Archive for February, 2010

It Turns Out That Top-Down Decisions Are What CIOs Need To Make

Wednesday, February 24th, 2010
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To Get An IT Project Done On Time, The CIO Needs To Make Some Decisions

To Get An IT Project Done On Time, The CIO Needs To Make Some Decisions

What’s Wrong With The Way That We Schedule IT Projects?

At the end of the day, an IT department is simply a collection of projects. Some of these projects are short lived (“we’ve got an outage!”) and some are much longer (“let’s install a new ERP solution”). However, it turns out that today’s CIOs have been taking the wrong approach when it comes to scheduling these IT projects and it shows.

All too often once the decision has been made to fund a project, the CIO takes a hands off approach until the project has been completed. What this means in practical terms is that the planning for the project is done by the project team itself. This is where things start to go off-track from the very beginning.

Put yourself for a moment in the shoes of the poor IT planner who has just been handed a large IT project. Sure, you’re excited about the opportunity to manage so much responsibility; however, you also realize that not delivering the project when you say that you will can sink your career. What will you do?

Simple – it’s called “sandbagging” . What you will most likely do will be to add extra time to the project so that when things start to slip, the end date for the project won’t be impacted. Shucks, if you can get away with it you’ll add a lot of extra time to the project so that you just might be able to deliver it early and get the admiration of your bosses for being such a good project manager.

Take this situation and then consider what happens when what the project manger is working on is just one part of a bigger project. Additional time will be added to each of piece of the project and eventually the “time padding” will grow so large that you may have doubled or even tripled the real time that the project is expected to take.

The Power Of Top-Down Planning

The way to solve this is for the CIO to step in and supply some top-down planning. This is where the CIO sets the dates for the project and hands these dates to the project team. Jay Bahel reports that a recent study of 75 large IT projects revealed that the ones that were the most successful were the ones that had their milestone dates set in a top-down fashion by the senior IT leadership.

Why does this type of heavy-handed approach to setting IT project dates work so well? It’s actually pretty simple. By establishing the dates by which work needs to be completed, the CIO is sending a very clear message to the IT team – this is your goal, make it happen. This sets up a sense of urgency within the team and it can go a long way in preventing those internal conflicts that always seem to arise as a team tries to set dates for a project.

The Role Of The Core Team

Yes, yes – I know that things will be different when you become CIO. However, let’s assume for just a moment that even you won’t be able to spend all of your waking hours lording over any single IT project. What can be done to keep things on track and moving towards the milestones that you have laid down?

Creating a so-called “core team” that keeps a watchful eye on an IT project can be a great help in ensuring that the project stays on track. It’s important that this team not be too large – 4-6 senior management leaders should do the trick. The role of this team will be to bring the interests of both IT and the rest of the business to the table in order to manage the project.

The core team is ultimately responsible for making sure that the CIO’s project milestones are met. In order to do this they will have to resolve the conflicts that arise during the project as well as ensuring that the project team is able to interface with the rest of the business in order to complete project tasks.

What All Of This Means For You

Moving to a top-down project planning process will require changes to be made in your IT department. Expect some bruised feelings especially from the project managers – they’ll feel like you are taking some of their power away from them.

Picking the members of the core team that will be watching over the IT project is not something to be done lightly. Not only do they need to bring solid set of skills to the table, but they also need to be able to get along with each other.

Once again, it becomes clear that a CIOs job is not necessarily to actually do things, but rather to make things happen. When it comes to IT projects, the CIO needs to show the rest of the IT department the way by setting timelines and milestones in a top-down fashion…

Do you think that top-down IT planning would help your IT department’s projects to be more successful?

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental Successful CIO Blog is updated.

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

I believe that one of the reasons that it is so hard for a CIO to get the IT department to align with the rest of the business is that finding the correct opportunities where alignment is possible can be a big challenge. Well I’ve got some good news for you: it looks like such an opportunity is getting ready to show up and it’s called XBRL…

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Posted in IT project | 2 Comments »

CIOs In Crisis: Do We Have A Problem Here?

