Delivering IT Solutions

I recently had the privilege to speak at the third annual Technology Innovation and Leader’s Summit in Lake Forest, IL.  The summit was made up of technology executives and leaders from a wide variety of businesses ranging from Fortune 50 to smaller and privately held companies  My panel focused on how to deliver technology solutions and advance the digitalization of our organizations.

My fellow panelists and I shared our experiences in our current organizations and how we have seen the role of the CIO change over the years.  It was a great opportunity to reflect on the impact IT has on our businesses and to share stories about our successes and failures in delivering solutions.  Some consistent themes emerged as we spoke and fielded questions from the other summit participants.

First off, IT delivery is complicated on many levels.  There are financial complexities, political complexities and execution complexities that can hamper a project and cause it to land in the all too large collection of IT projects that come in late, over budget or fail to meet customer expectations.  But there is hope.  Many of our collective successes had the same core themes:

1 – Know Your Customer

This sounds simple, but is one of the biggest challenges we face.  My career started off in the application development space, but over the last few years as CIO it has expanded to include all facets of IT delivery including infrastructure; desktop support and customer service and support.  Some of the failures I’ve had in my career were because I or my team violated this simple principle.  In every successful project, meeting customer needs is only achievable by understanding why the customer is initiating the project, what they expect to accomplish from it, and who the end users, stake holders and decision makers are.  Having this framework allows the project teams to make decisions and offer solutions to the customer that are focused on meeting their needs.  Requirements gathering is always a tough challenge primarily because our business partners and customers don’t know what they don’t know and they are not sure how to explain their needs.  We as IT professionals also often provide too many options to our customers further confusing the situation.  Knowing your customer allows you to partner with them to provide meaningful and realistic options, set reasonable expectations and look at the problem from their perspective.

2 – Follow Good Project Management Disciplines

There are few functions within an organization that have to deal with the amount of change and external pressures that IT does.  Our technologies are expensive and change so rapidly that it can be paralyzing to make a decision and deliver a solution quickly enough for the business to see a return on the investment.  In order to be successful, we as IT leaders, need to ensure that we follow good project management discipline.  This does not mean dragging out a project or introducing a bureaucracy that forces a slow pace.  On the contrary, good project management can be applied rapidly and in fluid situations.  I learned this as a Captain in the Army Corps of Engineers where I was challenged many times with ‘projects’ requiring successful execution despite a dynamic situation.  The challenge is defining what good project management is.  Unfortunately, most organizations today employ project coordinators and not project managers.  They key difference between these two roles is that a coordinator produces reports, brings groups together and sounds the alarm if something looks to be going awry.  A true project manager does these as well but is also empowered to change the plan, make decisions and allocate resources to ensure that the tasks on the critical path are executed on time.  This requires the project manager to be a leader and have a deep understanding of the Critical Success Factors for the project.  Effective project management means understanding the end game, identifying the critical path to get there, identifying potential obstacles, developing contingencies in advance, being honest with the team and stake holders on the current state of affairs, working the plan to hold the team accountable and adapting the plan when needed to meet the objectives.

3– Embrace Risk & The Possibility Of Failure

IT projects are inherently risky.  The rate of change in IT is amazing and is certainly a major contributor to the failure of IT projects.  Project delays come from new technologies emerging mid-stream, or from lack of experience with these new technologies. This may cause the project team to spend more time in discovery or learning the technology than anticipated.  Cost overruns can come from switching technologies or chasing the next and better technology.  Failure to meet customer expectations is another side effect of the rapidly changing world we work in.  When our solution delivery is not fast enough to show quick and effective results we run the risk of the customer changing their mind or increasing the project scope to keep up with the changing market.  Because of the fast pace we work in, we have to embrace the risk associated with that and allow for the possibility of failure.  The trick is to deliver minimally functional deliverables so the team can fail quickly and learn from the mistakes or identify the root cause of the failure.  This is a joint responsibility between IT and our customers, but it is IT’s responsibility to openly and honestly share the risks, the contingencies and force discussion and decisions on key issues.  In knowing your customer and following good project management practices you are well equipped to identify the key risks and key goals of the project, work towards them and develop solutions quickly to determine if you are moving in the right direction.

IT delivery can be, and is, successful despite the challenges we face as technology leaders. Many factors contribute to this, but the key principles we shared at the summit included knowing your customer so that you can partner with them and make decisions to meet the objectives; following good disciplined processes to honestly evaluate and assess the project’s health; and to acknowledge that technology changes too rapidly to keep up with it – embrace the risk, fail fast and adapt.