Posts Tagged ‘Six Sigma’

CIOs Want To Know Why IT Process Improvement Programs Fail

Wednesday, January 11th, 2012
Image Credit
They start out fine, but the ending is never pretty…

They start out fine, but the ending is never pretty…

It seems as though at least once a year CIOs get a bee in their bonnet and decide that the company’s IT department needs to knuckle down and improve its processes. This means that it’s time to implement one of those far-reaching process improvement programs. Oh, oh. No matter if it’s Six Sigma or some other flavor-of-the-week program, they all seem to end up the same way – having no lasting impact. Let’s take a look and see why this happens…

Process Improvement Programs Don’t Work

This type of discussion always seems to get off to a good start if I can share some interesting statistics with you. How about this one: 60% of all corporate Six Sigma programs fail to deliver the expected results. Ouch!

Clearly something has gone horribly wrong here. Those of us who work in IT know exactly what is going on. We’ve seen those big process improvement programs get announced with all sorts of excitement and then they always just seem to end up fading away.

When you’re CIO, this can’t happen. Your career is based on what kind of results you can deliver, and a successful process improvement program can be a big part of this. Let’s take a closer look and maybe we can find out where things are going off track.

Phase 1: The Good

Man, these big IT programs always seem to start on such a positive note. Everybody’s happy to be selected to be on the team and they are all committed to achieving the goal. Those teams are no small thing either – they can easily have 10-18 people on them because of course you want to have a representative from every possible impacted area.

Since the CIO has launched the program; the program has the attention and the support from the senior IT folks. This means that the low-level managers are clearly communicating to their folks who are involved in the project that working on the project is a top priority.

What’s even better than the launch, is what happens when the team reaches a goal – the CIO throws a party! Everyone celebrates the success and the people on the team get some sort of recognition and a reward. Everyone is happy.

Phase 2: The Bad

Time marches on. After the initial success, the process improvement program continues on. The problem is that it’s been going on for so long that now folks start to get distracted. Other tasks start to creep in around the edges and steal their time away.

The outside experts who were brought in to help the time implement the Six Sigma or whatever program now move on to other things. The team keeps moving on, but their way forward is no longer clear.

Managers are no longer so open to having their team members spend so much time on this other project. Instead, they start pushing to have their staff complete their “day job” before they spend time on the “special project”.

Phase 3: The Ugly

This is where it all falls apart. Basically what happens is that the folks who are working on the process improvement teams just stop doing the work. They no longer care about the program because it really has no bearing on their annual performance appraisal. Therefore they make the conscious decision to focus on what matters, their real job, and start to ignore the process improvement project.

What’s interesting is that this project failure is often hidden from the CIO. What happens is that the folks who are doing the reporting start to focus on the one or two teams who are actually able to keep moving forward, even if it’s just a bit, and they don’t report on the teams that aren’t making any progress.

Because they also start to report on what teams say that they are going to do in the future, this obscures what is really going on right now – nothing. This always eventually comes to the surface, but by then the damage is done and the CIO’s process improvement program has failed.

What All Of This Means For You

The very definition of information technology is that it’s a department built on processes. When CIOs decide that those processes need to be improved, they like to kick off a big process improvement program.

However, all too often in the IT sector these programs end up producing no long-term positive results. The reasons are many: over time there is less and less expert assistance, existing job responsibilities start to take over, and lack of senior IT management involvement all work to shift focus away from the project.

The importance of information technology means that IT processes really do need to be improved. CIOs can make sure that the time and effort that is poured into these process improvement programs yield results. Making expert resources available for longer times, making process improvement results a part of everyone’s performance appraisal, limiting team size, and ensuring IT executive involvement will all work to make your next IT process improvement program a success.

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Department Leadership Skills™

Question For You: How long do you think an IT process improvement program should go on?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

I love clouds, you love clouds, we all love clouds. It seems like everyone in IT is talking about cloud computing and how it’s the next big thing. Cloud computing has almost become a part of the definition of information technology. Look, I think that there’s a lot of good things about cloud computing, but I’m not convinced that it’s the right solution for everyone. This brings up the question of how a CIO can find out if cloud computing is right for his or her IT department. It turns out that there are three questions that just might provide the answer that you are looking for.

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Posted in IT project | 8 Comments »

Is Life Easier If You Are A CIO Who Works For The U.S. Government?

Wednesday, May 26th, 2010
Image Credit Federal CIOs Have The Same Issues That Everyone Else Has

Federal CIOs Have The Same Issues That Everyone Else Has

You want to become a CIO. You probably want to become a CIO in the private sector – you know, those companies that have owners or stockholders that they always have to work to keep happy. Why haven’t you spent any time thinking about becoming a CIO who works for the biggest employer out there: the U.S. Federal government?