Wednesday, February 17th, 2010
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What Is It Going To Save The Role Of The CIO?

What Is It Going To Save The Role Of The CIO?

What’s Happening To All Of The CIOs?

You and I both know that a well run IT department is what can make one company more successful than its competitors. That must mean that the IT department is important, and therefore the CIO must also be important, right? If that’s true, then why are some of the really big companies like News Corp, Harrah’s, ConocoPhillips, etc. getting rid of their CIO and then choosing to not replace him / her? What are they thinking?

What’s The Problem Here?

If firms feel comfortable getting rid of their head of IT (the CIO) and not replacing that person, then clearly there must be a crisis here. It sure looks like today’s CIOs have not done a good job of advertising just how valuable they are to the rest of the company’s executive leadership team.

This is pretty easy to understand. However, there’s a problem with this explanation. You would think that all of the upper management positions would be faced with this same challenge of conveying their value to the company. However, it seems like the CIO is the only position that companies feel comfortable leaving either open or in the hands of a less senior member of staff. You can’t say the same for operations, finance, human resources, etc.

What Could We Do To Solve This Problem?

Arthur Langer has been researching this issue and he believes that the problem that IT has is that we’re lacking support. If we worked in accounting, then we’d all be CPAs and everyone would agree on the way that things needed to be done.

IT has no equivalent accreditation system. Langer points out that the field of IT is lacking any sort of professional body that could provide its stamp of approval for how an IT department is run or what goals it chooses to focus on. Although such an organization may be a long way off, in the near term IT at least needs to do a better job of getting the message across to the CIO about IT actually does.

Langer makes a good point when he states that he believes that there is no question that CEOs value what an IT department does. It’s just that what we do is so far removed from what he understands, that CEOs really have no clear idea how to manage their IT resources.

Ultimately, this is what is currently missing: an IT best practices organization that can provide CEOs with this kind of management guidance. Sure we’ve got the ITIL standards, but those are far too detailed. What’s missing is that top-level “here’s how you run an IT department” type of guidance.

What All Of This Means For You

Even though you may not yet be a CIO, you need to start thinking about how you are going to effectively deal with this issue. The last thing that you want to have happen is for you to finally become the CIO only to lose your job because the job itself was seen as being not all that important.

As CIO what you are going to have to do is 1) do a good job of running your IT department, and 2) do a good job of educating your CEO on how to manage his / her IT assets. This means that you’re going to have to do a lot of different tasks: create IT best practices for your company, collect industry research and show it to your CEO, create management guides to instruct your CEO on what you need him / her to do for IT. Congratulations – when you become CIO, you also become a teacher!

Although this may seem like it would take up a lot of your precious CIO time that could be spent forging strategy and harnessing new technology, think again. Teaching your CEO how to manage the CIO and showing how to use IT to make the company more successful just might be the best thing that you’ve ever done – it could even save your job!

Do you think that at your company the CIO is necessary or do you think that someone lower down could do all the same things?

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental Successful CIO Blog is updated.

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

At the end of the day, an IT department is simply a collection of projects. Some of these projects are short lived (“we’ve got an outage!”) and some are much longer (“let’s install a new ERP solution”). However, it turns out that today’s CIOs have been taking the wrong approach when it comes to scheduling these IT projects and it shows…

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Posted in career | No Comments »

Dealing With Vendors AFTER You’ve Signed The Deal

Wednesday, February 10th, 2010
Image Credit Getting Married To A Vendor Is Just The Beginning…

Getting Married To A Vendor Is Just The Beginning…

When you become CIO, vendors will enter your life and they just won’t leave. What this means is that they’ll be a constant pain in your neck, always wanting your time and attention. However, on the flip side, they will be a valuable resource that can provide you and your team with information and guidance that you couldn’t get anywhere else. Don’t do what too many new CIOs do and stop talking with vendors after the deal is signed…

What’s In The Relationship For You

CIOs always have the same problem: they are being asked to do more and more with the same amount of resources and funding. The challenge is to do an inventory of what tools and talents you have available to you and then find ways to use those to perform the tasks that the company needs you to do.

