What It Is: IT Operations provides “IT for IT”, the infrastructure to track, monitor, and manage operating performance across various dimensions, depending on the scale and complexity of the organization
Why It Matters: The more an IT organization scales in headcount and complexity, the more important it becomes to have a way to benchmark performance and enable operational excellence
Key Concepts
IT Ops is a support organization meant to promote effectiveness, not create bureaucracy
Ops should be centralized regardless of the IT operating model (functional, product-based, etc.)
For large-scale organizations, a federated IT Ops model is preferable for overall org effectiveness
Key Dimensions
Transparency
Without visibility, it is nearly impossible to promote excellence and operational improvement
Focus should be on critical, minimum metrics that enable governance and benchmarking
Metrics can span from a leadership IT scorecard to portfolio and delivery metrics
Governance, Compliance, and Risk Management
IT Ops doesn’t need to provide PMO services, but it should ensure they exist and are effective
Compliance capabilities can be everything from regulatory and SOX to cyber security and audit
Portfolio Management
IT Ops may not provide the services, but should ensure that transparency and governance exist
Capabilities can span demand generation and prioritization to monitoring and value realization
Workforce and Sourcing Strategy
IT Ops should monitor internal/external performance, utilization, and workforce composition
Financial Management
IT Ops should help benchmark value/cost across IT at a service level and identify improvements
Continuous Improvement
IT Ops should identify and track operational excellence opportunities on an ongoing basis
Part of ongoing improvement should be reviewing and ensuring efficacy of IT services overall
What It Is: IT Portfolio Management is the process whereby technology investments are prioritized, managed, and governed (from demand management through delivery) on an ongoing basis, in the interest of enabling business strategy, maximizing return, minimizing risk, and providing security and compliance.
Why It Matters: Organizations don’t have unlimited capacity in terms of people, funding, ability to adopt new solutions, etc. and ensuring investments is essential to maximizing value in relation to spend
Overall Concepts
Portfolio management is about leadership and business partnership first, and process second
Portfolio reviews should produce schedule changes, delivery engagement, or risk management
Understanding total cost of ownership and effective resource management are critical input
Performing named resource planning versus role-based is important for critical roles
Transparency and Governance
Provide visibility into demand, scope, value, complexity, critical resource needs
Monitor ongoing delivery to proactively address risk and maintain and adjust release calendar
Evaluate and report on value realization, adjust metrics on new demand to improve efficacy
Portfolio Allocation
Typically includes: Innovation, Business Projects, Modernization, Security, Compliance, Operate
Prioritization model balance local versus global efforts, short- and long-term value
Release Management
Have a structured release approach with deployment windows to reduce risk and ease adoption
Frontload the first half of the year to avoid excess resource availability issues near the holidays
Separate major and minor releases, maintenance, and experiments into defined release slots
Change Management
Manage a global view of deployments to avoid schedule conflicts and manage end user change
Maintain an end-user view of technology and consider integration to avoid being project-centric
Tools
Portfolio management tools should enable and support the process, never become the focus
Gather only critical data that is actionable, or it is administrative overhead and likely wasteful
What It Is: Excellence is core to creating sustainable value through technology in any organization
Why It Matters: Technology advances so rapidly that most organizations can’t keep up. The balance of agility and discipline, speed and quality are essential to optimizing the value of IT at the right cost
Key Dimensions
Courageous Leadership
Excellence requires tenacity, agility, flexibility, risk appetite, humility, and discipline
Given leadership sets the tone and direction for everything else, this is critical to get right
Need to be an advocate, champion, and business partner, knowing when to say “no” if needed
Transformative Culture
Remaining competitive in a continually evolving world requires a culture that enables change
Culture is expressed in what people see as much or more than anything they hear in speeches
Core values need to be consistently demonstrated from leaders to individual contributors
Relentless Innovation
Consider what happens in the technology strategy if core solutions are obsolete in 18-24 months
Make disciplined innovation part of the ongoing portfolio strategy to maintain competitive edge
Plan for “urban” renewal so there is minimal need for large scale, disruptive modernization
Operating with Agility
Establish strong business partnerships to respond to changes in portfolio composition/priorities
Create a minimally invasive, highly transparent operating infrastructure to drive efficiencies
Leverage workforce and sourcing strategy to provide the right capabilities at the right cost
Framework-Centric Design
Leverage enterprise architecture to establish a connected enterprise of intelligent ecosystems
Develop standards to enable ongoing integration of best-of-breed technology capabilities
Integrate artificial intelligence in thoughtful ways that scale and provide sustainable value
Delivering at Speed
Create a disciplined and repeatable environment for delivering solutions that can scale
Design with architecture, quality, and security in mind, not as an afterthought
Understand that total cost of ownership is as important as speed-to-market most of the time
What It Is: Workforce and Sourcing Strategy is the long-term approach that an organization uses to provide the necessary skills, internal and external, to enable capabilities to deliver on business commitments and support the current and future technology footprint
Why It Matters: Having a deliberate and thoughtful strategy not only creates an agile and responsive workforce to meet ongoing and variable business demand, but also does so at the right cost. Where a defined strategy is not in place and being governed, there is very likely cost optimization opportunity
Key Concepts
Business and technology needs fluctuate. A strategy helps mitigate the cost impact of change
Leverage a competency model internally and externally to benchmark roles, capacity, and costs
Generally speaking, it’s better to align variable capacity to areas of variable demand
Benchmark internal cost of service against best-in-class providers, make adjustments as needed
Understand that not everything needs differentiated service, keep the lights on is valid in cases
Invest in areas where technology creates competitive advantage and IP, outsource elsewhere
Actively manage and govern talent development and performance to optimize productivity
Never assume HC = FTE. Used named resources for capacity planning of critical roles vs FTEs
Source where technology is emerging and immature to facilitate experiments and early learning
It is a reasonable strategy to engage partners in simplification efforts through mutual incentives
Never assume shifting sourcing to captives for arbitrage benefits is a 1:1 FTE exchange, it isn’t
Be mindful in how you manage overall tenure. Motivated inexperience introduces risk and cost
Leverage role-based capacity agreements to shift contract labor costs to a defined model
Scrutinize contracting heavily to avoid inflated cost. Convert or hire longer-term needs
Establish consistent contract language that aligns to service delivery roles and expectations
Define primary and secondary partners for individual sourcing needs, manage them consistently
Negotiate aggressively but fairly, “partnerships” produce more value than a “vendor” mentality
Benchmark and leverage consistent performance metrics across internal and external partners
Apply vendor management and governance processes to captives the same as external partners
Approach
Understand Current State – Benchmarking capacity by role across sources of staff, including cost
Determine What You Need – Evaluate business and industry trends, do the same for technology
Define Sourcing Approach – Identify critical skills to retain and source, and where to get them
Refine Talent Strategy – Clarify gaps between current and future IT staffing, skills and capacity
Develop Transition Plan – Plan change to talent pool and make explicit sourcing decisions
What It Is: App Rationalization is the process of reducing redundancies that exist in an application portfolio in the interest of reducing complexity, cost of ownership, and improving speed-to-market.
