“IT is the Business ” and ” The Business is IT”. What do you think? What does this mean exactly?

It is no longer possible to separate The IT department from the process of delivering the “End
Product” of the business as the IT is now truly “customer facing” in most organizations. It is
also fair to say that the Business cannot ignore or underestimate the importance of IT to its
own survival. The relationship is now a true symbiosis where both sides have to work as one
to survive and prosper.

Hisham Burdini

IT Management & Business Process Re-engineering Practitioner

IT (Information Technology) isn’t the business. But, it should be a strategic partner. Unlike accounting or corporate real estate or payroll or (to a certain extent) HR, it shouldn’t be commoditized as a generic service. There are elements of IT that fit into that category, but to treat all of IT as a commodity would be as naive as considering your sales, marketing or new product development to be commoditized functions. They all require a strong alignment with the business strategy, an in-depth knowledge of the business and continual adjustment based on feedback from the business or they simply won’t provide maximum value.

IT can provide functionality to the business that the business never even considered. I don’t mean to get preachy, but It can enable huge paradigm shifts in customer contact, marketing, sales, service, delivery, process management, quality improvement, etc. By providing a seat at the table to IT and developing a strong knowledge and consideration of the needs of the business within IT, IT can bring appropriate new technologies and models to the business to solve real business problems.

The business can continue just fine with commodity IT. Focus on KTLO (Keep The Lights On) activities and keep IT away in a closet away from the discussion of the actual business issues and strategy and you might as well outsource the whole organization. But if the business takes full advantage of the capabilities of an aligned, mature and engaged IT organization, the benefits can be incredible.

Unfortunately, the trend seems to be to further commoditize IT through outsourcing and offshoring rather than treating it as a potential source of innovation for the business. It’s fine to commoditize operational aspects, but don’t go overboard. Don’t lose sight of the solutions that IT has brought to the table in the past (PCs, PDAs, mobile salesforce, databases, email, web, etc.) and think about what the future may hold. An outsourced organization isn’t going to understand *your* business or see the opportunities that a strategic partner will.

Just my two cents worth.

Are there any advantages of virtual project teams to the project or the team?

Other than benefiting the individual does the project or the team benefit from virtual operations or virtual team members?

Dan Light

Win More Federal Business

Most definitely. Virtual project teams allow you to pick the best people for your team regardless of geography. The benefits to the individual generally make for happier and more productive team members and you often get unique insights and perspectives that you wouldn’t get from a co-located team.

The challenges, of course, are the lack of personal contact. The camaraderie and team dynamic that comes from co-location and the non-verbal communication and nuance that comes from a face-to-face team. I’ve found that the best way to deal with that is to bring the entire team together on some neutral ground for a kick-off meeting. Use the opportunity to do some immersive team-building and force the awkward socialization with exercises and assigned seating at meals to mix the team up a bit. If you have an opportunity to do some brainstorming around your project or initiative, that’s also an excellent way for team members to get to know each other personally.

Once you have that “personal connection”, the virtual team tends to work much better together than a group of semi-anonymous voices on the phone or in a web-meeting.

One other “gotcha” to be aware of (and one that most organizations overlook) is that if you have a co-located group and a bunch of virtual team members, meetings will often have an underlying “us vs them” dynamic. People in the room will have side conversations that don’t carry through to the virtual team. Virtual team members will IM each other or exchange background emails and it’s easy to divide the team. I generally use an “all or nothing” approach. If the team is virtual, meetings should take place entirely on the phone or online (even if some of the team sits next to each other). Make extensive use of online whiteboards and other information sharing tools. It’s too easy to exclude virtual team members if you have a group of people physically meeting in a room.

If you just met someone who introduced themself as ‘Chief Innovation Officer’, what would you assume they actually did in that role?

