Archive for the ‘product managment’ Category

New Name For CIOs: Strategic Execution Officer

Wednesday, August 26th, 2009
CIOs Need To Learn To Manage Wild IT Projects<p>(c) - 2007</p>

CIOs Need To Learn To Manage Wild IT Projects(c) - 2007

In order to complete in a global economy that is moving faster every day, more and more firms are committing to implementing those really BIG process digitization projects. More often than not the CIO will find himself / herself in charge of not only the implementation of the new software application, but also the overall success of the project. How do you go about doing that?

What Goes Wrong With Big IT Projects

We all know the statistics – most big IT projects are not successful. However, the key question is why? It turns out that all too often the issue is not with the new process automation technology that is being implemented, but rather with the management challenge that comes along with a project like this.

The reason that managing a large transformational IT project is so hard is because the CIO also needs to be finding ways to drive the new business process changes that will be required once the new systems have been installed. It turns out that nobody likes change!

What Doesn’t Work?

It seems as though IT departments have been trying since the beginning of time to find a way to tackle this two-headed IT project beast. One approach has been to give responsibility for the success of the project to an executive governance committee. It turns out that this type of committee does an excellent job of defining the strategy for implementing the changes that will be needed, but does a lousy job of executing it.

Another approach has been to create an IT task force to implement this type of change. They generally do a good job of getting the new application up and running, but they lack the wide-ranging authority to cause other parts of the company to change how they are doing their jobs.

What Does An IT Strategic Execution Officer Do?

If the CIO is willing to step up and tackle leading both sides of a major IT process automation project, just what do they have to do? There are three fundamental tasks that they will need to deal with:

  • The implementation of the process automation application(s).
  • Making sure that the new technology gets adopted by the rest of the company.
  • Making sure that the new processes that the project has implemented start to get used by everyone.

Ultimately, the CIO will be filling the management / leadership gap that exists between coming up with the process automation plan and actually changing the company to use the project once its been implemented.

Final Thoughts

No CIO wants to take on more work – there’s not enough time in the day to get everything done as it is. However, ensuring that big IT projects get implemented correctly and that the company transforms its processes in order to use the new tool is the key to the company’s long term success.

This is a clear example of where a CIO gets to practice for his / her next job: becoming CEO. Nobody else will be as well positioned to implement cross-company changes. CIOs who can pull this off will have found a way to apply IT to enable the rest of the company to grow quicker, move faster, and do more.

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

The basic job of a CIO is to ensure that a company’s IT infrastructure operates smoothly and allows the company to conduct business. On Monday, August 3, 2009, PayPal’s CIO failed at this most basic of jobs…

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Posted in product managment | 4 Comments »

Forgotten IT Skills: How To Ask Questions

Monday, April 6th, 2009

Good IT Departments Know How To Ask Good Questions

Good IT Departments Know How To Ask Good Questions

It’s easy to get caught up in all of the servers, routers, applications, and firewalls that make up a modern IT environment. After a while we tend to start thinking that the path to our next great IT insight must lie somewhere in this jungle of IT “stuff”. And that is where you’d be wrong!

Ranjay Gulati, James Oldroyd, and Phanish Puranam are three researchers who have been studying this problem and they’ve made some interesting discoveries. They’ve come to realize that if IT folks like us want to help our firms uncover ideas for new products or services, then we may have to rediscover the ancient art of asking the right questions.

I will confess to being just as guilty of this as everyone else. In order to be more productive, I try to ask pointed questions that get right to the (what else) point. The researchers are saying that this is exactly the wrong thing to be doing.

What they are saying is that more often than not other parts of the company will have information and data that can help us uncover new products and solutions if only we know how to ask for it. If we re-train ourselves to start asking broad questions, then we will start to get exposed to more types of information.

An example of this comes from the folks at Harrah’s. The IT department was helping out with a project that was designed to find out what hotels were in need of expansion. They asked the question “What is the demand for our hotel rooms?” Note what they didn’t ask: “What is our occupancy rate?” The broad way that the question was asked allowed both the occupancy rate and the number of people unable to book a room because of the hotel being full or because they were unwilling to pay the room rate to be counted. A much different answer!

Getting IT staff to start asking broad questions is not easy. They will be giving up some efficiency, but the rewards can be great.

Do you ask pointed or broad questions? Have you ever been surprised by the answer when  you asked a broad question? How could you get your IT staff to start asking broad questions? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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Posted in product managment | 5 Comments »

Soft Work In Hard Times

Thursday, June 5th, 2008

Soft Skills Are Important For IT Workers
It would appear as though the U.S. economy is starting to pull out of it’s recent downturn; however, for those of us in the IT industry, this should serve as yet another wake-up call for both ourselves and our teams: technical skills alone are not going to cut it anymore.

Generally when I say that, heads start to nod. However, nobody seems to know that answer to the very next question: so what to do about it? For IT departments to transform themselves from where they are today to where they need to be tomorrow, there are a whole new set of skills that everyone needs to learn and the quicker, the better. You’ve heard this phrase before and you’re going to hear it one more time: soft skills.

More head nodding should be occurring right now. The big question is what soft skills do IT departments need to get good at? There are lots of these skills, but I believe that for IT they can be placed into five groups:

  1. Negotiation Skills: proving once again that its not what you know, but what you know how to get done that is most valuable to the company. As IT departments start to rely on outside vendors more and more, the ability to properly negotiate agreements becomes a must have skill.

  2. Communication Skills: being the best technical worker is of almost no value to the company if you can’t communicate what you are working on and the challenges that you are facing. Putting together a 100+ page PowerPoint deck does not mean that you can communicate. Using a three page PowerPoint deck to clearly communicate your point does.
  3. Your Business Knowledge: knowing what your business does, how it does it, and why it does it has become critical knowledge for all IT workers. Ultimately the goal is to align what IT does with where the company wants to go and knowing what the business side of the house is trying to do is key to being able to do this.
  4. Team Motivation Skills: knowing how to get a group of people to work together towards a shared goal has always been important and now it is a required skill. Everybody is understaffed and overworked. Having the ability to cut through all of the clutter and get folks to accomplish an objective makes you worth your weight in gold to the company.
  5. IT Product Management Skills: even if everyone is not a product manager, having the basic product management skills of scheduling, planning, and coordinating are critical to making sure that the project that you are working on is a success. Once the IT department is aligned with the rest of the business, missing delivery dates can have significant impacts on the company’s bottom line.

These are my picks for the top five must-have IT department soft skills, what do you think?

Posted in communication, IT, motivation, negotiation, product managment, soft skills | 2 Comments »