Defining a roadmap requires first and foremost an understanding of the current situation. One must gather the necessary information to fully understand the current environment and situation to be sure that the end result, defined by the roadmap, is the best end result. If I create that roadmap taking me to California but I need to go to New York instead, then having even the best roadmap to California will still result in a delivery that is undesired.

One of the marketing folks that has worked with my company said that he just didn’t see any value in assessments or recommendations. The assessment is a definition of the current situation. The recommendations is the roadmap based on the assessment. This person just didn’t see a value add in these items. To say it differently, this person didn’t see a need in understanding a customer’s environment and needs before putting a solution in place that may or may not meet the needs of the customer or may or may not work at all. Unfortunately that view is prevalent and an approach taken by many.

Keeping costs to a minimum is a key objective by most companies. All too often the value in this roadmap approach is ignored in lieu of saving costs. It is one of those items that is “you can pay now or you can pay later.” Later is always more expensive. What would you prefer? Do you prefer that the time, effort, and expense be put into ensuring that the right roadmap is created? Do you prefer to take a chance, more of that “crapshoot” approach, and see what happens? Well, most will say do the homework up front. Take the time. Ultimately taking that time will keep the costs to a minimum in the long term. Making an investment earlier rather than later is required to ensure that goals, objectives, and technology needs are met.

Using alternative approaches to IT such as Open Source and Managed services will be discussed in the coming days. It is even more critical that the roadmap as described above be developed when taking the cost saving approach of implementing Open Source and Managed Services. You can have BIG IT at the cost of small IT. Open Source and Managed Services will be a key driving factor in achieving that success.

What is your organization doing to ensure that IT projects, or any project, is delivering on promise? What are you doing to ensure that costs are kept at a minimum over the long haul?

The promise many make today is to drive costs down. In the world of Information Technology, costs are expected to be kept at a minimum, yet the performance is expected to be that of a big IT organization. Services levels must yield the same or improved results but at the least amount of costs. How can companies deliver such results? What are the driving factors of providing the “BIG IT” performance and a small IT cost.

As a company owner, one of the things that challenges me most is a supplier committing to something yet delivering at less than the commitment or not delivering at all. I’m not alone in that frustration. The dollar doesn’t go as far today as in the past and every investment MUST yield, at the very least, the results promised in the commitment. Unfortunately this isn’t always the case. There are many variables which contribute to success and failure. Fundamentally, over commitment and under delivery is never a good thing.

Creating a roadmap to drive success is critical. There are many roadways that can be driven to success. Finding the best route is what is critical to delivering that success. I can drive from Florida to California by following a road. If I have no map or plan, I’m likely to get lost along the way, ask for directions, and eventually I will get there. I may not get there as quickly or with the least cost because I spent time and money on fuel heading in directions that would not take me to my desired end location.

In information technology, approaches such as Open Source and Managed Services are two key areas that can be used to drive down costs, yet provide delivery of “BIG IT”. Historically, Open Source has been something of a crapshoot. Conceptually it is a brilliant idea, but not without potential pitfalls in using as mission critical functions. Managed Services provides that IT support around the clock thus relieving companies of hiring full time IT staff to perform the same management tasks. This approach is pennies on the dollar compared to that internal IT staff member. Finding the right company with the customer focus and commitment to always delivering the best solution is the key challenge. What companies have a vision and the creativity to implement the vision? What companies can provide that big picture overview and translate that into technology and tasks to implement at an affordable price. Again, very critical.

This begins a series of articles that will focus on promise -v- delivery. Two key technology approaches to be discussed are Open Source and Managed Services. Packaging a total solution, a custom fit to any organization, is critical in delivery of Information Technology today. Delivering on commitment rather than just making hollow promises must use a technology roadmap and cost effective technology approaches. Follow on discussions will begin with developing that roadmap and using these technology approaches of Open Source and Managed Services. We will discuss how your organization will benefit without compromising the integrity of operational areas critical to the success of your company.

In larger organizations, experience at the leadership level often runs deep. This leadership works within business organizations to provide guidance and the necessary direction to ensure that the appropriate technologies are implemented, that the best practices using the best technologies are implemented at the most cost affordable price.

In smaller companies and small IT organizations, this level of leadership may not exist or may not be at the level needed to provide that necessary business and technology view and approach. What are the alternatives available to smaller companies? What are the alternatives available at an affordable price?

This requires a level of managed services that include strategic level planning and leadership. So, in IT, this would be CIO/CTO level of services. This level of services would interact with the corporate leadership to ensure that technology spending is bringing about the necessary value for the company. This leadership builds a strategy that carries the technology into the next three or maybe even five years. Managed services, at a fixed price, over a period of three years is one method of reinforcing the IT organization in any company.