Big Changes Coming

The U.S. Federal government (the one that runs the country, not the states) employs over 300 CIOs that manage all of the different parts of the operation. You would think that federal CIOs would have it easier: I mean they don’t really have to worry about keeping shareholders happy or anything like that, do they?

You need to keep in mind that although a federal CIO doesn’t have to worry about the same things as a private sector CIO, they have a whole bunch of different issues that occupy their time. One big issue is that every four years they may have a completely new boss what with the presidential elections and all that.

As the U.S. experiences the effects of the global recession just like everyone else, federal CIOs are feeling the pressure to show that their IT departments can deliver a solid return on investment (ROI) .

It’s becoming pretty clear that there is a lot of IT funding for the things that you would expect a federal CIO to be working on: things like wireless projects and public safety projects. However, this doesn’t leave a lot left over for all the other things that an IT department is supposed to be working on,

What Are A Federal CIO’s Biggest Priorities?

One of the key ways to tell if being a federal CIO is any different from being a private sector CIO is by taking a look at what’s on their list of projects. Federal CIOs always have to be nimble enough to adjust to a new administration’s priorities which may differ from the last administration’s. This can cause a big change in what the IT department spends their time working on.

Right now the federal CIOs are reporting that the key programs that their departments are working on include:

How Are They Going To Be Successful?

So if you were a federal CIO right now, how would you go about pulling off all of these initiatives while dealing with the tightest budgets in years? As you might be able to guess, there is no one magic answer to this question.

In a survey done by InformationWeek magazine, 21% of federal CIOs said that they were using Lean Six Sigma. 29% reported that they were using ITIL. Even within the military there was no one way to go: the U.S. Army is using Lean Six Sigma while the Navy is planning on using ITIL.

What All Of This Means For You

In your future, there is actually a good chance that you might at some time become a federal CIO – there sure are a lot of them out there. You might have thought that this was an easy route to take – no pressure from owners / shareholders. Think again.

Federal CIOs have to deal with a great deal of upheaval in their upper management structure on a cyclic basis. On top of that even during difficult economic times they need to find ways to push forward on important IT programs that will transform their organizations.

If you do become a federal CIO, I sure hope that you like change. You’ll have your own set of issues to worry about, but at least things won’t be boring!

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Department Leadership Skills

Question For You: Do you think that it would be easier or harder to be a Federal CIO than being a private sector CIO?

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

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

I hope that you wore your good clothes to work today, because there’s a pretty fair chance that you might end up on video sometime during the day. The arrival of low-cost video cameras and high quality video processing software has effectively made it ridiculously easy to create multimedia content. This has got to affect what a CIO does, but how?

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Should A CIO Bother With That ITIL Stuff?

Wednesday, April 28th, 2010
Image Credit Johnson & Johnson’s CIO Had An Out-Of-Control Growth Problem That ITIL Solved

Johnson & Johnson’s CIO Had An Out-Of-Control Growth Problem That ITIL Solved

Johnson & Johnson Had A Problem

I’m sure that when you picture yourself becoming a CIO in the future you see yourself sitting at the corporate strategy table with the CIO using your deep understanding of IT to help the company move faster and do more. Umm, one problem with that vision – you’re not going to make it to the big table if you don’t solve the problem of run-away IT costs. Johnson & Johnson’s CIO had this very same problem and she tackled it using the ITIL framework. Maybe this would be a good time to look into that ITIL thing…

Just What Is the ITIL?

You’ve probably heard about the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL); however, do you really understand what it is? First off, it’s an old (10 years is old by IT standards) set of best practice guidelines for how to do IT service management. It was originally developed by the U.K. government in order to help them do a better job of modeling their outsourced IT projects. It’s quite popular in European IT shops and is only now starting to pick up steam in the U.S.

What makes the ITIL so attractive is that it allows a CIO to run the IT department like a business. This is exactly what Johnson & Johnson’s CIO was looking for back in 2001. J&J was going gang-busters from a business point-of-view; however, their IT costs were going through the roof – they were going up by over 10% every year.

J&J had previously tried the old stand-by CIO trick of pulling together IT operations from all around the sprawling company into a single centralized organization in order to get on top of their costs. However, even though now they knew where the money was going, they still were seeing out-of-control growth on infrastructure tasks. Something had to be done!

J&J’s CIO decided to implement a program based on the ITIL. Now mind you, this is not some silver-bullet magic cure-all. Instead, the ITIL can help with specific parts of running an IT shop. Specifically if you go about implementing ITIL correctly, your IT department can boost the quality of service that it is providing to the rest of the company.

