employee security in an organization? Definitely not.
Culture
Backing up to the experience of the workplace as a whole, I separate culture from the people with whom an employee works for a reason. In most organizations, culture is manifest in two respects: what a company suggests it is and what it actually is.
Across the seven organizations where I’ve been fortunate to work over the last thirty years, only two of them actually seemed to live into the principles or values that they expressed as part of their culture. The implication for the other five organizations was that the actual culture was something different and, to the extent that reality was not always healthy, it had a negative impact on the desirability of the workplace overall.
The role culture can play can be both energizing and engaging to the degree it is a positive experience. If it is the opposite, then the challenge becomes what was referenced in the team section, which is your ability to establish a “culture within the culture” that is healthier for the individual employee. This is somewhat of a necessary evil from my perspective, because changing an overall culture within an organization is extremely challenging (if not impossible) and takes a really long time, even with the best of intentions. In practice, having a sub-culture that is associated with a team is, at best, a short-term fix however, because ultimately most teams need to partner and collaborate with others outside their individual unit and unhealthy behaviors and communication in a culture at large will eventually erode the working dynamics within that high performance team.
Work/life balance
The final dimension is somewhat obvious and, again, very subjective, which is the level of work/life balance an individual is able to maintain and how well that aligns to their goals and needs. In some cases, it can be that someone works more than is “required” because they enjoy what they are doing, are highly motivated, or seeking to expand their knowledge or capability in some way. The converse, however, can also be true where an individual works in an unsustainable way, their personal needs suffer, and they end up eventually becoming less productive at work.
From the perspective of the employer, at a minimum it is a good idea to have managers check in with their team members to understand where they are in terms of having the right balance and do what they can to help enable employees to be in a place that works for them. To the extent these discussions don’t happen, then some of the aspects of the relationship between an employee and their immediate manager may suffer and the impact from this dimension could be felt in other areas as well.
Wrapping up
So, bringing things together, the goal was to introduce the various dimensions of what makes a work environment engaging and positive for an employee, along with some thoughts on how I think of each of them.
If I were to attach a concept/word to each to define what good looks like, I would suggest:
What you do – REWARDING
Who you work for – TRUSTED
Who you work with – ENERGIZING
Where you work – CONVENIENT
What you earn – REASONABLE
Culture – EMPOWERING
Work/life balance – ALIGNED
To the degree that leaders pay attention to how they are addressing each of these seven areas, individually and collectively, I believe it will have a positive impact on the average employee experience, productivity and engagement, and the performance of the organization overall.
I hope the thoughts were worth the time spent reading them. Feedback, as always, is welcome.
When looking towards the Delivering at Speed dimension of Excellence by Design, it’s worthwhile to understand roles and responsibilities and, more importantly, the criticality of effective communication and collaboration in delivery. To that end, I wanted to provide a quick commentary on the value and risk of RACI as an enabler in the process.
Many who have worked with me know that I’m not a fan of the RACI tool. In this article, I’ll cover what I consider good and not so good about it. Hopefully the concepts will be helpful.
At the end of the day, what makes teams effective is a collective investment in success. That takes courage and a willingness to do whatever it takes to deliver, particularly if a project is complex or high risk. Where individuals and teams don’t lean into that discomfort, things can easily become imbalanced, inefficient, and ineffective… and the opportunity for excellence is lost. The ultimate reality is that technology delivery is messy and complex, it involves dealing with adversity and is not for the faint of heart, which is why courageous leadership is the first and most critical dimension to driving excellence in an organization.
A Quick Refresher
For those who may be unfamiliar, the RACI tool is used to help clarify roles and responsibilities across a set of constituents against a defined set of activities, deliverables, or whatever is relevant to the conversation.