Many small companies cannot afford a single full time IT person. The technology decisions are being made by non-technology professionals. The value add can be hit or miss. Having no plan or strategy, or expectation of results, should certainly halt anyone from moving forward with any endeavor. We must ask the question, do we really need to do that? How do we know that our project will be successful? What is the measuring stick? Leadership and experience at a senior level of IT is needed to bring about a strong technology organization within any company. Providing this leadership for small businesses, delivering information technology at a level seen in a large organization, yet at a comfortable and affordable price is a must and what is needed to drive small businesses into the future. This is required for any business to be at the top of their game as a leader in their industry.

Is your IT driving technology solutions based on real business needs? Do you have a strategy that will take you into the coming year, one that is scalable and flexible to rapidly changing business demand? If not, then consider sourcing your IT strategy through a managed services organization. Can you afford not to do so?

In small businesses, IT is stretched to cover many areas of expertise.  So in our example, a network admin may be asked to develop programs, run a project, and evaluate software. These three items require, at the very least, a slowed down, organized thinking, documented approach before delivery. Remember, I mentioned that IT was much like the medical industry in that there are many areas of expertise. I said, you’re not going to see a podiatrist (foot doctor if you don’t know) for a heart related issue. Yet, in small businesses, we ask our IT folks to assign the podiatrist to a cardio issue. That is the reality of small businesses and IT within small businesses.

In our small businesses, we may hire network admins and call them IT managers.  What is often missing is the manager piece. We ask and expect these folks to be managers but in many cases, they are not equipped to do so, simply because they have not had the experience at that level. It doesn’t mean they can’t and don’t learn, but the learning may be slow because of the number of opportunities that are presented.   The manager must have a broader understanding of IT and how it relates to a company’s day to day operational needs. This is especially true for small businesses and mid-sized businesses.

How can this be rectified? What are the options available to small businesses that can help overcome this challenge? Well, most of these small companies cannot afford full time IT leadership. In other words, the executive level and vision cannot be supported on a full time basis. These companies need someone to assist in this area, but at an affordable price structure. They need the strategic vision, leadership, to help move their IT into a lean organization and provide experienced leadership much needed for the small business units. They need someone to lay that foundation for their IT organization that can be used across all knowledge areas of IT.

What is available is CIO and CTO leadership through managed services. What is available is the sharing of this leadership across many companies which keep the costs at a minimal for the small businesses. These folks develop a strategy for your business organization, develop improved IT integration throughout your business organization by having a strong business knowledge, and the knowledge of how IT can provide improved working environments and processes.

As businesses are required to do more and do more with less, on a global scale, they must look to how they can source their business needs, yet keep their costs at a minimum.  Managed services, and more specifically, executive level of CIO and CTO managed services, delivers on that requirement. YOU can have a BIG IT capabilities, yet with a small IT footprint. You can have your technology needs met every day, yet without hiring that full time staff to deliver functionality at every knowledge area within IT. Small businesses today must consider having that strategic IT assessment of their organization, allowing their business to shore up the weak areas and broaden the knowledge areas in support of business growth, thus taking the business to the top of its game and into the future.

Why is this a hot button for me?   I’ve seen this too many times, where there is no planning, no organizational thought process in how projects are approached.   In my experience I’ve seen IT take the approach of sending stuff out to the end user, without any knowledge of what they were sending out and asking the user to accomplish something.  When working on implementing software solutions, we work to manage the user’s expectations and more importantly, how we involve the user in a software rollout or a software evaluation.   Neither is comfortable to the end user and generally not a knowledge area for them.  IT must bring that expertise and assistance to the table when approaching such projects.

Yet, in this example, not once, but TWICE, the same IT person went out to the end user and asked them to start working with a software product or evaluate a software product, when that person, as an IT representative, had absolutely no knowledge of what he was asking, how the products worked,  and no understanding how the users were to make use of these products.   A video link was e-mailed to the user asking that person to evaluate the product.  The IT worker, totally unrelated to the evaluation, saw fit to ask for feedback from the user.    This IT person was asked whether he had seen the video before sending it out.  Do you know what you sent out?   The answer in both cases was NO.   Are you kidding me?  How could an IT person make such a request.   Additionally, this person, in neither case, saw fit to communicate to his manager responsible for the projects that he had made such requests.   This just tears away at the credibility of any IT organization.