Why It Matters: Organizations typically spend anywhere between 50-80% of their IT budget maintaining and supporting systems in place. That limits investment in innovation and competitive advantage.
Key Concepts
Understand that rationalization is more about change management than technology
Ensure there are healthy relationships in place and strong leadership support for the work
Focus in on critical areas of the portfolio that drive cost. Don’t boil the ocean
Don’t worry about creating the perfect infrastructure day one. Clean that up along the way
Start with how your business operates and simplify and standardize processes first
Align your future blueprint as cleanly to your desired operating footprint as possible
Consider your Artificial Intelligence (AI), cloud, and security strategies in the future vision
Simplification can come through reducing both unique applications and instances of applications
Address how systems will be supported and enhanced moving forward in your design
Explicitly include milestones for decommissioning in your roadmap. Don’t let that go undone
Expect the work to continually evolve and adapt. Plan for change and adjust responsively
Include rationalization as part of your ongoing portfolio strategy so it’s not a one-time event
Approach
Align – Obtain organizational support critical to defining vision, scope, and facilitating change
Understand – Gather an understanding of the current state and alignment to operations
Evaluate – Leverage something like the Gartner TIME model to evaluate portfolio quality and fit
Strategize – Develop a future state blueprint, CBA, and proposed changes to the environment
Socialize – Obtain feedback, iterate, clarify the vision, and finalize the initial roadmap
Mobilize – Launch first wave of delivery, realign ongoing work as required
Execute – Deliver on 30-, 60-, and 90-day goals, governing and adjusting the approach as you go
“Something needs to change… we’re not growing, we’re too slow, we’re not competitive, we need to manage costs…”
Change is an inevitable reality in business. Even the most successful company will face adversity, new competitors, market shifts, evolving customer needs, expense pressures, near-term shareholder expectations, etc. While it’s important to focus on adjusting course and remedying issues, the question is whether you will find yourself in exactly the same (or at least a relatively similar) situation again (along with how quickly) and that comes down to leadership and culture.
Culture issues tend to beget other business issues, whether it’s delayed or misaligned decisions, complacency and a lack of innovation, a lack of collaboration and cooperation, risk averse behaviors, redundant or ineffective solutions, high turnover resulting in lost expertise, and so on. The point is that excellence needs to start “at the top” and work its way throughout an organization, andthe mechanism for that proliferation is culture.
The focus of this article will be to explore what it takes to evolve culture in an organization, and to provide ways to think about what can happen when it isn’t positioned or aligned effectively.
It Starts with the Right Intentions
Conformance versus Performance
Before attempting to change anything, the fundamental question to be asked is why you want to have a culture in place to begin with? Certainly, over the course of time and multiple organizations (and clients), I’ve seen culture emphasized to varying degrees, from where it is core to a company’s DNA, to where it is relegated to a poster, web page, or item on everyone’s desk that is seldom noticed or referenced.
In cases where it’s rarely referenced, there is missed opportunity to establish mission and purpose, rallying people around core concepts that can facilitate an effective work environment.
That being said, focusing on culture doesn’t necessarily create a greater good in itself, as I’ve seen environments where culture is used in almost a punitive way, suggesting there are norms to which everyone must adhere and specific language everyone needs to use, or there will be adverse consequences.
That isn’t about establishing a productive work environment, it’s about control and conformance, and that can be toxic when you understand the fundamental issue it represents: employees aren’t trusted enough to do the right thing, be empowered, and enabled to act, so there needs to be a mechanism in place to drive conformity, enforce “common language”, and isolate those who don’t fit the mold to create a more homogenous organizational society.
So, what happens to innovation, diversity, and inclusion in these environments? It’s suppressed or destroyed, because the capabilities and gifts of the individual are lost to the push towards a unified, homogenized whole. That is a fairly extreme outcome of such authoritarian environments, but the point is that a strong culture is not, in itself, automatically good if the focus is control and not performance and excellence.