The process is generally to have a facilitator populate a grid in two dimensions, with stakeholders or teams as a set of rows and the activities or deliverables across an entire project lifecycle (as an example) as the columns. Once the teams and work are clarified, the team then typically goes a column at a time, noting which teams have which responsibilities using the RACI notation to indicate who is:
R – Responsible (DOER – primarily responsible for performing the activity)
A – Accountable (LEADER – ultimately accountable for the execution)
C – Consulted (ADVISOR – asked to provide input, in a supporting role)
I – Informed (LISTENER – notified of the status or outcome, but not involved)
A conceptual example of a completed RACI chart could look something like this:
Generally, there should only be one “Accountable” party per activity, though there can be more than one individual or team “Responsible” for performing the work. In many cases, “R” and “A” go together, though there can be situations where someone is playing a general contractor-type role who is Accountable, but someone else is actually playing a subcontracting-type role who is Responsible for performing the work. In one of my previous employers, we occasionally collapsed the “R” and “A” categories into a single “Owner” (O) role, which indicated the individual or team who was both responsible and accountable and simplified the facilitation of the exercise.
What’s Good about RACI
In my experience, the value of a RACI discussion is in the conversation, not the tool.
The conversation is helpful in two primary respects:
Clarifying the scope and breadth of activities/ deliverables/ responsibilities that are associated with whatever the cross-functional team is trying to accomplish
Having an understanding of the anticipated interactions of that cross-functional team against those activities
On the latter point, the exercise can be particularly helpful for a newly formed team or on a new type of effort where the combination of activities is emerging and the interactions across the team against those activities isn’t clearly understood.
The discussion itself gives the team a chance to engage, interact, experience the various communication and leadership styles and, in the process, talk about the work they need to perform.
Where Things Go Awry
…So what’s the problem?
Well, the problem is sometimes in the mindset of the participants as they enter the discussion and how the tool is ultimately used in practice.
Things to watch for in a RACI discussion:
Asserting Control / Promoting Exclusion
There are times when participants use the tool and process as a way to establish their authority to make decisions (as the “Accountable” party) in a way that excludes others
In these cases, the RACI tool can become a hammer that enables dysfunction and empowers poor leadership
Showing a Lack of Accountability
There are times when the tone of discussion shifts towards an “us” and “them” conversation and the concept of “team” is subjugated to who is accountable if something goes wrong.
In this situation, the tool becomes a hammer to assign blame and undermine partnership
Encouraging a Lack of Collaboration
Finally, the stronger the contrast between “RA” and “C” comes across, there is risk of an underlying level of dysfunction that goes beyond activities and deliverables
While the tool and process are meant to help foster healthy discussion on primary accountability and roles, an extreme version of its use can feel like there is a lot of “throwing things over the wall”… and that is normally something you can hear in the discussion itself
Summing this up, while RACI can be a useful tool, it can also be a mechanism to stratify dysfunction in an organization, enable poor leadership, assign blame, and do more harm than good.
Breaking Down the Model
In thinking about the above, the question arises: “Ok, so what do you do about it?”
In a previous employer where we conducted a lot of client workshops, we would start with a predefined set of ground rules and allow the clients to add to the list as they saw fit. Depending on the group assembled, there were times when that flexibility actually would go astray and the rules became a long, laundry list of “what not to dos”.
If the discussion started to feel unhealthy, we would suggest that we reset the list back to two things:
Do what makes sense
Do the right thing
In practice, almost any situation that would arise in a workshop setting could be addressed with those two principles and they are simple and broad enough that they cover what you need to facilitate a session on about any topic.
Going back to RACI, when the discussions go astray, the same type of principles may be helpful to set the tone for collaboration as part of the effort.
Summing It Up
Stepping back from the tools and process, the critical point to remember is the importance of communication and collaboration in a cross-functional team.
In my experience, when people are effective collaborators and the underlying relationships are sound, there isn’t a need for RACI discussions. People work past boundaries, sometimes swap responsibilities where the capabilities of individuals are roughly equivalent, and the team is focused less on “who owns what” and doing what they need to do to meet the conditions of success. There is a mindset of mutual support and partnership… and the efficiency of the execution will be much higher by extension.