Simon Stapleton

Commercial Director at Webventur

I’d assume that the board spent too much time reading “Wired” magazine and thinking about titles to make the company look progressive. 🙂

Innovation has to be pervasive in the culture, not driven by an individual. While I applaud companies for realizing that innovation is important, assigning an “individual” to that role would make me assume that they “don’t get it”. This would be especially true if the title was in a non-engineering company.

Innovation initiatives need to be separated out from the mainstream projects, administrativia and organizational politics. But the drive and sponsorship needs to come from the entire leadership team and not an isolated individual. In short, the Chief Innovation Officer needs to be every “C” level executive, every manager and every individual in the company.

If it was a development or engineering company, I would assume that the CInnovationO it’s just the head of R&D with a shiny new “cool” title.

I’ve met quite a few very impressive individuals with titles like these. But it doesn’t stop me from cringing when I see them printed on business cards. They’re so nebulous, that they could mean anything from “head of coffee flavour selection” to “Right hand to the CEO”. If the title comes with the underlying organizational commitment and culture, that’s a whole different ballgame. However, all too often it’s just a bandaid for a company that simply doesn’t get it.

What is the most valuable professional course that you’ve taken and why?

Please share your experience with training in the professional environment. What is the most valuable class or course that you’ve taken? Why was this experience so impactful?

Bill McDade

President at Arcella Global Corp.

I’ve taken a lot of professional courses and I have a spew of alphabet soup after my name with the various certifications that I’ve received. However, the most valuable training that I ever received was when i worked for a company called CableData.

As part of the “on-boarding” process, they ran a multi-month program called CDIT (CableData Intensive Training). It included the standard “this is our product and how to use it”, but it also included working in every department throughout the company to understand how everyone fit together in the overall process. You didn’t spend a lot of time in each role, but it gave you perspective that’s impossible to get any other way. In a given day you might find yourself working with the people on the loading dock, running the collators that stuffed the bills and flyers into envelopes or taking customer calls on the help desk. At the end of the process, they actually arranged for you to work on a customer site and cycle through the jobs that their tools impacted. (that included riding with cable installers and seeing what kind of customers *they* encounter in a day. It was an enlightening and somewhat humbling experience.)

This was about 20 years ago, so I doubt that they still do the same sort of training today. But it’s an experience that stuck with me. I learned that no job is inherently more valuable than anyone elses and that it takes a lot of different gears to keep the machine rolling. Knowing it intellectually and experiencing it first-hand are radically different things.

Image your company as a sports franchise. Your managers have recruited the best athletes from around the world, the best coaches and you’ve provided them with the best equipment. The owners and board of directors are up in the skybox looking down on the field and anxiously anticipating a winning season.

Now for the complications:

Nobody actually sat down with the hiring managers and told them what game was going to be played. So the athletes and coaches are from a dozen different sports and disciplines. Additionally, they’re all equipped with their own specific equipment, balls, pucks, rackets, etc.
The playing field is completely shrouded in fog and your players can only see what’s happening within a few yards of where they’re standing. They only interact with other players that happen to enter within that circle of vision and they have no idea where they are relative to the goals, the competition or the rest of their team.

The coaches get feedback from the players that they can’t find the goals or even the ball. At the same time, the coaches are getting feedback from the skybox that the team is losing the game. To try to make sense of the game,  the coaches decide to mark up the field with some guidance. Each coach makes assumptions about the game being played and what the goals are. Unfortunately, each coach draws different plays and strategies directly onto the field and the team can’t tell which is which.

The Owners sees that their team isn’t winning. They can only see the people that come out of the fog right in front of them looking lost and confused. The owners have  the goals to directly under the skybox in the hope that the realignment will result in some of those wanderers scoring points.

The team gets frustrated with the inability to score and they try to figure out the problem on their own. They decide that the coaches and owners must be stupid or crazy. Small groups of players independently decide on strategies to fix the problem. Since the game has never been defined and they can’t directly see the goals, the players are forced to make assumptions.  Between them they decide to bring extra balls, a hockey stick, two tennis rackets and a team of seeing-eye dogs onto the field.