As much as anything, it is an educational challenge within IT.  In today’s world of “get it done and get it done now,” the perception is that there just isn’t time to follow processes and procedure in ensuring a successful project outcome.   There isn’t understanding between the different knowledge areas of IT to respect the varying requirements and needs to ensure successful project outcomes.   I tell people, IT is much like the medical field.  If you have a heart related issue, are you going to see the cardiologist or a podiatrist? Both are MD’s but only one is qualified to take on the heart related challenge.   The same is true in IT.  There are many areas of expertise in IT yet the folks in IT  are IT folks.   Even within the IT organization, that disconnect is true and people outside a knowledge area may not understand what they are asking thus the resulting consequences is reduced credibility of IT.   Consistent processes to ensure success of any project within the organization must be followed.   The follow-up discussion to this will highlight some options supporting an improved organization and that reduce the risk of failure of projects within IT, regardless of the knowledge area.

It is called Assessment and Recommendations.  These two areas are critical before the start of any project.   They are officially not part of PMBOK, but our philosophy at CI Solutions Group is that they must occur before every project, at least to some degree.  This is most critical to ensuring success and reducing risks to any given project.  I’ve seen projects encounter trouble in the change management area, even with the greatest of planning, execution, and monitoring during a project.  How can this be?

Well, as mentioned in Part 1 of this blog, change management in the context discussed here is about people, how people are impacted by change, how people react to change, and how we can successfully manage through that change by involving people in the project.   People and their involvement and commitment vary through a project.  Everyone brings a different set of skills, strengths, and weaknesses to the project.  It is the weaknesses we must identify, develop remedies, and shore up.  Otherwise, until such time, it may be best to delay moving forward with the project.

Now, project management professionals may disagree with this approach,  the idea being that tools are provided by PMBOK that will mitigate risks here.  This is true, but to mitigate even further, to ensure a higher likelihood of success, with minimal issues, a pre-project assessment and recommendations is a must.   Hypocrisy exists in every organization.   “We are totally committed to this project.  Our people will always be available when needed.”  We’ve all heard that before.  “I’m at your disposal throughout the project.  I’m totally committed to this project and the success of the project.”

All well-meaning comments, but in reality the above is rarely seen through the life of the project.   We must probe to find the areas where the commitment to a project is minimal, questionable, and the likelihood of resources when needed or management support when needed will not be there.  That occurs in the assessment.   Recommendations are based on assessment results and drive any remedy to the situation such that the project can move forward with the initiation phase.

Finding out later in the project that a manager refuses to  be involved, refuses to provide the leadership needed to ensure success of this  project in their area, is too late.  Can we remedy during the project?  PMBOK says  we can but it is more difficult and can derail a project, at least for a period of time, until that can be remedied by whatever means agreed upon by the project management group and the company’s  leadership team.

Quite frankly, if the right skill sets for the project do not exist in an organization, or if lack of commitment for a project and commitment to providing management leadership needed in a project is permeated throughout the organization, wouldn’t it be nice to know this sooner than later?  As the saying goes, “You can pay now or you can pay later.”  It is more expensive to find out the issues later in the project as opposed to before the project start.

Do you want to improve the likelihood of success in a project?   If so, then give this a try before your next project.

Change management is critical to the success of any project.   Change management in the context of this discussion is not related to managing change to the project scope as part of the planning group.   This change management is not a process group  such as planning or monitoring and controlling.  This change management is related to process changes such as an engineer implementing a process change and the related impact to the human side of that change.  Change management is a systematic approach to dealing with change, both from the perspective of an organization and on the individual level.  In my opinion, this is the most important aspect of project management.  It is this human side of change that has a great risk of failure if not planned for and managed appropriately.  

Change management has been characterized as having three stages, Unfreezing, Changing, Refreezing.  Looking at change management a little more analytically, you can characterize change management as problem finding and problem solving.  Now some folks prefer not to use the word “problem” but rather the word “opportunity.”  In this discussion, the “problem” is nothing more than something that requires an action but the solution is still unknown.   The goal is to identify a solution and action that will solve the problem.   You will find this definition in an article written by Fred Nickols called “Change Management 101: A Primer”.

Change impacts people in many ways.  Change may have political impacts, analytical impacts, system impacts, or  staffing impacts.  Change may be organizational or systems related.  In either case, people generally don’t like change for fear of the impacts and what must happen at an individual level to implement and adjust to this change.  In short, change takes people out of their comfort zone.   Mitigating risks due to change must occur very early in the project process.  This means that even the planning process is too late for mitigating this project risk.  Our next discussion will focus on ways to mitigate risk due to change management and where this must start in the life of a project.