I’ve written multiple articles on culture and values that I believe are important in organizations, so I won’t repeat those messages here, but the goal of establishing culture should be fostering leadership, innovation, growth, collaboration, and optimizing the contribution of everyone in an organization to serve the greater good. If that doesn’t apply in equal measure to every employee, based on their individual capabilities and experience, that’s fine from my perspective, so long as they don’t detract from the performance of others in the process. The point is that culture isn’t about the words on the wall, it’s about the behaviors that you are aspiring to engender within an organization and the degree to which you live into them every day.
Begin with Leadership
Words and Actions
It is fairly obvious to say that culture needs to start “at the top” and work its way outward, but there are so many issues I’ve seen over time in this step alone, that it is worth repeating.
It is not uncommon for leaders to speak in town hall meetings or public settings and proclaim the merits of the company culture, asking others to follow the core values or principles as outlined, to the betterment of themselves and everyone else (customers and others included as appropriate). Now, the question is: what happens when that person returns to their desk and makes their next set of decisions? This is where culture is measured, and employees notice everything over time.
The challenge for leaders who want excellence and organizational performance is to take culture to heart and do what they can to live into it, even in the most difficult circumstances, which is where it tends to be needed the most. I remember hearing a speaker suggest that the litmus test of the strength of your commitment to culture could be expressed in whether you would literally walk away from business rather than compromise your values. That’s a pretty difficult bar to set in my experience, but an interesting way to think about the choices we make and their relative consequence.
Aligning Incentives versus Values
Building on the previous point, there is a difference between behaviors and values. The latter is what you believe and prioritize, the former is how you act. Behaviors are directly observable; values are indirectly observed through your words and actions.
Why is this important in the context of culture? It is important, because you can incent people in the interest of influencing their behavior, but you can’t change someone’s values, no matter how you incent them. To the extent you want to set up a healthy, collaborative culture and there are individual motivations that don’t align with doing the right thing, organizational performance will suffer in some way, and the more senior the individual(s) are in the organization, the more significant the impact will likely be.
This point ultimately comes down to doing the right level of due diligence during the hiring process, but also being willing to make difficult decisions during the performance management process, because sometimes individual performers with unhealthy behaviors cause a more significant impact than is evident without some level of engagement and scrutiny from a leadership standpoint.
Have a Thoughtful Approach
Incubate -> Demonstrate -> Extend
As the diagram above suggests, culture doesn’t change overnight, and being deliberate in the approach to change will have a significant impact to how effective and sustainable it is.
In general, the approach I’d recommend is to start from “center” with leadership, raise awareness, educate on the intent and value to the changes proposed, and incubate there. Broader communication in terms of the proposed shift is likely useful in preparing the next group to be engaged in the process, but the point is to start small, begin “living into” the desired model, evaluating its efficacy, and demonstrating the value it can create, THEN extend to the next (likely adjacent) set of people, and repeat the process over and over until the change has fully proliferated to the entire organization. The length of any given iteration would likely vary depending on the size of the employee population and the degree of change involved (more substantial = longer windows of time), but the point is to be conscious and deliberate in how it is approached so adjustments can be made along the way and to enable leaders to understand and internalize the “right” set of behaviors before expecting them to help advocate and reinforce it in others.
An Example (Building an Architecture Capability)
To provide a simple example, when trying to establish an architecture capability across an organization, it would need to ultimately span from the central enterprise architecture team down to technical leads on individual implementation teams. It would be impractical to implement the model all at once, so it would be more effective to stage it out, working from the top-down, first defining roles and responsibilities across the entire operating model, but then implementing one “layer” of roles at a time, until it is entirely in place.
Since architects are generally responsible for technical solution quality, but not execution, the deployment of the model would need to follow two coordinated paths: building the architecture capability itself and aligning it with the delivery leadership with which it is meant to collaborate and cooperate (e.g., project and program managers). Trying to establish the role without alignment and support from people leading and participating on delivery teams likely would fail or lead to ineffective implementation, which is another reason why a more thoughtful and deliberate approach to the change is required.
What does this have to do with culture? Well, architecture is fundamentally about solution quality in technology, reuse, managing complexity and cost of ownership, and enabling speed and disciplined innovation. Establishing roles with an accountability for quality will test the appetite within an organization when it comes to working beyond individual project goals and constraints to looking at more strategic objectives for simplification, speed, and reuse. Where courageous leadership and the right culture are not in place, evolving the IT operating model will be considerably more difficult, likely at every stage of the process.
Manage Reality
To this point, I’ve addressed change in a fairly uniform and somewhat idealistic manner, but reality is often quite different, so I wanted to explore a couple situations and how I think about the implications of each.
Non-Uniform Execution
So, what happens when you change culture within your team, but it doesn’t extend into those who work directly with you? It depends on the nature of the change itself, of course, but likely the farther “out” from center you go, the more difficult it will be for your team to capitalize on whatever the intended benefits of the change were intended to be.
My assumptions here are in relation to medium- to larger-scale organizations, where the effects are magnified and it is impractical to “be everywhere, all the time” to engage in ways that help facilitate the desired change.
In the case that there isn’t broader alignment to whatever cultural adjustments you want to make within your team, depending on the degree of difference to the broader company culture, it may be necessary to clarify how “we operate internally” versus how “we engage with others”. The goal of drawing out that separation would be to try and drive performance improvement within your team, but not waste energy and create friction in your external interactions.
There is a potential risk in having teams with a very different culture than the broader organization if it creates an environment where there becomes an “us and them” mentality or a special treatment situation where that team demonstrates unhealthy organizational behaviors or is held to different standards than others. Ultimately those situations cause larger issues and should be avoided where possible.