Most of the time, when I hear someone request or suggest a RACI discussion, I assume there is an underlying issue or source of dysfunction. It doesn’t mean the conversations can’t be useful in helping to surface and address those concerns and challenges, but it is important to understand they are not a cure all if the outcome is just a snapshot of something that wasn’t working effectively in the first place.
Hopefully the concepts were helpful. As always, feedback is welcome and appreciated.
Before addressing the subject at hand, just an acknowledgement that I’m considerably behind where I want to be in writing this blog. With another eight topics in the backlog, it may take a while to get “caught up”, a concept that I pray is achievable in practice, or I need to hire some ghost writers. Hopefully the concepts will continue to be worth the time spent reading them. Feedback and other ideas for articles are welcome. These continue to be an expression of my point-of-view. There is plenty of room for debate and dialogue, and it’s welcome. That is, after all, where innovation and improvement originate.
With regard to mentoring, in my earlier article on Excellence by Design, I referenced the importance of talent development in relation to Operating with Agility. I’ll write separately about workforce and sourcing strategy in an upcoming post, but the purpose of this article is to explore the mentoring process, both from the perspective of the mentor and mentee.
Setting the Stage
First of all, the mentoring process itself requires two critical components: a willing coach and an engaged participant.
Mentoring isn’t something you can “kind of” do if you expect to have an impact on an individual. You need to meet them where they are in their journey, be mindful of their aspirations and needs, and find the right way to provide guidance that will lead to sustainable, long-term growth. Mentoring, from my perspective, is more than “feedback”, insofar as the latter is generally situational in nature and somewhat transactional or provided within the context of a current role or assignment. Mentoringis really about longer-term capability development when done properly and requires more of a strategic focus on behaviors and overall career goals. In a talent development sense, this is akin to why there is a difference in many organizations between performance reviews and career development plans, which contemplate longer-term goals of the individual, not limited to execution of their current responsibilities.
From the standpoint of the person being mentored, it is equally important to be engaged in the process in a healthy way. Looking back at my own experiences, there were times when I was receiving good career advice that I was either too inexperienced, too insecure, or probably too headstrong to receive and learn the lessons I needed to at the time they were being provided. Fortunately or unfortunately for me, as has been said many times, when you don’t learn those lessons or take them to heart, they will keep re-presenting themselves to you, sometimes painfully so, until you actually are open and receptive to them. Success ultimately requires humility, reflection, and a fundamental acceptance that we’re all on a journey, no matter what stage we are in our careers, and there is always something to learn if we want to be better at what we do.
Said very simply: if the mentor or the mentee don’t engage effectively, the process will fail, and both individuals actually will lose opportunity as a result.
Looking back on the last thirty years of my career and seven employers, I’m very grateful to the leaders, some of whom were not my direct managers, who took the time to help move me forward in my journey. In many ways, my success is their success because, without those little nudges and sometimes very pointed smacks upside my head to get me to the right place, I wouldn’t be where I am, and I owe very much to them for caring enough to spend that time helping me along. While I may be very motivated and self-directed, I do want and need that advice and guidance just as much now as I did when I was a kid out of college writing software for a living.
Putting “Growth” in Perspective
When talking about mentoring, I believe it’s important to spend a couple moments on “growth” (in terms of promotions) by comparison with capability development.
While, in a perfect world, developing your capabilities would ideally go hand-in-hand with your level of responsibility or relative seniority in an organization (whether that’s in a management capacity or not), the reality is that they often don’t.
Promotions take three things in my experience:
Opportunity – There has to be a spot to which you can move with the desired role
Advocacy – You need someone from a management standpoint to make the case for change
Accomplishment – You need to have delivered something or created value that helps to substantiate your worthiness to assume more organizational seniority
If any of the above is missing, in the vast majority of cases, you won’t be promoted and, if you find yourself in an organization where advocacy and opportunity are enough for people to be promoted without actual accomplishments… you’re probably not in a high-performing organization, because results and/or proven leadership should be part of the process, otherwise it would suggest people are promoted for other reasons than demonstrated capability (yes, I’m an advocate for meritocracy).