In today’s world of   rapid change, people are constantly interacting with cell phones, messaging,  e-mailing, tweeting, checking Facebook and other social networks. Yet, companies tend to stay with IT and IT systems, without much if any change, for years and years. The leadership in these companies is the same folks who must have the latest phones, tablets, and other social technology toys. Why would  companies take a different approach to IT versus other aspects of their business and business relationships?

Companies have a  different level of expectation of IT than other groups in the corporate
organization. “Keep the computers running,” is what is expected from IT. The value that IT brings, or more importantly, should bring to the organization, is  unclear and often unexpected. IT can, should, and MUST bring greater value to every organization. Technology, where demanded by individuals on a personal  level, is not always demanded, at least strategically, at the corporate level.  Simply put, IT isn’t required to provide that push and support that improves business processes and fundamentally makes a person’s job easier and more enjoyable. Often, we suffer through a tired old technology.

How do you know that you might need a new IT?  First, and foremost, you might need a new IT if your IT group cannot lead, develop strategy and direction, both business and
technology, to bolster your company’s position within the global economy.  You might need new IT if your servers are extremely slow, crash often, have viruses and have loss of data. If the system is down then you cannot do your job.  Figure out the cost of a person sitting idle for one hour of the day. Multiply that times the number of people in a department or an entire organization. This can be quite expensive. What is the cost of data loss?  Do you have to re-enter the data?  What if it is some weeks or even months before you realize some data is missing. Can you recover?  Again, this can be very expensive on a company’s bottom line.

Just the other day I was having coffee with a sales executive from the Information Technology industry. I said to him that IT can improve a company’s top line.  He looked at me like I was from another planet. IT can provide sales and marketing with the analytics for product movement, by regions and zones, high volume product, slow moving product, excess inventory, industry specific product sales, high volume and low volume customers.  Providing this information sooner than later, allows an organization to make strategically sound decisions on future sales and marketing initiatives.  Companies can target areas of the business that are doing well and give focus to those areas needing improvement or even replacing of product. All go to improving the top line.  This CAN and SHOULD be provided by IT and enabled by IT tools. You might need new IT if you rely upon spreadsheets to track your company sales and all the critical information surrounding those sales.  If you cannot get to the data or if the data is non-existent in your organization, then you might need new IT.

Effective technology is essential for small businesses looking to increase the productivity of their people and improving overall business performance.  You might need new IT if
these items cannot be provided by your IT organization.  Check out your personal technology.  Are you giving your business the same priority?  What’s it costing
you?

Have you ever experienced a marketing group going to print with a catalog containing new products that cannot be manufactured because the right machinery is not in place to produce this new product? Have you seen sales make a commitment to an executive group on the number of products to be produced monthly, yet have no conversation with manufacturing as to whether there is capacity to produce such quantities?

Information Technology, a group that in today’s world, MUST bring that whole or entire understanding of the business to the table to meet an organization’s business needs. Yet, I’ve experienced IT organizations that are segmented by business groups, thus making the same types of decisions as the rest of the business, with no consideration regarding the impact of decisions to the rest of the organization. Have you ever experienced an IT group making a change to a sales order entry process and then suddenly manufacturing is no longer receiving work orders? The group didn’t consider the impact of the change nor did they confirm that the change impacted others. Why? Because it was manufacturing and not order entry. That is someone else’s problem. That IT structure, built around specific business units, has to be a thing of the past. This silo or pasture effect is a common business problem. Making decisions without consideration and understanding of the impact to the entire organization is the same as building a house and putting the carpet in before putting on the roof.

It is a mandate of Information Technology to bridge that gap – open the gates between pastures. IT must provide the path and generate that throughput to facilitate improved business processes and decision making. Understanding the core business is a must in today’s global workplace. Strategy is key in building any future. Planning is critical to mitigating risk. Managing change is a must to ensuring success. Information Technology must bring all of these and more to the table. IT is not the core business itself, it is a core business enabler. However, with globalization and the explosive changes in technology, Information Technology must develop that strategy and direction to carry organizations into the future.

Communication is paramount. People must talk with others outside their immediate business unit to improve their understanding of the business. IT must represent and facilitate process changes to ensure that all aspects of the business are considered when any change is planned for and realized. This IT need is especially critical in the small and mid-sized business organizations where IT may consist of one or two people, and the expectation is for IT to keep the computers running. The Silo effect is as strong as any in the small and mid-sized businesses. Small and mid-sized businesses must consider sourcing this level of IT services to ensure a complete technology solution for the organization.

Tear down the silos, remove the fences. To be successful in today’s world, this operating process must become the NEW NORMAL in business.