Handling Disparate Cultures
Unlike the previous situation where there is one broader culture and a team operates in a slightly different manner; I’ve also seen situations where groups operate with very different cultures within the same overall organization and it can create substantial disconnects if not addressed effectively. When not addressed there can be a lot of internal friction, competition, and a lack of effective collaboration, which will hinder performance in one or more ways over time.
One way to manage a situation where there are multiple distinct cultures within a single organization, would first be to look for some level of core, universally accepted operating principles that can be applied to everyone, but then to focus entirely on the points of engagement across organizations, clarify roles and responsibilities for each constituent group, and manage to those dependencies the same as you would if working with a third-party provider or partner. The overall operating performance opportunity may not be fully realized, but this kind of approach could be used to provide clarity of expectations and reduce friction points to a large degree.
Wrapping Up
The purpose of this article was to come back to a core element that makes organizations successful over time, and that’s culture. To the degree that there are gaps or issues, it is always possible to adapt and evolve, but it takes a thoughtful approach, the right leadership, and time to make sustainable change. In my opinion, it is time worth spending to the degree that performance and excellence is your goal. It will never be “perfect” for many reasons, but thinking about how you establish, reinforce, and evolve it in a disciplined way can be the difference to remaining agile, competitive, and successful overall.
I hope the ideas were worth considering. Thanks for spending the time to read them. Feedback is welcome as always.
This is a question that I’ve heard asked many times, particularly when there is a strategic initiative or transformation effort being kicked off. Normally, the answer is an enthusiastic “Yes”, because most programs start with a lot of optimism (which is a good thing), but not always a full understanding of risk. The question is… How do you know whether you have the necessary capabilities to deliver?
In any type of organization, there is a blend of skills and experience, whether that is across a leadership team or within an individual team itself. Given that reality and the ongoing nature of organizations to evolve, realign, and reorganize, it is not uncommon to leverage some form of evaluation (such as a Kolbe assessment) to understand the natural strengths, communication, or leadership styles of various individuals to help facilitate understanding and improve collaboration.
But what about knowledge and experience? This part I haven’t seen done as often partially because, if not done well, it can lead to a cumbersome and manually intensive process that doesn’t create value.
The focus of this article is to suggest a means to understand and evaluate the breadth of knowledge and skills across a team. To the extent we can visualize collective capability, it can be a useful tool to inform various things from a management standpoint, which are outlined in the second section below.
Necessary caveats: The example used is not meant to be prescriptive or exhaustive and this activity doesn’t need to be focused on IT alone. The goal in the illustration used here was to provide enough specificity to help the reader visualize the concept at a practical level, but the data is entirely made up and not meant to be taken as a representation of an actual set of people.
On the Approach
Thinking through the Dimensions
The diagram above breaks out 27 dimensions from a knowledge and skills standpoint, ranging from business understanding to operations and execution. The dimensions chosen for the purposes of this exercise don’t particularly matter, but I wanted to select a set that covered many of the aspects of an IT organization as a whole.
From an approach standpoint, the goal would be to identify what is being evaluated, select the right set of dimensions, define them, then determine “what good looks like” in terms of having a baseline for benchmarking (e.g., 10 means X, 8 means Y, 6 means Z, etc.). With the criteria established, one should then explain the activity to the group being evaluated, prepare a simple survey, and gather the data. The activity is meant to be rapid and directionally accurate, not to supplant individual performance evaluations, career development, or succession plans that should exist at a more detailed level. Ideally the dimensions should also align to the competency model for an organization, but the goal of this activity is directional, so that step isn’t critical if it requires too much effort.
Once data has been collected, individual results can be plotted in a spider graph like the one below to provide a perspective on where there are overlaps and gaps across a team.
Ways of Applying the Concept
With the individual inputs from a team having been provided, it’s possible to think about the data in two different respects: how it reflects individual capabilities, gaps, and overlaps as well as what it shows as the collective experience of the team as a whole (the green dotted outline above).
The data now being assembled, there are a number of ways to potentially leverage the information outlined below.
Talent Development: The strengths and gaps in any individual view can be used to inform individual development plans or identify education needs for the team as a whole. It can also be used to sanity check individual roles and accountability against the actual experience of individuals on the team. This isn’t to suggest rotations and “learn on the job” situations aren’t a good thing, but rather to raise awareness of those situations so that they can be managed proactively with the individual or the team as a whole. To the extent that a gap with one person is a strength in another, there could be cross-training opportunities that surface through the process.
Coordination and Collaboration: With overlaps and gaps visible across a team, there can be areas identified where individual team members see opportunities to consult with others who have a similar skillset, and also perhaps a different background that could surface different ways to approach and solve problems. In larger organizations, it can often be difficult to know “who to invite” to a conversation, where the default becomes inviting everyone (or making everyone ‘mandatory’ versus ‘optional’), which ultimately can lead to less productive or over-attended conversations that lack focus.
Leaders and Teams: In the representative data above, I deliberately highlighted areas where team members were not as experienced as the person leading the team, but the converse situation as well. In my experience, it is almost never the case that the leader is the most experienced in everything within the scope of what a team has to do. If that was the case, it could suggest that the potential of that team could be limited to that leader’s individual capabilities and vision, because others lack the experience to help inform direction. In the event that team members have more experience than their leader, there can also be opportunities for individuals to step up and provide direction, assuming the team leader creates space and a supportive environment for that occur. Again, the point of the activity is to identify and determine what, if anything, to do with these disparities where they exist.
Sourcing Strategy: Where significant gaps exist (e.g., there is no one with substantial AI experience in the example data above), these could be areas where finding a preferred partner with a depth of experience in the topic could be beneficial while internal talent is acquired or developed (to the extent it is deemed strategic to the organization).
