Today CIO’s focus on the right things, but is the right attention given to exploring future opportunities?

Chief Information Officers (CIO’s) are often challenged with staying current on technological trends and consistently delivering solution projects. In addition, CIO’s often struggle with allocating the right time, attention and focus towards: strategy, service delivery, issue resolution and the future of technology. The good news is that today’s CIO’s have started to better prioritize time and energy spent on strategic technology matters, tactical execution of solutions, however the world of technology management has changed in various ways, and …

Today CIO’s find themselves in a situation where:

  • Technology has become the business. In almost every industry, most firms have an online internet presence and for many firms, technology is at the core of the business, and for others, technology and information processing has not only become common, but replaced paper.
  • Technology is an enabler and is the business. Business processes become more integrated with technology, from online transaction processing, to in-house processing and data storage.
  • Technology problems tend to get resolved by a collective C-suite team. In addition to business participants, there is a blurring of role lines with clearer division of labor between the CIO, the CTO (Chief Technology Officer) and CDO (Chief Digital Officer).
  • Business transformation is starting to leverage technology innovation. Under proper governance practices, steering and working groups are spending more time discussing ideas, proposing new solutions and collaborating on technological innovation.
  • The role of the CIO has become as all-inclusive role, with responsibility for all aspects of information management. This includes accountability for strategy, innovation, delivery, optimization, and management.
  • CIO’s have broader choices when it comes to resource management. Technology groups now have resource portfolios inclusive of blended skilled, dedicated employees, contractors, 3rd party partners, and vendors.

Today CIO’s focus on the following right trends…

but is the right attention given to future opportunities?

  1. Focusing on the “Future of Technology”:

Yester-year, the focus was: Build out software for the near-term, run the “factory”, optimize servers and get client requirements, build solutions, and manage expectations.

  • Today’s focus is: Ideation and project review forums that encourage active representation in a collective collaboration focused, planning and solution roadmap reviews.
  • Future opportunity focus: For the future, forward looking view of technology; CIO’s should expect to continue to manage technology for today, and tomorrow, but put more emphasis on engaging more closely with industry experts, clients in future focused technology forums such as innovation labs and solution think-tanks. These forums start with the Long-Term (3-5 year) roadmap, but also focus on the market offerings and trends associated with horizontal and vertical integration of services, solutions and partnerships.

2. Demand management and prioritization: 

Yester-year, the focus was: Traditionally, in the past, IT and Business employed “siloed” governance and prioritization processes; IT aligned with the business, documented decisions, and “figured it out”, but it was a lengthy process that was neither collaborative nor inclusive.

  • Today’s focus is: Clients demand to “do more with less”, expect integrated tools with client teams deciding where to optimize, where to invest, and how much to spend?
  • Future opportunity focus: With the advent of mature governance models, advanced business intelligence (BI), artificial intelligence (AI), forward thinking models, demand planning, and automated decisioning, CIO’s can expect faster, more predictable decisioning, anticipate changes in advance, and be in a better position to more predictably manage time, resources and costs.

3. Real-time Governance:

Yester-year, the focus was: Outdated technology management practices of meeting-up with the business counterparts to discuss topics annually, monthly and daily and address tactical execution, such as: running IT, building technology and managing resources.

  • Today’s focus is: Deployment of integrated cross-functional engagement model inclusive of representative management, stakeholders, clients, partners and collaborators in disciplined repetitive forums with clear ownership, decision rights and outcome tracking.
  • Future opportunity focus: CIO’s can expect a future governance model to include active participation from internal decision-makers, industry experts, and 3rd parties parties with real-time ongoing reviews, automated scenario planning with metrics to drive pragmatic and informed decisions.

4. Business Transformation:

Yester-year, the focus was: Typically, business owners spent time on business technology strategy and would send the CIO the requirements to design, build, test and deploy solutions.