So, the fact that these things can be out of synch having been acknowledged, here’s my overall point-of-view when it comes to career development: focus on your capabilities and the recognition will catch up in time. Said differently, when you build your skills and knowledge, they become part of who you are and what you bring to an organization. If those things go underappreciated over time, you will eventually find other opportunities that align to your capabilities where those talents are recognized and valued, presumably you will pursue those situations (at some point), and things will be in sync again.
Why being a mentor is so important
From the perspective of the mentor, it is worth stating that it is a primary responsibility of a leader to help develop others and make the organization better, whether in a managerial capacity or not. Sharing knowledge, providing feedback and advice, and actively collaborating with others in solutioning situations are things that anyone can do, regardless of their role, and all of which contribute to helping develop and grow others. Whether that is, in a “formal” sense, mentoring or not, informally it can very much help advance the cause of developing talent over time. It makes others better, it creates value for the organization, and makes you a more valuable contributor to the organization as well.
Another lens to put on being an effective coach is that, when done well, it actually makes you a better performer by extension.
Thinking back on a non-work example, I coached baseball for nearly ten years in my twenties. As a coach, it was important to me to understand the fundamentals of what I was sharing with our team and individual players in the interest of helping them improve. In an area like hitting, with all the years I played baseball growing up, I don’t think I ever really thought about the mechanics of a swing at the same level I did when I started trying to coach others… primarily because I was committed to doing the best I could to making them better players. Oddly, what I found was that, aside from imparting that knowledge, I also became a much better hitter myself and the process of internalizing those things stuck in a way I didn’t expect.
Coaching in a professional setting is very much the same thing, because ideally a good mentor should be thinking through the mechanics of what they are recommending to an individual and, in doing so, it becomes a very healthy reminder and opportunity to “sharpen the saw” yourself.
My overall advice to the prospective “mentee”
From the perspective of the individual wanting to be mentored, my advice would fall into four areas:
Find and develop relationships with mentors who can help you over time and who are committed to your personal and professional success. I mention the personal dimension, because so much of developing over the course of a career involves soft skills and behaviors that extend beyond the workplace into daily life. Good mentors should ideally be people who you respect and trust, and who you view as being knowledgeable and capable in areas you’d like to develop yourself. This doesn’t need to be an immediate manager, though it’s great when that happens. It also doesn’t necessarily have to be someone “senior” to you in an organization, as the process is more about developing skills and capabilities that you lack than the relative position of the person that is helping you. In reality, mentors can span positions and jobs, so it’s more important to choose the right person(s) than the expedient one(s). Mentors can also come and go over time, and that’s fine as well, as long as you benefit and learn through the experience.
Have a clear idea (or a reasonably clear one) in terms of what you want from an aspirational standpoint. Your goals matter, they can be everything from a behavioral quality or actual capability you would like to excel in to a position you’d ultimately like to hold (even if that’s only a short distance from where you currently are). Make sure your mentor is aware of those goals, and guide them in terms of where you’re seeking the most help. A good mentor should be able to evaluate where you are and help provide the right guidance based on your needs and the circumstances, but it doesn’t mean your input is any less important to the process. It’s your life, it’s your career, and you have the ultimate vote in whether the process works for you. At the end of the day, the only person accountable for managing your career and ultimate success is you.
Remember thatyou can learn the most from those who differ from you and you don’t need to have just “one” mentor. Over the years, I’ve been lucky enough to cultivate an amazing set of coaches who help me improve, but they come in all shapes and sizes for different needs, and that’s great from my perspective. I have mentors who help me on a more strategic and broader level and others who help guide me on more tactical, skill-based needs. The mixture is something that works for me. Some of the best coaches I’ve had are also those who have behaviors or approaches that are polar opposite of mine. Those relationships have been extremely helpful, given those with similar thoughts and approaches as me won’t as easily be able to provide insight on my blind spots or opportunities to think differently as those who actually are different. Whether you ultimately choose to model or learn their behaviors or not, you can always seek to understand and learn from those perspectives and that will make you a more well-rounded contributor over time.