Business Partnership: The visibility could serve as input to a partnership discussion to align expectations for where business leaders expect support and capability from their technology counterparts versus areas where they are comfortable taking the lead or providing direction. This isn’t always a very deliberate conversation in my experience, and sometimes that can lead to missed expectations in complex delivery situations.
Risk Management: One of the most important things to recognize about a visualization like this is not just what it shows about a teams’ capability, it’s also what isn’t there.
Using Donald Rumsfeld’s now famous concept:
There is known – something for which we have facts and experience
There is known unknown – something we know is needed, but which is not yet clear
And the pure unknown – something outside our experience, and therefore a blind spot
The last category is where we should also focus in an activity like this, because the less experience that exists individually and collectively in a leadership team, there will be a substantial increase in risk because there is a lack of awareness of all the “known unknowns” that can have a material impact on delivering solutions and operating IT. To the extent that a team is relatively inexperienced, no matter how motivated they may be, there is an increased probability that something will be compromised, whether that is cost, quality, schedule, morale, or something else. To that end, this tool can be an important mechanism to identify and manage risk.
Wrapping Up
Having recently written a fairly thorough set of articles on the future of enterprise technology, I wanted to back up and look at something a little less complex, but also with a focus on improving transparency and informing leadership discussions on risk, development, and coordination.
Whether through a mechanism like this or some other avenue, I believe there is value in understanding the breadth of capabilities that exist within a team and across a leadership group as a means for promoting excellence overall.
I hope the ideas were worth considering. Thanks for spending the time to read them. Feedback is welcome as always.
Having had this blog for nearly four years, I took a look at the nature of the articles written to date, and subjects included therein, wondering if there were any patterns that emerged. I found the resulting chart (above) interesting as a reflection of the relative importance I associate with certain topics overall. To that end, I thought I’d provide some perspective on what’s been written to date before moving to the next article, whatever that may be.
Leadership and Culture
The two largest focus areas were leadership and culture, which isn’t surprising given I’ve worked for many years across corporate and consulting environments and have seen the relative impact that both can have on organizational performance on the whole. Nearly two-thirds of my articles to date touch on leadership and one-half on culture, because they are fundamental to setting the stage for everything else you want to accomplish.
In the case of organizational excellence, courageous leadership has to be at the top of the list, given that difficult decisions and a level of fearlessness are required to achieve great things. By contrast, hesitancy and complacency will almost always lead to suboptimized results, because there will be apprehension about innovating, challenging the status quo, and effectively managing relationships where the ability to be a partner and advisor may require difficult conversations at times.
With leadership firmly rooted, it becomes possible to establish a culture that promotes integrity, respect, collaboration, innovation, productivity, and results. Where one or more of these dimensions is missing, it is nearly impossible to be effective without compromising performance somewhere. That isn’t to say that you can’t deliver in an unhealthy environment, you certainly can and many organizations do. It is very likely, however, that those gains will be short-lived and difficult to repeat or sustain because of the consequential impact of those issues on the people working in those conditions over time. In this case, the metrics will likely tell the tale, between delivery performance, customer feedback, solution quality, and voluntary attrition (to name a few).
Delivery and Innovation
With the above foundation in place, the next two areas of focus were delivery and innovation, which is reassuring given that I believe strongly in the concept of actionable strategy versus one that is largely theoretical in nature. Having worked in environments that leaned heavily on innovation without enough substantive delivery as well as ones that delivered consistently but didn’t innovate enough, the answer is to ensure both are occurring on a continual basis and managed in a very deliberate way.
Said differently, if you innovate without delivering, you won’t create tangible business value. If you deliver without ever innovating, at some point, you will lose competitive advantage or risk obsolescence in some form or other.
The Role of Discipline
While not called out as a topic in itself, in most cases where I discuss delivery or IT operations, I mention discipline as well, because I believe it is a critical component of pursuing excellence in anything. The odd contradiction that exists, is the notion that having discipline somehow implies bureaucracy or moving slowly, when the reality is the exact opposite.
Without defined, measurable, and repeatable processes, it is nearly impossible to drive continuous improvement and establish a more predictable operating environment over time. From a delivery standpoint, having methodology isn’t about being prescriptive to the point that you lose agility, as an example, it’s about having an understood approach that you can estimate and plan effectively. It also defines rules of engagement within and across teams so that you can partner and execute efficiently in a repeatable fashion. Having consistent processes also allows for monitoring, governing, and improving the efficiency and efficacy of how things are done over time.
The same could be said for leveraging architectural frameworks, common services, and design patterns as well. There is a cost for establishing these things, but if you amortize these investments over time, they ultimately improve speed, reduce risk, improve quality, and thereby reduce TCO and complexity of an environment once they are in place. This is because every team doesn’t invent their own way of doing things, ultimately creating complexity that needs to be maintained and supported down the road. Said differently, it would be very difficult to have reliable estimation metrics when you never do something in a consistent way and analyze variance.
Mental Models and Visualization
The articles also reflect that I prefer having a logical construct and visualizations to organize, illustrate, analyze, and evaluate complex situations, such as AI and data strategy, workforce and sourcing strategy, digital manufacturing facilities, and various other situations. Any of these topics involve many dimensions and layers of associated complexity. Having a mental model, whether it is a functional decomposition, component model, or some other framework, is helpful for both identifying the dimensions of a problem, and also surfacing dependencies and relationships in the interest of driving transformation.
Visualizations also can help facilitate alignment across broader groups of stakeholders where a level of parallel execution is required, making dependencies and relationships more evident and easier to coordinate.