The coaches see the changes and begin to question their own assumptions about the game. They re-align around whatever small successes they perceive. They  try to keep the  game going by hiring pro hockey players, a pair of tennis stars and a dog trainer. The Board tells the coaches that they’re over budget, so the coaches fire the most highly paid of the original players to try to reduce expenses.
The fans (the users) become confused and disgruntled and start looking towards other teams and players to follow. Some of the fans get ambitious, form their own teams and enter the field in the assumption that they could play better.
The Board sees the money drying up and the lack any apparent scored goals. They fire the coaches and the rest of the original players. They look at the organization and determine where the team seems to be struggling. They hire 3 more animal trainers, a consulting tennis coach and they buy a zamboni to ice the field to make better use of the hockey players.

The dogs get run over by the zamboni. The animal trainers all defect to Las Vegas to train tigers. The hockey players join an off-broadway ice show. The tennis coaches try to recruit tennis players, but the board decides to hire professional cricket players for half the price.

The situation fails to improve.

Hoping to turn it around, management equips everyone with headsets so that they can communicate. New scoreboards are installed to better report the scores to management. Everyone is sent on motivational training and the markings on the ice are all repainted in neon green.

So, you now have a bunch of cricket players being coached by tennis coaches, sliding on the ice in dense fog trying to make sense of what the actual game is and where the goals are. However, you truly do have a group of talented individuals. Each individual is performing to the best of their abilities. Occasionally goals are scored through acts of personal heroics. But the overall efficiency, control and alignment of the organization is shot and you’re left wondering how you got here.

This scenario may seem extreme. But, surprisingly, it’s not that far off what’s happening in organizations on a daily basis. The larger the organization becomes, the more difficult it is to keep the pieces aligned and focused on common goals. The lack of a shared context leads to a lot of ambiguity, conflicting goals and strategies, a perception of others in the organization as “stupid” or “incompetent” and a considerable amount of misdirected and wasted effort. Groups adhere to their own agendas, often with no regard or awareness for corporate strategy. Impacts to other teams are only considered when something “breaks” and often, the organization continues to function by brute force and individual efforts rather than through good planning or alignment.

This goes beyond a simple communication problem. As an organization grows, alignment drifts, personal political agendas begin to overshadow the “good of the company” and the idea of “team” becomes a localized concept. We forget that the “team” is really the entire company and not just our little corner of the corporate world.
The larger the organization, the stronger the leadership needs to be. That doesn’t mean that the leaders need to micromanage. Instead, they need to provide clear direction and expectations (what game are we playing and what are the rules?) ensure that every level of the organization has the authority to make their own decisions within the rules (fans stay off the field. Coaches set the strategy. Stadium staff maintain the stadium, goals and markings. Equipment managers control the equipment selection, etc.) and provide feedback on what’s successful and what isn’t. Trust is a big part of successful leadership. It leads to empowerment, better decision making on the floor and a more responsive and agile organization. But direction is needed if you want to keep those trusted individuals aligned to common goals. You can’t just assume that everyone is playing the same game.

By recognizing what’s going on, opening up a continuous dialogue and providing your staff with the tools and information to make the right decisions, you can recapture that small-company alignment, passion and team dynamic. Couple that with the resources and talent pool of a large corporation and you have a potential championship team.

A consultant’s only asset with any long-term value is reputation.

Technologies fall out of favour. Business Processes evolve. Companies are bought and sold. Ultimately, the only asset that a consultant has is their reputation and ethics. Many consultants (and consulting organizations) forget this and focus on the short-term value of inflated billing, placing inexperienced consultants, under-bidding and then running over budget, working on poorly considered client projects, etc. While this short-term approach may be financially profitable, it results in unhappy clients, a bad “street cred” and can ultimately lead to the ruin of the consulting organization or even the client companies.