J&J’s IT department was able to use ITIL to decrease how long it took to resolve problems. This in turn resulted in J&J’s systems having more uptime and therefore allowing more work to be done quicker. Needless to say, end users were very happy about this.

Sure happy customers are nice, but what about the money? J&J says that if you count both cost savings and costs that they were able to avoid, then starting in 2005 they believe that they’ve been able to save at least $30M a year.

Why Did This Solution Work

ITIL is not the only way to standardize the way that a CIO runs his / her IT department. Other methods include the Capability Maturity Model (CMM), Control Objectives for Information and Related Technology (COBIT), Six Sigma, and Lean Manufacturing. However, ITIL has been around the longest and its been shown to work.

Taking the ITIL path was the right choice for J&J for a number of reasons. Not the least of which was it provided J&J’s CIO with a way to both quantify and measure the quality of the service that J&J’s IT department was delivering. Who was the wise man who said “If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it”?

What All Of This Means For You

When you become CIO you’ll be facing the same twin set of conditions that can keep you from doing all of that strategic stuff that you want to be doing: rising IT costs and ever increasing user demands for more service. You are going to have to deal with this issue and do it quickly.

ITIL is not a new “flavor of the day” approach to solving the challenges that an IT department faces. In fact, it’s a rather old approach. However, if you’re willing to make the investment in time and energy that it can take, ITIL just might be the solution that you are looking for.

Knowing that there is a solution framework out there that works is what allows most CIOs to be able to sleep at night. Actually implementing a solution and saving the company, well that’s a job that will be waiting for you when you become the CIO.

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Department Leadership Skills

Question For You: Would ITIL work at your company or do you think that a different approach would be better?

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

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Just when you think that you’ve got this Internet thing figured out, it goes and changes on you.  There are some fantastic tools out there for you, but will you know what to do with them when you are the CIO?

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Posted in ITIL | No Comments »

Can CIOs Drive Innovation & Boost Quality At The Same Time?

Monday, October 5th, 2009
How To Capture Innovation Without Going Broke

How To Capture Innovation Without Going Broke

How are you at walking and chewing gum at the same time? It’s sorta a classic challenge – do two different things simultaneously and do them well. CIOs are facing the challenge today – cut costs and simultaneously use IT to make the business more competitive. How hard can that be?

Say Hello To Six Sigma

If you’ve been to a book store recently and looked at any of the books in the business section, you may have been overwhelmed by the number of titles that had the words “Six Sigma” in them. Six Sigma is an approach to business that makes use of constant measurement and analysis in order to continue to optimize business operations.

Dr. Sara Beckman has researched this technique and points out that Six Sigma was invented at Motorola and popularized by Jack Welch at GE. If you apply it to how an IT shop goes about doing its work, it can be a great way to drive out costs and boost quality. However, it will do nothing to drive innovation.

Say Hello To Design Thinking

Design thinking is a new set of skills that are designed to drive innovative thinking. The starting point for design thinking is for solution designers (who else?) to start by focusing on what problems their customers are having on a daily basis. Once they understand the problems, the next step is to consider the wide universe of possible ways to solve these problems.

The Problem

Here in lies the problem. If you go out and talk to today’s CIOs you’ll find that they have generally implemented one of these two different solutions (Six Sigma is more popular because it’s easier to understand and measure).

This causes problems. It is possible to focus too much on driving out costs and then lose your way and not be able to provide the innovation in IT that is needed to keep the business competitive – this is the problem that HP is currently facing.

Likewise, if an IT department is too innovative and doesn’t watch the bottom line closely enough, then they can quickly drive themselves and the company out of business. The dot.com fiasco was a great example of this.

What’s The Correct Solution To This Problem?

You may have already guessed it, but the right way to solve this challenge is for CIOs to take the time to find a way to incorporate both the design thinking and the Six Sigma approaches into their IT departments.

The design thinking technique allows an IT department to find ways to explore new approaches to solving the problems that the business is facing. Six Sigma techniques allow an IT department to find ways to improve how they are currently doing things.

Final Thoughts

CIOs can’t allow their IT departments to become too focused on just one approach or they risk failing. Design thinking tries to find out what a good solution to a problem is while Six Sigma assumes that a solution is good and then goes about trying to make it even better.

CIOs who can find a way to reduce costs while at the same time driving IT innovation will be better at finding ways to apply IT to enable the rest of the company to grow quicker, move faster, and do more.

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

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

The times they are changing. Let’s take a moment and have a talk about one of a CIO’s key survival skills: the ability to successfully negotiate office politics. Specifically, if you could only have one best friend, who should it be: the CEO or the CFO?

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Posted in innovation | 3 Comments »