Wrapping Up
Overall, the purpose of writing this article was simply to pause and reflect on what has become a fairly substantive body of work over the last several years, along with recognizing the themes that reoccur time and again because they matter when excellence is your goal. Achieving great things consistently is a byproduct of having vision, effective leadership, discipline, commitment, and a lot of tenacity.
I hope the ideas were worth considering. Thanks for spending the time to read them. Feedback is welcome as always.
A new leader in an organization once asked to understand my role. My answer was very simple: “My role is to change mindsets.”
I’m fairly sure the expectation was something different: a laundry list of functional responsibilities, goals, in-flight activities or tasks that were top of mind, the makeup of my team, etc. All relevant aspects of a job, to be sure, but not my primary focus.
I explained that my goal was to help transform the organization, and if I couldn’t change people’s mindsets, everything else that needed to be done was going to be much more difficult. That’s how it is with change.
Complacency is the enemy. Excellence is a journey and you are never meant to reach the destination.
Having been part of and worked with organizations that enjoyed tremendous market share but then encountered adversity and lost their advantage, there were common characteristics, starting with basking in the glow of that success too long and losing the hunger and drive that made them successful in the first place.
The remainder of this article will explore the topic further in three dimensions: leadership, innovation, and transformation in the interest of providing some perspective on the things to look for when excellence is your goal.
Fall short of excellence, you can still be great. Try to be great and fail? You’re going to be average… and who wants to be part of something average? No one who wants to win.
Courageous Leadership
As with anything, excellence has to start with leadership. There is always resistance and friction associated with change. That’s healthy and good because it surfaces questions and risks and, in a perfect world, the more points of view you can leverage in setting direction, the more likely you’ll avoid blind spots or avoidable mistakes just for a lack of awareness or understanding of what you are doing.
There is a level of discipline needed to accomplish great things over time and courage is a requirement, because there will inevitably be challenges, surprises, and setbacks. How leaders respond to that adversity, through their adaptability, tenacity and resilience will ultimately have a substantial influence on what is possible overall.
Some questions to consider:
Is there enough risk tolerance to create space to try new ideas, fail, learn, and try again?
Is there discipline in your approach so that business choices are thoughtful, reasoned, intentional, measured, and driven towards clear outcomes?
Is there a healthy level of humility to understand that, no matter how much success there is right now, without continuing to evolve, there will always be a threat of obsolescence?
Relentless Innovation
In my article on Excellence by Design, I was deliberate in choosing the word “relentless” in terms of innovation, because I’ve seen so many instances over time of the next silver bullet meant to be a “game changer”, “disruptor”, etc. only to see that then be overtaken by the next big thing a year or so later.
One of the best things about working in technology is thatit constantly gives us opportunities to do new things: to be more productive and effective, produce better outcomes, create more customer value, and be more competitive.
Some people see that as a threat, because it requires a willingness to continue to evolve, adapt, and learn. You can’t place too much value on a deep understanding of X technology, because tomorrow Y may come along and make that knowledge fairly obsolete. While there is an aspect of that argument that is true at an implementation level, it gives too much importance to the tools and not enough to the problems we’re ultimately trying to solve, namely creating a better customer experience, delivering a better product or service, and so on.
We need to plan like the most important thing right now won’tbe the most important 6 months or even a year from now. Assume we will wantto replace it, or integrate something new to work with it, improving our overall capability and creating even more value over time.
What does that do? In a disciplined environment, it should change our mindset about how we approach implementing new tools and technologies in the first place. It should also influence how much exposure we create in the dependencies we place upon those tools in the process of utilizing them.
To take what could be a fairly controversial example: I’ve written multiple articles on Artificial Intelligence (AI), how to approach it, and how I think about it in various dimensions, including where it is going. The hype surrounding these technologies is deservedly very high right now, there is a surge in investment, and a significant number of tools are and will be hitting the market. It’s also reasonable to assume a number of “agentic” solutions will pop up, meant to solve this problem and that… ok… now what happens then? Are things better, worse, or just different? What is the sum of an organization that is fully deployed with all of the latest tools? I don’t believe we have any idea and I also believe it will be terribly inefficient if we don’t ask this question right now.
As a comparison, what history has taught us is that there will be a user plugged into these future ecosystems somewhere, with some role and responsibilities, to work in concert (and ideally in harmony) with all this automation (physical and virtual) that we’ve brought to bear on everyone’s behalf. How will they make sense of it all? If we drop an agent for everything, is it any different than giving someone a bunch of new applications, all of which spit recommendations and notifications and alerts at them, saying “this is what you need to do”, but leaving them to figure out which of those disconnected pieces of advice make the most sense, which should be the priority, and try somehow not to be overwhelmed? Maybe not, because the future state might be a combination of intelligent applications (something I wrote about in The Intelligent Enterprise) and purpose-built agents that fill gaps those applications don’t cover.
Ok, so why does any of that matter? I’m not making an argument against experimenting and leveraging AI. My point is that, every time there is surge towards the next technology advancement, we seldom think about the reality that it will eventually evolve or be replaced by something else and we should take that into consideration as we integrate those new technologies to begin with. The only constant is change and that’s a good thing, but we also need to be disciplined in how we think about it on an ongoing basis.
Some questions to consider:
Is there a thoughtful and disciplined approach to innovation in place?
Is there a full lifecycle-oriented view when introducing new technologies, to consider how to integrate them so they can be replaced or to retire other existing, potentially redundant solutions once they are introduced?
Are the new technologies being vetted, reviewed, and integrated as part of a defined ecosystem with an eye towards managing technical debt over time?