Finally, it’s important to recognize that your career is a long-term investment, and one of the most important ones you make in life. Investing in the right coaches and committing yourself to continuous learning is the best way to increase your probability of success, in whatever it is you choose to do (and being exceptional at it over time).
Keeping the above points in mind should help make the process more effective as long as you continue to engage with it in a positive and productive way.
The connection into Excellence by Design
In an earlier blog article, I wrote about the “The Power of N” and maximizing the collective potential of a team. I will write an article about expanding that potential further, when we look at organizational aspirations and portfolio composition, but for now, I’ll wrap this up with a simple, but important point:
Where we don’t invest in ourselves and our long-term development and, by extension, when we don’t help people achieve their potential as leaders, we suboptimize the results we can achieve as an organization. The investment is always worth the time.
So….
On what are you working to improve and who is helping you get there?
Who are you helping to achieve their potential?
As always, I hope the information and thoughts were helpful. All the best in achieving the sum of your aspirations, and in being an inspiration and guide to others as well.
One of the challenges associated with Courageous Leadership and achieving Excellence by Design is knowing how to effectively manage customer relationships.
In the consulting environment, there is generally a measurable connection between client satisfaction and the revenue trajectory of an account (whether that’s expressed as stable annuity or growth over time). In a perfect world, this is ideally driven based on a blend with how you are managing the relationship and the quality of your service delivery. In the corporate IT world, it is a little more difficult to measure, but certainly there are indicators on whether a business partner is satisfied with the support they receive, whether it is expressed in feedback processes, involvement in critical strategic discussions, the collaborative dynamics of the relationship, etc. In both cases, whether a consultant or an IT leader, the goal is generally to be a “partner at the table”, which is a very often used, but rarely achieved situation.
Describing What “Good” Looks Like
At an anecdotal level, some simple litmus tests on the health of a customer relationship:
Does the customer involve you actively when ideating or forming a business strategy?
Would the customer or a neutral third party refer to you as more of a “partner” or an “order taker” in business discussions?
Are conversations when issues arise handled as a fact-finding and joint solutioning opportunity or as a beat down/”do what I say” discussion (conceptually)? This is normally very perceivable in the tone and direction of the discussions as they occur.
Does the customer openly seek feedback and input as to how new/advanced technology can drive innovation and adjust plans accordingly?
Are prioritization discussions occurring when new opportunities arise as part of a larger portfolio management process? Are those conversations collaborative? Are initiatives stopped or deferred as an outcome of the exercise, or are portfolio discussions largely a snapshot of all the work that has come through the demand management process and is planned for delivery?
Is the delivery environment sustainable from a utilization and pace of execution standpoint?
What are the average hours worked per employee? Is there time being spent in learning and talent development? Are technology standards and strategies being implemented or set aside in deference to critical “priorities” on an ongoing basis, resulting in accumulated technical debt?
Worth noting, I’m calling out a number of dimensions above intentionally and not leaning on “the customer said they are happy” for a reason… namely that, there are many situations where customer satisfaction is largely based on a sense of having control over priorities and actions in a relationship and where no effective partnership exists. Again, the simple test for this is: what happens when the parties disagree and, in those circumstances, what percentage of the outcomes are ultimately what the customer originally wanted? I don’t know how to estimate this with any precision, but if the answer to the question is directionally something like 80% or more of the time, and the consulting/IT team taking on more work without any remedy or accommodation, it would be hard to argue there is much “partnership” in practice.
Where The Best of Intentions Creates Challenges
It isn’t news that being highly motivated in a delivery environment is a blessing and a curse. On the positive side, motivation and a passion to deliver is what can propel an individual and those leading teams to achieve sometimes incredible results, despite the odds that otherwise could undermine their success. On the flip side, a belief that anything can be accomplished can also lead to issues when leaders view tradeoffs or compromises as an inherent sign of failure or weakness in their customer’s mind and they take on too much when they should be seeking balance in the overall situation instead.