One way to do this is to find new ways of using more fully the hardware, software, and services that the firm has already bought. As smart as your IT team is, there is no way that they can know all of the ins and outs of every IT tool that the department is currently using.

Ericka Chickowski over at CIO Insight points out that this is where your vendors come in. Assuming that you didn’t burn your bridges with your vendors during the negotiation process, they can be a fantastic resource for you to draw on. Often new CIOs spend too much time looking only inside of the IT department and don’t take the time to look outside in order to uncover this set of hidden resources.

How To Manage Your IT Vendors For Maximum Benefit

As your company’s CIO, you will ultimately be responsible for controlling how your firm interacts with its IT vendors. You may not be part of every negotiation, but you certainly will end up living with the results. With that in mind, here are six things that you’ll have to do as the CIO in order to get the most out of your IT vendor relationships:

  1. One Cook To Run The Kitchen: those IT vendors are sly guys. They know that when they are dealing with inexperienced CIOs that they can always talk to other parts of the company if they don’t like how things are going with the IT team. You need to step up and put your foot down both inside and outside of the company – let everyone know that you are the one who will ultimately be making the decision and nobody else. This will force your vendors to deal with you.
  2. Banish Confusion: I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen this issue sink what could have been a great vendor relationship: when the IT department doesn’t know what they really want. This is pretty simple right: if you don’t know what you want, then there is no way that you’re going to be able to tell the vendor what you want to buy. When this happens, the post deal relationship always seems to go poorly because nobody is happy – you’re not happy with what you got and the vendor isn’t happy because you’re not happy.
  3. It’s NOT All About Price: I think that it’s only the government that still sticks to the rule that they’ll always buy from the lowest price vendor. Yes, the up front price of whatever you are buying is important However, the cost of owning or using the product or tool over the lifetime that your company will use it is what really counts. The CIO who can step back and determine what the true cost of a product is can make good negotiating decisions. Once again, choosing wisely will help you to have a good long-term relationship with your vendor.
  4. Boxing Yourself In: One of the popular trends in IT these days is to reduce the number of suppliers that the firm is dealing with. This can have many benefits like being able to get greater discounts because you buy more from one supplier; however, there is also a dark side. You can easily get trapped into having to go along with what a vendor proposes if you’ve become too reliant on them. In order to have a healthy relationship with your vendor after the deal is struck, make sure that you keep your vendor options open.
  5. Forget The Little Guys: Which vendors should you spend your time dealing with – the big guys or the little guys. We generally tend to favor the big guys, they do a slicker job. However, it’s the smaller vendors who can more easily provide the customized services that you’ll need as the CIO and they are the ones who will be willing to work more closely with your team after the deal is done.
  6. The Contract Is Just The Start: CIOs who are just starting out often don’t realize that after all of the effort that went into defining and signing the contract, the real work is only starting after everything has been signed. It’s how you manage the day-to-day relationship with the vendor that you’ve selected that will really control how much value the company gets out of that contract.

What All Of This Means For You

All too often when new CIOs step into their position, they can get caught up in all of the internal issues that are always ongoing. However, if they do this, they may be missing one of the biggest “free” resources that they have available to them – their existing IT vendors.

The vendors know their products better than anyone else on the IT team and they have the experience with other IT departments in understanding how the tools can be used to solve real business problems. You’ll need to be careful how you choose to deal with them, but they are a great resource in these cash strapped times.

Taking the time to realize that selecting a vendor and entering into a contract with them is very much like a marriage is what a new CIO needs to do. Sure the wedding is fun, but you need to realize that you are in it for the long haul and just like every other part of your CIO job, you’re going to have to work at it in order to make it successful…

Do you think that your vendors would be willing to work more closely with you if you asked them to?

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental Successful CIO Blog is updated.

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

You and I both know that a well run IT department is what can make one company more successful than its competitors. That must mean that the IT department is important, and therefore the CIO must also be important, right? If that’s true, then why are some of the really big companies like News Corp, Harrah’s, ConocoPhillips, etc. getting rid of their CIO and then choosing to not replace him / her? What are they thinking?