  • Today’s focus is: Transformation managed as a joint team effort between the business, IT, and various internal stakeholders. It is run as a program, with horizontal representation across the enterprise with agreed upon deliverable outcomes and results.
  • Future opportunity focus: CIO’s can picture a scenario where cross functional teams will replace functional technology forums. Technology teams will evolve into enterprise collaboration agile forums with enterprise and industry representation. These teams will be chartered to solve business technology issues across business processes instead of single functional point solutions.

5. Future state solutions: 

Yester-year, the focus was: Firms typically maintained a vertical single solution focus, that may not have scaled-well, had limited functionality and only served short term client needs.

  • Today’s focus is: A horizontal future state business process team collaborating and collectively focusing on full-lifecycle solution development from strategy (build/buy/host/improve) to sourcing, to definition, to development, to support and optimization of technology solutions.
  • Future opportunity focus: Technology component-based solutioning will become digitized including on-going reviews, use of visually interactive collaborative tools to enable CIO’s and business counterparts to better plan, anticipate changes, execute and calibrate technology. More emphasis will be placed on selection and quantification of technology solution benefits.

6. Efficiency, consistency and effectiveness of technology management:

Yester-year, the focus was: The CIO ran the factory and kept systems running, built software for todays needs and attempted to measure efficiency and effectiveness of technology and services;kept track of delivery and not necessarily improving processes, practices, consistency and better utilization of resources, closing skills gaps and filling headcount budgets.

  • Today’s focus is: Business clients and CIO’s expect results. After all, time is money. CIO’s have benefited greatly and have easy access to: on-demand service delivery and fulfillment; the emergence of cloud solutions; (x) As-A-Service; pre-built, customizable products and package solutions, better access to and cheaper service provision, and standardization of strategic advisory. Service delivery expectations have increased, with CIOs demanding shorter timeframes from internal and service providers to get higher quality resources at cheaper prices. Technology has become the ENABLER of business, IS the business, and so therefore delivery of technology is under the microscope. Solving complexity is the CIO’s challenge.
  • Future opportunity focus: CIO’s and business expect to leverage technology better: as an enabler (of change/as a service/and as a business outcome); be better able to demonstrate success in terms of on-demand services, reduced costs, reduced timelines, and be more predictable when proposing and delivering solutions.

Written by Terry Coull. Terry is a management consultant focusing on transformation and continuous improvement in technology today. This is part 2 of a series of informative team-centric leading practice white-papers.

Aligning IT (with) the Business

What does it mean to align IT (with) the business?

For most organizations, IT management issues continue to be a strategic and organizational challenge. In addition, CIO’s continue to strive for performance gains such as IT becoming more efficient, nimble, and innovative. For IT to be more agile, control costs and align with the business further supports a desire by organizations to achieve strategic organizational benefits.

According to the Society for Information Management (SIM) and it’s 2016 and 2017 IT Trends Survey; aligning IT (with) the business has been a top-ten issue, and for both years, almost half of the respondents identified alignment as a top five IT management concern.

So we ask ourselves, what does “Alignment” mean for the IT professional?

  • Is it the traditional definition, of the fit between the objectives of the business and IT, and how well IT knows and supports the objectives, and its ability to satisfy the business requirements?; OR
  • Is it less about the alignment? But, more about how cohesively IT and the business team/partner together to accomplish enterprise objectives?

A different point of view

In our experience, we see alignment as a collective effort on both business and IT’s part, and where alignment confusion comes in is where the IT organization has difficulty in responding to business and technological changes? Furthermore, we do not see it as technology’s responsibility to become aligned, and collectively stay aligned, but rather it should be a cohesive partnering between business and IT to form cohesive teams, partner and share responsibilities on a strategic level as well as jointly share responsibilities on tactical execution levels.

What to do?