In practice, organizations often sign up for too much, stretch beyond their internal capability to support the volume of ongoing work effectively (with critical skills and knowledge where it is needed) and ultimately create an unsustainable environment. This is generally FAR more costly than taking a reasoned, fact-based approach to portfolio management and prioritizing the mix of ongoing work effectively (something I will likely write about as part of Operating with Agility). The resulting effects of this situation are fairly prevalent in my experience across many organizations and clients in the last 30 years, namely missed delivery commitments, technical debt, poor quality, lack of value realization, employee burnout (and ultimately attrition), and unhappy customers.
Overall, a healthy and credible customer partnership should be created by establishing mutual trust and respect, acting with integrity, and making fact-based decisions in the interest of maintaining a sustainable environment that delivers quality solutions with agility and speed at scale. Admittedly, that’s quite a lot. Easy, right? Of course not, but what in that statement isn’t the aspirational end state? If that level of partnership and delivery environment isn’t the goal, what is? That might be a discussion worth having from a leadership standpoint.
Some Examples to Consider
Having been in both consulting and corporate environments, I’ve seen a number of situations where managing customer situations has been challenging. To share some examples:
Where the skills were insufficient
Having completed a lengthy engagement with an existing customer, I was asked by the account exec on a strategic account to speak to a prospective client about a potential new portfolio of work related to data warehousing.
In the call, the client walked through where they were, the work done to date, the forward-looking plan, makeup of their team and areas where they could possibly use some assistance.
Overall, the project was thoughtfully organized, fairly complex, and the areas of opportunity were outside our organizational capabilities because the depth of skill and experience required was beyond anything we had. Subcontracting those capabilities also wouldn’t have offered any material benefit to the client that they couldn’t obtain by contracting the skills directly on their own.
As a result, I thanked the client for the opportunity but said we weren’t well positioned to help. The prospect’s response was literally “I’ve never heard a consultant say that before” and they thanked me profusely for being candid about our ability to meet their need.
As you might expect, the account executive, on the other hand, called and yelled at me for some time given I was meant to sign the client up for work, regardless of whether they needed our help or not, with the implication being that a very informed customer “didn’t know what they needed”, which is why we needed to sell the work.
In a positive twist, the prospect went back to their leadership and gave such a positive review of the conversation and us having done the “right thing” that they ended up offering up a different piece of work that was in our wheelhouse to deliver.
Was the conversation a mistake? Not in my mind. Would I do the same thing again? Yes, for certain, because I’d rather accept what we can and can’t do successfully than sign up for everything and ultimately have an adverse impact on the work as a whole.
Probably to this day, the account exec would argue that I messed that situation up, but unfortunately that’s the nature of consulting at times when revenue goals cloud matters in relation to ethics and integrity. The account team was primarily incented to reach a target, not a healthy client relationship and sustainable delivery environment (which is not unusual in consulting as a whole).
Where the timing wasn’t right
Coming out of a successful delivery engagement with a new client, our executive sponsor referred us to a peer, who had recently assumed responsibility for the integration of an acquired organization. We were asked to help develop a strategy and some new customer-facing technology that would bring together and align the existing and acquired company products into one cohesive solution.
With the best of intentions, we started into what was a roughly an 8-12 week scoping and visioning activity, engaging teams from both the parent company and new acquisition.
What we rapidly realized was the major challenges and headwinds associated with being engaged so early after the transaction had been announced and nearly every deliverable we had planned for the early portion of the engagement fell very far behind schedule.
In preparation for our first sponsor checkpoint (~week 4 as I recall), we realized the probability of completing the engagement within any reasonable timeframe was extremely low and we decided to pivot to providing an update on where we stood in addressing the various challenges we were facing, such as the lack of a brand strategy, team dynamics, technology integration issues, major strategy decisions that would need to be made, etc.