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Posted in vendors | No Comments »

Bad Behavior: Why CIOs Don’t Get Along With The Rest Of The Business

Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010
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A CIOs Personality Often Rubs Other Departments The Wrong Way

A CIOs Personality Often Rubs Other Departments The Wrong Way

Forget the whole alignment thing, is it possible that a CIO’s behavior is the root of the problem that the IT side of the house and the business side of the house have never been able to get along? Could it be that this is the secret as to why there has always been such a gap between these groups?

What Drives CIOs?

You may not be a CIO just yet, but I’m willing to bet that you share all of the bad personality characteristics that your CIO has. Perhaps if we take a moment and uncover just what is holding the IT department back from being all that it can be, we’ll also be able to uncover a way to solve this problem.

IT by its very nature likes to focus on things like technology and processes. However, it’s that “people dimension” that turns out to really be the most important thing. It’s how people interact that either allows IT and the business to align – or keeps them apart.

Studies of CIOs have revealed that they have two personality characteristics that help them be good CIOs, but which are probably dooming their ability to interact well with other departments. Wonder if you share these traits?

What Makes A CIO Good & Bad At The Same Time

A recent personality study of more than 500 CIOs, managers, and IT staffers have uncovered two personality traits that appear to be crucial to doing well in IT while impeding interactions with other departments.

The first of these personality traits is the need to do things right and to do them perfectly. I’m sure that we can all agree that we share this characteristic in some manner. When the CIO has this personality “feature” , it has a habit of being adopted by the entire IT department.

The problem with this trait is that it means that IT can be very slow to change how it does business. CIOs won’t want to make changes until they can be assured that the change has been tested and that it will work correctly in every situation. Needless to say, if the rest of the company is dynamically changing in order to adapt to the market, then IT will come to be seen as a drag on the rest of the company.

The other trait that CIOs share is a deep set need to do things correctly and to find ways to continuously improve what they are doing. We’ve all seen both of these characteristics show up in countless internal IT improvement programs. This is something that can help an IT department get more done, but it’s going to hinder working with other parts of the business.

The problem with this trait is that when other departments show up and ask the CIO to do something quickly or to do a job only partially in order to quickly react to a changing market situation, CIOs often balk.

When the rest of the company encounters resistance to their requests from the CIO, they are not pleased. This kind of internal roadblock is dealt with by the rest of the business by either complaining to the CEO that IT is not being responsive or else (and we’ll all seen this before) the business ends up going around the IT department in order to solve their problem.

How To Fix These Personality Flaws

These personality flaws are a challenge for any CIO to deal with and will remain that way when you become CIO. The issue is that you need to have these personality features when you are performing IT functions, but you need to find a way to deal with them when you are interacting with people from other departments.

Knowing that these two personality traits are a hindrance to aligning the IT department with the rest of the business is the first step in finding a solution to this problem. The next step is to realize that you need to consciously work to “turn them off” when you are working with other departments. This can be done by forcing yourself to step into their shoes and working to see the world the way that they do, not how IT sees it. Not easy, but doable.

What All This Means For You

When you become CIO, there probably still won’t be true alignment between the IT department and the rest of the business. This means that it will fall on your shoulders to finally solve this problem.

Knowing that one of the root causes of this problem lies in the very personality traits that will make you a good CIO is the first step in finding a way to deal with this issue. Your focus then needs to be on finding ways to turn these traits on when you are dealing with IT issues and off when you are dealing with business issues.

You may feel as though this will require you to become sorta of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde type of CIO. Perhaps this is true, but if it allows alignment to happen then go ahead and drink the potion…!

Do you think that you already have these two personality characteristics that could make it difficult to get along with the rest of the business?

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental Successful CIO Blog is updated.

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

When you become CIO, vendors will enter your life and they just won’t leave. What this means is that they’ll be a constant pain in your neck, always wanting your time and attention. However, on the flip side, they will be a valuable resource that can provide you and your team with information and guidance that you couldn’t get anywhere else. Don’t do what too many new CIOs do and stop talking with vendors after the deal is signed…

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Posted in alignment | 5 Comments »