In our experience, we have supported organizations with both organizational change and “running IT (with) the business”. In both instances, we promoted and encouraged clients to take a top-down strategic approach. This approach includes establishing and institutionalizing five basic portfolio management techniques:

  • Break down the silo’s: be aware of organizational functions and staff titles, but, take down the organizational barriers between IT and the Business and instead encourage the establishment of cross-functional teams, with accountability for collective objective and project goal accomplishment
  • Convene a strategic group of stakeholders: establish forum/s with representatives that include internal (business, technology) or external partners to drive ownership, accountability and oversight of technological change
  • Establish the “rules of the road”: be prepared to improve on enterprise collaboration, the collective ways and guiding principles in which teams come together to accomplish firm-wide and initiative objectives
  • Establish role-based teams: drive execution activities for project consistency. This includes establishing portfolios of projects, resources and combined teams with clearly demarcated accountable roles and responsibilities
  • Focus on deliverable milestones: to ensure consistency of what to accomplish, and by when, clear milestones have be created, measured and actioned

What to expect?

Taking this approach typically yields the following benefits:

  • Significant increase in managing business expectations
  • Improved engagement and cooperation from all stakeholders
  • Faster time to market for technological change,
  • Cost effective service delivery
  • Shorter decision time-frames

Written by Terry Coull. Terry is a management consultant focusing on transformation and continuous improvement in technology today. This is part 4 of a series of informative team-centric leading practice white-papers.

Team governance models and traditional relationship based governance models

Firms spend significant time and energy to manage strategic priorities, keep operations functioning and optimally managing project delivery. Traditional hierarchical functional governance assumes that each functional manager makes informed decisions about her or his function, but what happens when project work crosses functional boundaries? Who make the decisions strategically, operationally and tactically?

In our experience, we have found firms that employ team governance models that conform to program portfolio management (PPM) principles and practices are more efficient and deliver more consistently on enterprise benefits than models that center on the deployment of traditional relationship governance roles.

First, we will describe the team model as it relates to PPM (program portfolio management) organizational deployment and then contrast this with the traditional relationship role-based governance model.

A team PPM governance model construct typically includes the following characteristics:

  • PPM team governance model:  Assumes that there is organizational cross functional teaming and collaboration, consistent execution of process management with use of standard communication channels and decision tools.
  • Definition of projects: Strategic planning defines the work that is being planned for, when, and by whom? It assumes that there is a teaming effort to collect project planning assumptions, conceptualize them into an annual operating plan and roll-up information at a strategic level into a long range plan. Performed correctly, this defines the requirements necessary for enterprise groups and functional leaders to articulate the plan, spell out the intent of project work both for the forthcoming year, and the longer term.
  • Ownership of projects: A collection of related projects is called a portfolio. Projects that relate to a portfolio are earmarked to start in the forthcoming year and are included in an annual operating plan. A sponsor is the project executive who owns the project. The sponsor focuses on validating project details with a project owner. In addition to a project owner, more often than not, a project manager may be appointed to help justify the support the project receives. Business cases are formally documented project details. Business cases get reviewed by sponsors, project teams and senior management stakeholders to justify projects. A symbiotic relationship exists between the sponsor and the project owner to ensure consistency in project definition, approach and understanding. Furthermore, the project reporting process is managed by a program management office (PMO).
  • Origination and prioritization of project work: In order to validate new work requests a project intake forum is established to review ideas and project proposals. This formal forum includes a group of senior stakeholders who review and ultimately prioritize ongoing work against new proposed work.
  • Teaming: Teaming is when key stakeholders convene in the three project management forums: 1) Strategically, senior management convene in a “Steering Committee or Team”; 2) Operationally, a “Working Group” is comprised of a team of project sponsors and functional stakeholders that include the PMO who discuss and agree planning and execution tactics: and lastly, 3) Tactically, a “Project Team” is comprised of a project manager who convenes team members, subject matter experts and project delivery workers in the management of a project.

What does a role-based relationship governance model look like?

The BRM (business relationship manager) is a role that is sometimes employed organizationally to take ideas, manage requirements and work closely with technology and business leaders to manage strategic and project delivery expectations.

BRM’s get involved in high-level requirement discussions. BRM’s are typically charged with understanding scope, gathering details and focusing on the strategic benefits a project will deliver. The BRM works closely with planning groups to discuss strategy, review ideas and newly proposed projects. These ideas or projects get documented in an intake process and get proposed by the BRM to a steering group, or a functional leader. The BRM is then expected to work collaboratively, albeit separately with a team of project managers, client business subject matter experts (SME’s) and sponsors in the development of a justifiable business case.

