Working closely with business partners to implement new products and capabilities changes things in IT operations.

IT-Risk

When I was working in IT for a Fortune 100 company prior to Y2K, we had just three major projects going on. A total of three! And get this – we were told by a number of consultants that this was too much to take on at once.

Looking back, I think we can say those were the good ol’ days. Who doesn’t have more than three major projects ongoing at any one time today? Since that time, the need to implement new capabilities for the business, while simultaneously replacing legacy systems, have definitely changed things in IT.

After years of working closely with my internal clients and business partners, three things have become very clear to me as an IT leader:

  1. CIOs must be less risk averse
  2. IT must master multi-tasking, and
  3. Strong project management is critical


CIOs Must Be Less Risk Averse

Why would working with the business force a change in the CIOs risk profile? Simple. The business needs solutions immediately to meet urgent problems that exist right now. IT can no longer plot out multi-year projects in a prioritized backlog to solve the business’s problems. Stepping up and working with the business means the entire IT organization has to be more flexible and nimble. Of course, we must try to define the solution to meet future needs or we’ll never break out of the urgency cycle.

Therefore, the CIO must become less risk averse – or spread the risk by non-traditional methods. This means being willing to utilize suggestions from the business more often. I admit it - this makes me nervous just writing about it. But it is the new reality. The key is to work with the business to understand and state the risks up front so there are no surprises later.

“The quantity of projects really forces everyone on the IT leadership team to communicate well, particularly when projects get into trouble.”

Moving to the cloud, as odd as it may seem, can help you manage risk. You can test a product and give the thumbs up or down to a proposal much quicker with this model because you don’t have to build an environment and get up to speed on support. This is particularly true for Software as a Service (SaaS) applications, as there’s no real infrastructure learning curve.


IT Must Master Multi-Tasking

I have a team of 150 people spread over 18 countries supporting somewhere around 200 concurrent projects. While a number of these are small in the overall scheme, every one of them is critical to someone in the company, or they wouldn’t exist.

The quantity of projects really forces everyone on the IT leadership team to communicate well, particularly when projects get into trouble. With a global leadership team, this is a challenge. We’ve recently implemented desktop videoconferencing to improve the effectiveness of our conference calls and make them feel more like in-person meetings. This has boosted camaraderie and morale on the team.

In addition, the relationship to the business discussed above must be nurtured to ensure alignment between the IT team and the business partner. Breaking down projects into manageable containers or phases is more important today than ever. Rapid prototyping is definitely possible, but it requires commitment and for the relationships to occur naturally.

Along with internal and external communications, documentation on the personal and team level are critical. I have found that the increase in projects, tasks, and activities has forced me to implement a much more defined documentation system for myself. If you haven’t yet investigated OneNote as a way to organize your personal tasks and documentation, I certainly recommend it. I also recommend a good mind mapping tool for brainstorming. We are using a tool called MindGenius for our five year plan.


A Strong PMO is Critical

A strong Project Management Office or PMO is highly recommended. There are three key areas that have worked for us:

  • A simple methodology for managing projects
  • A good repository for making this information available
  • A strong PMO Manager

Our PMO uses a structured, prioritized methodology for oversight. We began this for high priority projects only with a part-time PMO manager. This has been successful enough that we are working to make this a full-time position reporting to the CIO managing ALL projects. We use common, simple reporting tools with a consistent implementation. With such a large number of projects, visibility above the project team and sponsors requires a very high level Red-Yellow-Green snapshot of key areas and what is causing any non-Green conditions. We define what’s happened over the past period, what’s coming up, and what the key risks are.

While there are a number of Project Management tools for resource and documentation management, the initial focus should be around providing a simple method for sharing key data. At this point, we do not use any project management software (although we are investigating a couple of solutions). We use simple PowerPoint and Excel files implemented in a consistent manner for the project documentation, and SharePoint as the basic document control tool. We’ve implemented some metadata management at the SharePoint Library level to better display status, etc.

The skill level of the PMO Manager is absolutely key. With a global organization, you need someone who works comfortably with other regions. Since we’re really just starting, we needed someone who could help mentor and challenge the projects and project managers. We found such a person in our Bangalore office.

I hope this will cause you to step back and think about where you stand on the risk matrix, and how you manage your team and the larger organization. Best of luck.

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