Continual Transformation
In the spirit of fostering change, it is very common for a “strategy” conversation to be rooted in a vision. A vision sets the stage for what the future environment is meant to look like. It is ideally compelling enough to create a clear understanding of the desired outcome and to generate momentum in the pursuit of that goal (or set of goals)… and experience has taught me this is actually NOT the first or only thing important to consider in that first step.
Sustainable change isn’t just about having a vision, it is about having the right culture.
The process for strategy definition isn’t terribly complicated at an overall level: define a vision, understand the current state, identify the gaps, develop a roadmap to fill those gaps, execute, adapt, and govern until you’re done.
The problem is that large transformation efforts are extremely difficult to deliver. I don’t fundamentally believe that difficulty is often rooted in the lack of a clear vision or as simple as having execution issues that ultimately undermine success. I believe successful transformation isn’t a destination to begin with. Transformation should be a continual journey towards excellence.
How that excellence is manifest can be articulated through one or more “visions” that communicate concepts of the desired state, but that picture can and will evolve as capabilities available through automation, process, and organizational change occur. What’s most important is having courageous leadership and the innovation mindset mentioned above, but also a culture driven to sustain that competitive advantage and hunger for success.
Said differently: With the right culture, you can likely accomplish almost any vision, but only some visions will be achievable without the right culture.
Some questions to consider in this regard:
Is there a vision in place for where the organization is heading today?
What was the “previous” vision, what happened to it, did it succeed or fail and, if so, why?
Is the current change viewed as a “project” or a “different way of working”? (I would argue the latter is the desired state nearly in all cases)
Wrapping Up
Having shared the above thoughts, it’s difficult to communicate what is so fundamental to excellence, which is the passion it takes to succeed in the first place.
Excellence is a choice. Success is a commitment. It takes tenacity and grit to make it happen and that isn’t always easy or popular.
There is always room to be better, even in some of the most mundane things we do every day. That’s why courageous leadership is so important and where culture becomes critical in providing the foundation for longer-term success.
I hope the ideas were worth considering. Thanks for spending the time to read them. Feedback is welcome as always.
In my most recent articles on Approaching Artificial Intelligence and Transformation, I highlight the importance of discipline in achieving business outcomes. To that end, governance is a critical aspect of any large-scale transformation or delivery effort because it both serves to reduce risk and inform change on an ongoing basis, both of which are an inevitable reality of these kinds of programs.
The purpose of this article is to discuss ways to approach governance overall, to avoid common concerns, and to establish core elements that will increase the probability it will be successful. Having seen and established many PMOs and governance bodies over time, I can honestly say that they are difficult to put in place for as many intangible reasons as anything mechanical, hopefully the nature of which will be addressed below.
Have the Right Mindset
Before addressing the execution “dos” and “don’ts”, success starts with understanding that governance is about successful delivery, not pure oversight. Where delivery is the priority, the focus is typically on enablement and support. By contrast, where the focus is the latter, emphasis can be placed largely on controls and intervention. The reality is that both are needed, which will be discussed more below, but starting with an intention to help delivery teams generally should translate into a positive and supportive environment, where collaboration is encouraged. If, by comparison, the role of governance is relegated to finding “gotchas” and looking for issues without providing teams will guidance or solutions, the effort likely won’t succeed. Healthy relationships and trust are critical to effective governance, because they encourage transparent and open dialogue. Without that, likely the process will break down or be ineffective somewhere along the way.
In a perfect world, delivery teams should want to participate in a governance process because it helps them do their work.
Addressing the Challenges
Suggesting that you want to initiate a governance process can be a very uncomfortable conversation. As a consultant, clients can feel like it is something being done “to” them, with a third-party reporting on their work to management. As a corporate citizen, it can feel like someone is trying to exercise a level of control over their peers in a leadership team and, consequently, limiting individual autonomy and empowerment in some way. This is why relationships and trust are critically important. Governance is a partnership and it is about increasing the probability of successful outcomes, not adding a layer of management over people who are capable of doing their jobs with the right level of support.
That being said, three things are typically said when the idea of establishing governance is introduced: that it will slow things down, hinder value creation, and add unnecessary overhead to teams that are already “too busy” or rushing to a deadline. I’ll focus on each of these in turn, along with what can be done to address the concerns in how you approach things.
It Slows Things Down
As I wrote in my article on Excellence by Design, delivering at speed matters. Lack of oversight can lead to efforts going off the rails without the timely interventions and support that cause delays and budget overruns. That being said, if the process slows everything down, you aren’t necessarily helping teams deliver either.
A fundamental question is whether your governance process is meant to be a “gate” or a “checkpoint”.
In the case of a gate, they can be very disruptive, so there should be compliance or risk-driven concerns (e.g., security or data privacy) that necessitate stopping or delaying some or all of a project until certain defined criteria or standards are met. If a process is gated, then this should be factored into estimation and planning at the outset, so expectations are set and managed accordingly, and to avoid the “we don’t have time for this” discussion that otherwise could happen. Gating criteria and project debriefs / retrospectives should also be reviewed to ensure standards and guidelines are updated to help both mitigate risk and encourage accelerated delivery, which is a difficult balance to strike. In principle, the more disciplined an environment is, the less “gating” should be needed, because teams are already following standards, doing proper quality assurance, and so on, and risk management should be easier on an average effort.
When it comes to “checkpoints”, there should be no difference in terms of the level of standards and guidelines in place, it’s about how they are handled in the course of the review discussion itself. When critical criteria are missed in a gate, there is a “pause and adjust” approach, whereas a checkpoint would note the exception and requested remedy, ideally along with a timeframe for doing so. The team is allowed to continue forward, but with an explicit assumption that they will make adjustments so the overall solution integrity is maintained in line with expectations. This is where a significant amount of technical debt and delivery issues are created. There is a level of trust involved in a checkpoint process, because the delivery team may choose not to remediate any issues, in which case the purpose and value of standards can be undermined, and a significant amount of complexity and risk is introduced as a result. If this becomes a pattern over time, it may make sense to shift towards a more gated process if things like security, privacy, or other critical issues are being created.