While this role is consistent with traditional governance line responsibility in managing client relationships, it is in direct conflict with the functioning of a modern-day project team-based organization…

What is at issue is that relationship based governance models typically support strategy to execution in siloed organizations, whereas today, most organizations have moved away, or are starting to move away from silo-based relational models to hybrid or pure PPM governance models.

The following characteristics define relationship based governance models:

  • Relationship based governance is mostly found in organizations that are functionally silo’d. Silo’s exist when internal organizational functions maintain boundaries, spend a significant amount of time preserving the functional identity of its members, and may be less inclined to collaborate with dependent functions. Hierarchical layered functions are often siloed organizations with some or very limited cross-functional teaming comprising functional group representation. There is a tendency to be less formal when it comes to BRM’s in their dealings with steering groups, project delivery roles, and project coordination. BRM’s tend to maintain a score-keeping and translation identity between technology and business functions.
  • Relationship challenges: The BRM role has overlapping responsibility with the following project based roles: 1) Sponsor (project and portfolio oversight), 2) Project Manager (for execution), 3) Agile Product Managers (for scope and compliance)
  • Decisions: Decision rights get blurry when a BRM makes project level decisions that impact project sponsors.

Should roles overlap, what should enterprise architects consider and what benefits can one expect from a PPM governance model?

Team-based PPM considerations include:

  • Formalize PPM relationship management: Technology and business relationships are coordinated and managed via PPM forums, namely; 1) senior management oversight in a steering or governance group; 2), program and PMO support in a working group, comprised of project sponsors, PMs and the PMO, 3) collaborative cross functional teaming at a project team level.
  • Appoint the Project Sponsor early on: If possible, as early as possible in the process, make sure the sponsor takes full responsibility for project strategy and execution, this is to help keep the focus on successful project delivery outcomes from day one.
  • Appoint the PM early on: The earlier the project manager gets appointedis involved in scope definition, gets to own the project execution and gets guidance and support from the Sponsor, the greater the opportunity for project success. In our experience, we have seen project managers offer less commitment if they inherit projects along the planning lifecycle instead of before the development of a business case.
  • Avoid relationship role appointments: Where possible, avoid the appointment of BRM roles as they are duplicative and overlapping to traditional project portfolio management roles and responsibilities.

Possible enterprise benefits and impacts:

  • Streamlined, consistent PPM principles and practices: When introducing formal PPM principles and practices, be sure to tie methodology to strategy and execution, keeping it streamlined, less complex and agile within an enterprise PPM and PMO framework. In addition, by maintaining repetitive consistency in strategic planning and execution helps to ensure that project delivery becomes more predictable, transparent, is more accurately measured with better management of client expectations.
  • Institutionalized roles and responsibilities: By institutionalizing formal forums of PPM with steering, working groups and project teaming, certain expected benefits can be realized including, but not limited to, project ownership, accountability, enterprise value realization and project transparency. This includes: 1) Ensuring project sponsors own and are accountable for projects from strategy right through to execution. 2) Strategic planning is aligned with execution, and not treated as a separate forum. 3) If BRM roles are embedded in a silo-ed organization, the relationship responsibilities should be incorporated into sponsor roles and responsibilities.
  • Synergistic output and improvement: In our experience, work is performed in teams. Ongoing team engagement in a collective forum promotes synergistic idea generation, knowledge sharing and coaching benefits. Each team member may contribute more than expected in a collective collaborative environment. Synergistic team output or contributions may exceed more than the sum of the total team members due to synergies gained from all contributing parties; for example (1+1+1=5) In contrast with two people meeting in a one-one setting; for example (1+1=2), the outcomes could be limited, and this may dilute the number of improvement recommendations made and possibly the ability to drive process, project or organizational changes.

Written by Terry Coull. Terry is a management consultant focusing on transformation and continuous improvement in technology today. This is part 3 of a series of informative team-centric leading practice white-papers.

