IT Resource Constraints, or Too Much Demand?

Guest blog by Bob Kantor, IT executive coach and author of Shatter Your Leadership Limits - Better Results in Less Time with Less Stress.

A comment I hear more and more often from IT leaders these days is, “We can’t do that because we are resource constrained.”

I believe that there are helpful ways to reframe this common situation. Just as the quality of the questions that we ask determines the quality of our answers, the way that we frame our challenges determine the effectiveness of our approaches to solving them.

So, I’d like to reframe the “resource constraints” challenge. When we see our IT organization’s ability to deliver business solutions as constrained by the amount of resources we have available, then the most apparent solutions look like adding or finding more resources. More often than not that means raiding other projects, asking for budget increases for headcount, or additional project funding for consultants.

Reframing IT Resource Constraints

What happens to the way we view our options if, instead of seeing the issue as “not enough resources,” we see it as “too much demand?”

Does that sound like I'm splitting hairs? “Same problem,” you say? Perhaps. But think about it for a minute… What options do we have when we have the problem of too much demand?

There is the still the option of going after more resources, just as before. But now we also can consider options for managing the demand that exceeds our current resource capacity.

One such option is to reduce demand by dropping specific requests for new services, and/or by reducing service levels for existing services.

For example, if your infrastructure or DBA groups currently provision new servers in 10 business days, what happens to “resource management” when you provision servers in 15 business days instead? If the Help Desk time-to-answer target is 90 seconds, what happens when you increase it to four minutes?

IT Service Management as a Business Partner Choice

Please note that this is not to suggest that the IT organization makes any unilateral decisions regarding changes to service levels. With this approach, and the others that follow, the idea is to offer your business leaders business investment choices. Each choice has different investments levels and performance impacts. Each aligns differently with your strategic business drivers and operational requirements.

The same approach applies to dropping or postponing requests for specific new services or projects. Which requests might be deferred until the following fiscal year, or postponed until a current project is completed? What happens if you force-rank the business priority of all the requests for IT projects and services across the enterprise, and then identify how far down the list of requests your current resource level can take you?

This approach significantly changes the dynamics of the dialog between the IT organization and all of its constituents. No longer is IT complaining about resources or saying “No” to project and service requests.

Now, IT is engaging business colleagues in making collaborative business choices to maximize the ROI from the company’s investment in IT. You now have joint ownership of exploring options and making the best collective business decisions.

Similarly, you can explore changing the scope of new requests so that you can address a larger number of them. For example, instead of rolling out a mobile application interface to all the functions of your legacy ERP system, maybe you roll out mobile access this year to just the most used functions.  

Manage IT Resource Constraints with Technology Platform Choices

One more strategy for managing demand, rather than resources, is to consider the impact of different technological approaches to providing services. One way to manage this approach in the past had been the ‘build vs. buy’ decision. Today, we can take that one step further and look at the ‘buy’ approach as SaaS vs. in-house deployment and support.

While there are certainly more options and approaches for managing the insatiable demand for IT services, I’ve offered these to illustrate a few ways to rethink the challenges related to managing “resource constraints.” I hope that I’ve provided a couple of ideas for reframing your conversations on this topic that result in reduced stress, stronger partnerships and improved outcomes.

Please post your comments or questions here.

Bob Kantor is an IT executive with over 25 years of leadership experience at companies like KPMG, Lotus and Ciba-Geigy. He is currently an IT executive coach serving Fortune 1000 clients and members of the CIO Executive Council. He can be reached at Bob.Kantor@KantorConsultingGroup.com.