Again, the goal of governance is to remove barriers, provide resources where required, and to enable successful delivery, but there is a handshake involved to the degree that the process integrity needs to be managed overall. My general point of view is to trust teams to do the right thing and to leverage a checkpoint versus a gated process, but that is predicated on ensuring standards and quality are maintained. To the delivery discipline isn’t where it needs to be, a stronger process may be appropriate.
It Erodes Value
To the extent that the process is perceived to be pure overhead, it is important to clarify the overall goals of the process and, to the extent possible, to identify some metrics that can be used to signal whether it is being effective in helping to promote a healthy delivery environment.
At an overall level, the process is about reducing risk, promoting speed and enablement, and increasing the probability of successful delivery. Whether that is measured in changes in budget and schedule variance, issues remediated pre-deployment, or by a downstream measure of business value created through initiatives delivered on time, there should be a clear understanding of what the desired outcomes are and a sanity check that they are being met.
Arguably, where standards are concerned, this can be difficult to evaluate and measure, but certainly the increase in technical debt that is created in an environment that lacks standards and governance, cost of operations, and percentage of effort directed and build versus run on an overall level can be monitored and evaluated.
It Adds Overhead
I remember taking an assignment to help clean up the governance of a delivery environment many years ago where the person leading the organization was receiving a stack of updates every week that was literally three feet of documents when printed, spanning hundreds of projects. It goes without saying that all of that reporting provided nothing actionable, beyond everyone being able to say that they were “reporting out” on their delivery efforts on an ongoing basis. It was also the case that the amount of time project and program managers were focused on updating all that documentation was substantial. This is not governance. This is administration and a waste of resources. Ultimately, by changing the structure of the process, defining standards, and level of information being reported, the outcome was a five-page summary that covered critical programs, ongoing maintenance, production, and key metrics that was produced with considerably less effort and provided much better transparency into the environment.
The goal of governance is providing support, not producing reams of documentation. Ideally, there should be a critical minimum amount of information requested from teams to support a discussion on what they are doing, where they are in the delivery process, the risks or challenges they are facing, and what help (if any) they may need. To the degree that you can leverage artifacts the team is already producing so there is little to no extra effort involved in preparing for a discussion, even better. And, as another litmus test, everything included in a governance discussion should serve a purpose and be actionable. Anything else likely is a waste of time and resources.
Making Governance Effective
Having addressed some of the common concerns and issues, there are also things that should be considered that increase the probability of success.
Allow for Evolution
As I mentioned in the opening, the right mindset has a significant influence on making governance successful. Part of that is understanding it will never be perfect. I believe very strongly in launching governance discussions and allowing feedback and time to mature the process and infrastructure given real experience with what works and what everyone needs.
One of the best things that can be done is to track and monitor delivery risks and technology-related issues and use those inputs to guide and prioritize the standards and guidelines in place. Said differently, you don’t need governance to improve things you already do well, you leverage it (primarily) to help you address risks and gaps you have and to promote quality.
Having seen an environment where a team was “working on” establishing a governance process over an extended period of time versus one that was stood up inside 30 days, I’d rather have the latter process in place and allow for it to evolve than one that is never launched.
Cover the Bases
In the previous section, I mentioned leveraging a critical minimum amount of information to facilitate the process, ideally utilizing artifacts a team already has. Again, it’s not about the process, it’s about the discussion and enabling outcomes.
That being said, since trust and partnership are important, even in a fairly bare bones governance environment, there should be transparency into what the process is, when it should be applied, who should attend, expectations of all participants, and a consistent cadence with which it is conducted.
It should be possible to have ad-hoc discussions if needed, but there is something contradictory to suggesting that governance is a key component to a disciplined environment and not being able to schedule the discussions themselves consistently. Anecdotally, when we conducted project review discussions in my time at Sapient, it was commonly understood that if a team was ever “too busy” to schedule their review, they probably needed to have it as soon as possible, so the reason they were overwhelmed or too busy was clear.
Satisfy Your Stakeholders
The final dimension to consider in making governance effective is understanding and satisfying the stakeholders surrounding it, starting with the teams. Any process can and should evolve, and that evolution should be based on experience obtained executing the process itself, monitoring operating metrics on an ongoing basis, and feedback that is continually gathered to make it more effective.
That being said, if the process never surfaces challenges and risks, it likely isn’t working properly, because governance is meant to do exactly that, along with providing teams with the support they need. Satisfying stakeholders doesn’t mean painting an unrealistically positive picture, especially if there are fundamental issues in the underlying environment.
I have seen situations where teams were encouraged to share inaccurate information about the health of their work in the interest of managing perceptions and avoiding difficult conversations that were critically needed. This is why having an experienced team leading the conversations and a healthy, supportive, and trusting environment is so important. Governance is needed because things do happen in delivery. Technology work is messy and complicated and there are always risks that materialize. The goal is to see them and respond before they have consequential impact.
Wrapping Up
Hopefully I’ve managed to hit some of the primary points to consider when establishing or evaluating a governance process. There are many dimensions, but the most important ones are first, focusing on value and, second, on having the right mindset, relationships, and trust. The process is too often the focus, and without the other parts, it will fail. People are at the center of making it work, nothing else.
I hope the ideas were worth considering. Thanks for spending the time to read them. Feedback is welcome as always.
Organized Chaos 