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It’s 10 AM, do you know how your team is performing?

THE SYNERGIES OF TEAM ENGAGEMENT

If your team is not meeting goals and deliverables, it may mean that not all your members are conversant or synchronized on the teams’ intended overall goals. A team is made up of mutually respecting members, where each member is expected to participate in both their individual and overall collective activities to produce an overall team outcome. But in reality, many team members focus exclusively on accomplishing their activities and may never get to leverage the collective benefit of collaborative team sharing with other team members. This can result in a situation where a team may not accomplish its intended collective outcomes, it may lose respect, and team outcomes may not be successful.

All members have to be included to realize synergistic team value.

INCLUSION PROMOTES CONNECTEDNESS:

In working with engaged teams across many organizations, I have found that by including team members in the scope discussion and crystallizing the outcome of the collective overall team goals, helps to engage members better where they feel more connected and motivated to achieve more. They get to see the team purpose and feel more connected to the project process. Inclusion is when there is a representative sample of people involved in team activity who are passionate, motivated, excited and engaged in the output process that is associated with soft benefits. Soft benefits are the motivational drivers that get people to work together, inspire them to contribute and cooperate more effectively. When soft benefits are missing, there is no team cohesion. In a business team setting, it’s about the leader providing guidance (about 20% effort), and getting the team members to provide input (approximately 30% effort). Once the team collaborates and iterates on the remaining (50%) output, synergies are achieved that exponentially multiply the output and benefits (referred to as team synergy). The collective knowledge, experience, and diversity of team practice then become typical, and one can begin to expect synergistic output benefits of 2x, 3x or even multiples more than 10x synergies generated by high performing teams.

So why settle for anything less than synergistic teaming?

Embracing a teaming mindset is hard, especially when society and the corporate world in general today mostly reward individual performance. However, teams perform work. “You are only as strong as your weakest link.” In consideration of this, every “team link” member needs to be stronger individually and connect synergistically with other team (link)members. Teams that are diverse in skills, roles, and background stand a better chance of performing optimally and are better positioned for achieving synergistic success.

A FEW PRACTICES TO ENCOURAGE SYNERGISTIC TEAMING

Team Synergy is achieved through constant connecting; members bound by a social contract with extensive collaboration.

CONSTANT CONNECTIONS

Teams should meet frequently; whether its every day, or every other day or once a week. Constant contact encourages connection and helps to build trust and commitment in the team. Motivated team players tend to share information more freely. Team members tend to work better in open team environments as they experience personal growth from others. Establishing a discipline of frequent meetings and establishing a cadence allows for good, bad, or even fun information to be shared promptly.

SOCIAL CONTRACT

For teams to trust, interact and engage effectively, there has to be a social contract between the members. Each member is (aligned) on the common goals of the team and by definition an extension of the firm. A social contract gets team members to commit and establishes accountability at the individual and team level.

COLLABORATION

Each member is committed and encouraged by each other in a comfortable and non-threatening environment. Each person possesses and can share experiences, contribute collectively and feel empowered to contribute; 1+1=3, and collectively the overall team shares in the synergies of team engagement benefits.

IT management concerns resolved by teams

Interestingly, each year, for the last 10 years, a number of technology management researchers have consistently reported the same IT management concerns. Each of these concerns have centered around common themes to improve the management of IT. In our experience, we have seen these concerns get addressed (and or resolved) when technology and business team together to achieve common business results.

Top 10 Key IT Management Concerns:

  • Alignment of IT and / with the business
  • Security / Privacy
  • Business Productivity
  • Business Agility
  • Business Process Management
  • Business Continuity / Disaster Recovery
  • IT Time to Market
  • Time-to-Market / Velocity of Change
  • IT Cost Reduction / Controls
  • IT Value Proposition to the business

A Perceptive Problem

Teams come together and corporate functions engage on a common purpose to achieve corporate goals. Poor engagement organization and modeling remains the number one perceptive problem that senior management needs to address.