In preparing for the checkpoint, we reached out to our prior sponsor who had referred the work to us for advice on how to approach the situation. His guidance was, thankfully, to be open and direct with where we were. Whether he ultimately gave our new sponsor a heads up in advance of the discussion, I don’t honestly know, probably because I was too young and inexperienced at the time to think of that possibility.
In any case, we met with our sponsor, talked through the challenges, and his response was to pause and ask us “so, you’re saying it doesn’t make sense to do this right now?” to which we responded, “yes”. He expressed appreciation for our candor, the project was stopped in-flight, and the client spent time focusing on the integration of their teams before trying to proceed further on any implementation work.
As it happened, the sponsor also left the organization relatively soon thereafter and, based on the impression he had of us and our work, contacted us from his new place of employment to explore opportunities to engage us again.
Our actual project had only lasted around a month and didn’t deliver anything, and yet built enough credibility for the customer to come back from a completely new direction.
In retrospect, while I believe we handled the situation correctly, we should have had a sidebar with the sponsor to give him a heads up ahead of the checkpoint so he knew what was coming before we got to the meeting itself. Thankfully that didn’t blow up in our face, but it would’ve been a more thoughtful way to handle the situation than what we did at the time (largely out of inexperience between me and other people in the account team at the time). Overall, I consider the project asuccessful failure because we didn’t waste the client’s money on an outcome we never would’ve accomplished in a reasonable timeframe.
Where the solution made no sense
As part of an internal team reviewing another engagement, the delivery team introduced us to a project they were about to initiate with their existing client. The overall engagement was going very well, and the opportunity to create a “management tool” came up as an adjunct to the larger program in motion.
For those of us outside the account, the proposed solution seemed immediately problematic and we challenged the team on why they were pursuing the work at all, given the complexity of what was desired, the likely cost of the project, and the questionable amount of value they could ultimately produce IF they figured out a way to do what the client was requesting.
The response from the team, not surprisingly, was that the client was “very excited” about the project, they were eager to sign the agreement and kick off the effort, and we should be more focused on how to help the team solution by comparison with asking why they were doing the project at all.
As you might expect, the engagement team ultimately had the authority to move forward with the work (and business), we noted our concerns in the review material for our industry leadership and the project got underway.
I don’t remember how far along it occurred, but somewhere after at least a couple months of execution, a change in client in leadership occurred, the new leadership reviewed the in-flight projects, and immediately questioned the nature, scope, and value of what the team building this tool was doing. The project was stopped, the account team took a major credibility hit, the larger engagement ran to completion, and no follow-on work came to the team as a result. Worth noting, the larger program was worth something over 10x the revenue as the smaller tool project, but the relationship impact from the trust that had been lost was significant enough that the larger engagement was damaged.
This is a difficult situation to assess in retrospect, because the team was eager to solve a client need and be responsive. The problem is that the solution itself didn’t make sense, added no value, and was essentially a ticking time bomb from the moment it was conceived. At a minimum, had the engagement team raised the concern and documented it somewhere in the course of initiating the project, there may have been some resource to mitigate the damage done once the overall direction changed.
The other takeaway from this situation is that a solution should objectively make sense and create value so that, in the event that circumstances and sponsorship changes, the work itself should be worth continuing. If the need for a project is largely subjective in nature, there can be downstream risk that the investment itself may not be in the best interest of the company (or client).
It could be argued that, as an outside team, it was far easier for us to call out the potential issue than the team engaging with the client directly (and that’s 100% true). However, the entire reason we had review teams was to provide an objective lens on the ongoing delivery work, in the interest of providing input and guidance to teams, but also to help them assess revenue at risk. We provided exactly that input, but it was largely discarded in deference to securing the revenue.
Where there was a historical lack of trust
As the start up on a first engagement with a new, large client, a teammate and I had the opportunity to meet with the client CIO for an introduction.
His opening statement to us was “I could buy a company of your size tomorrow if I wanted to, what makes you guys any different and why do we need to talk?”