Communication is at the heart of every successful project

A team that doesn’t communicate well internally, with the customer and with the vendors will fail. The project may be completed, but the results will be less than optimal, the project will be more expensive than required and the ongoing support costs will ultimately be higher. Clients, Management, Vendors and the direct project team need to function as a unified whole to ensure success.

Technology has no inherent value

The only value that technology has is in how it can bring value to the business. Implementing technology for the sake of technology is not only a waste of time and money, but can ultimately be detrimental to the business. Some companies don’t need a web site. Many organizations don’t need to engage in eCommerce. Implementing a multi-million dollar ERP system for a company with $500K worth of revenues isn’t going to magically drop them into the Fortune-50. Regardless of what the “other guys” are doing, your projected ROI (return on investment) should be the main driver behind any new technology initiative.

ROI (Return on Investment) doesn’t always mean direct revenue or cost savings

Your “return” on a project is nothing more or less than “business value”. Laying the groundwork to be able to exploit future opportunities, increasing your organizational agility, improving employee or customer satisfaction are all incredibly valuable to sustaining and growing your business. Many companies destroy their agility and their own futures by not quantifying these “soft benefits” or considering them as important as the hard dollars.

Nobody ever knowingly makes a wrong decision

This statement replaces the traditional “The Customer is Always Right”. If there are two diametrically opposed approaches, chances are that somebody is working with incomplete assumptions or data. By acknowledging that nobody knowingly makes a wrong decision, open communication of the relevant information can uncover where the disconnect has occurred.

If it’s not measured, it’s not managed

Project Management is a science and not an art. Deliverables should be objective, quantified (or at least enumerated in some way) and tracked. If an objective is not measurable, it can’t be tracked or monitored. If it can’t be monitored, it certainly can’t be managed. In many cases, Project Managers encounter deliverables that they feel can’t be objectively measured. If that’s the case, then the deliverable needs to be broken down or redefined to provide a clear set of exit or acceptance criteria. Committments need to be either time-based or event driven. “Whenever” often becomes “Never” or results in a last minute rush with predictably poor results.

Costs should not exceed the expected benefits

A client should clearly understand the benefits of the project, the projected value of these benefits to the organization and the costs of implementation, training and long-term support. If the costs exceed the potential benefits (direct and indirect), the project needs to be restructured or abandoned. Implementing a solution simply for prestige, empire building or billing purposes is irresponsible and unethical and can lead to disastrous long-term results.

Excessive analysis/planning/requirements definition, etc. are as crippling as no analysis/planning/requirements definition.

Most people and organizations are familiar with “Analysis Paralysis”, the inability to make a decision without analyzing every tiny detail, facet, risk, etc. to the exclusion of any real work. The new trend is a form of “Methodology Fundamentalism”, the tendency of an organization to adopt a methodology word-for-word rather than applying it appropriately for the tasks/project at hand. It’s important for everyone to understand the steps and the processes required to manage a project, but it’s equally important to know when the effort required to carry out a task outweighs the benefits. When a team can communicate effectively, there is a natural tendency to want to work using a cascaded development approach. A linear approach is appropriate for some projects, but where a cascade approach is applicable, accepting and embracing it up-front will make for a much more efficient and predictable project.

People shouldn’t be “shoe-horned” into roles as a client “make work” effort or in an attempt to increase billing.

Everyone has their own expertise, knowledge-base, interests and abilities. It is the responsibility of the Project Manager to understand where the strengths and interests of each team member lie. Furthermore, it is the PMs responsibility to ensure that everyone is engaged to the best of their abilities and with the best long-term outlook possible. Using resources inappropriately wastes everyone’s time and effort.

Ongoing Documentation is essential

Everyone should be working with the ultimate goal of becoming redundant. It takes very little effort to document throughout the project and revise the documentation as necessary. However, it can be an overwhelming or impossible task to document retroactively.