We see this happens due to one of two reasons:
1. Employee disengagement or, in other words, each corporate individual disengages and takes no responsibility to promote and or engage/collaborate with other individuals, or

2. Leadership’s inability to engage collectively with each other. This is partly due to cultural and management functional issues. Territorial or silo problems persist when functional leaders manage outcomes separately, and ultimately create additional work.
Individuals contribute, Teams solve problems, Leadership motivates

Alignment

Alignment of IT, and/with the business assumes a current state of where IT is acting as a task taker when dealing with the business, has no joint ownership of business results and is an internal service provider to business sponsors. This condition is outdated, where progressive firms today, have spent time encouraging joint ownership of delivery, invested in cross-functional teaming efforts and adhered to the basic principles of project management teaming. Secondly, Business Agility is measured by business results and delivery. When combined cross functional teams engage effectively, ownership is shared, alignment is seamless and IT is an active participant and contributor to promote business agility, flexibility and alignment.

Value

IT’s Value Proposition to the business, and time to market are important contributors to enterprise and business value. Today, IT’s value cannot be separated unless technology drivers are tracked separately to business drivers. More often than not technology innovation, disruptive technology change and business transformation drivers are the major contributors to enterprise value, and or share price increase. To separate technology management and business value is futile and redundant. When teams come together to solve business problems, business cases get proposed collectively, design and execution is performed in role based teams and measurements of success are team based. Overall, business value increases when teams produce results.

Productivity

In order for productivity to increase it means that output and (input) contribution have to increase. In our experience, we have seen firms that embrace taking a business process management and business productivity approach to solutions have a higher level of success than firms that solve technology only, or business only problems. Technology transformation, product development and any business process when analyzed, designed or actioned upon follow a supply chain continuum. Role based teams perform independently and collectively, as these project teams include representation from each function involved in a business process. Team and deliverable productivity are tracked and easily measured using basic project management techniques. Member performance drives team performance drives enterprise performance.

Controls

Management typically control costs, ensure business continuity and protect security and privacy of people and assets. In our experience, if these problems are tackled separately (IT and other business units), common enterprise-level solutions get missed and or work effort is duplicated. We see functional controls as having consistent themes in terms of process, technology and people. More often than not, today, firms are collectively addressing organization teaming approaches to solve control and compliance issues across functional groups. Teams are consistently being held accountable for costs and controls that span functional boundaries and are project specific.

How exactly does teaming help to solve these concerns?
Technology transformation is starting to take an enterprise teaming approach. Governance and strategic planning of enterprise deliverables is putting a sharper focus on the people, processes and technologies needed to successfully execute all projects. It does not make sense for companies to use limited functional resources as they have in the past.

By forming teams at all levels helps to channel team energy at the right level;

1. steering group; strategic planning and decisioning at the executive level,
2. at the operation level; program specific, functional execution, and
3. lastly at tactical level; project teams address the execution aspects of solution delivery.

Enterprise groups are more commonly addressing technology change and transformation challenges by taking enterprise teaming approaches vs having each function solve problems individually. There are a number of recent trends that are reshaping how projects get managed today and in the future.

  • Trend 1: Focus on strategy over projects
  • Trend 2: The move away from operations hierarchies to leverage employee strengths (roles)
  • Trend 3: The increased need for accountability and social responsibility
  • Trend 4: More emphasis on softer collaboration skills, not just technical training
  • Trend 5: Remote work, collaboration tools & increased “out of the box” security tools

In conclusion

Overall, we find that IT and management thereof is becoming more strategic and business focused. It appears that organizations are becoming more digitized with their focus shifting away from tactical and organizational IT issues like efficiency, service delivery, and cost reduction to more strategic and organizational priorities like business agility, innovation, the velocity change in the organization, IT time to market, and the value of business. These trends among global organizations confirm that there is a shift in how CIOs are spending their time encouraging and engaging in business driven teams.

Written by Terry Coull. Terry is a management consultant focusing on transformation and continuous improvement in technology today. This is part 6 of a series of informative team-centric leading practice white-papers.