After the tumbleweed blew across the room… and we drew a collective breath… my very young, overconfident, and inexperienced mind told him that we could also get a set of contractors, give them a copy of Microsoft Visual Studio, and ask them to do the project even cheaper… BUT… that’s not what buying consulting services is about. You’re buying experience, culture, methodology, passion, and a commitment to success. If successful delivery was about tools and technology, then everyone would be great at it, but unfortunately that’s not how things work, which is where we come in.
In retrospect, thank goodness I was young and inexperienced, or I might have been more intimidated. To his credit, the client probably knew that, he paused, apologized for being abrupt, and then told us that nearly every consultant he works with started by saying they were going to deliver a project but “then the minute I turn around and open the safe to pay them, they are looking over my shoulder to see how much more money I have in there.”
For whatever reason, I suspect the fact that I focused more on successful delivery and not “partnership” (which translated into future revenue opportunity in his mind) made a difference in getting off on the right foot.
We left the meeting with an invitation to come back whenever we wanted which, given the size of the client and how generally inaccessible their CIO was at the time, was a notable achievement.
In retrospect, what I believe worked was the unfiltered nature of a genuine and honest response, and I think the client picked up on it by comparison with more “polished” consulting pitches he likely heard on a regular basis from people much more experienced than I was then.
Where the engagement approach itself was poor
The final example I’ll share relates to having an ‘all or nothing’ mentality when it comes to discussing higher risk efforts.
With a change in senior executives, a directional statement was made with regard to a desired amount of technology delivery (i.e., X major releases per year) the new leader wanted to be part of the future environment.
The CIO and leadership team assembled a set of “educational” materials to help the new executive understand why the desired pace was unachievable. The message was not met well, either by the new executive or the head of the company, both of whom considered it a lack of leadership on behalf of the CIO and technology leadership team.
In retrospect, the entire issue was in the approach to the response, because the reason the IT leadership believed the request couldn’t be accomplished was, aside from technology-related issues, the business dependencies in delivering at that pace were generally unmet and would require an unprecedented level of speed by the business teams working with IT overall. The team assumed those items would never change and therefore wrote off the new executive’s request without ever considering whether he’d be willing to explore ways to address those challenges.
This situation has actually bothered me for a long time, in part because of the risk averse nature of the CIO and leadership team at the time, but also because the discussion could have been approached in a positive and partner-oriented mentality. “We’d like to help accomplish these goals and we will do X, Y, and Z to support it. We also, however, need your help in making sure that we can do A, B, and C from a business standpoint as well, because those are critical dependencies in our ability to meet those objectives as well.” That discussion never happened and rather than further the idea of IT as an enabler or partner, the reputation of IT as an impediment or barrier to success was furthered.
Putting Things in Perspective
In all of the situations described, it’s safe to say that none were “easy”, all involved some level of risk, and the stakes were generally high in some way or other.
What I’d say is fundamental in all cases for having healthy client relationships is:
Being open and transparent in communications, noting objections where appropriate
Operating with integrity, no matter what the pressures of the situation are
Remembering to put value in the center of the conversation and the desire to make things better. A partnership isn’t about control, it’s about mutual respect and understanding, listening, and collaboration in the interest of finding the right solution to challenges
It’s worth noting that our reputation is what transcends individual decisions, projects, and jobs over the course of a career (whether within one employer or across many)… and it doesn’t take long to do substantial damage to one if you’re not careful.
Recognizing there are opportunities to improve partnership in customer or client relationships isn’t a condemnation or criticism of any current or past situation I’ve encountered. It’s a recognition that, by acknowledging dysfunction and identifying opportunity where it exists, we create space to make things better and lay the foundation for excellence. It takes humility, but also courageous leadership to drive change where it’s needed, and that will always be worth the effort for the betterment of an organization.
Hopefully the ideas were worth the time it took to read them. As always, feedback and reactions are welcome and appreciated.
Organized Chaos 