Management Toolkit
Story: IT is key to future business growth
foundation
Building bridges and tall buildings with pretty pictures and spreadsheets promising delight in nifty board rooms is all dandy but as usual the boring basics are forgotten or grossly underestimated.
The IT building blocks will crumble if the foundation isn't sound and durable. And the only foundation that matters is one that takes into account, for the long term, the only two constants in IT: damage and change. Overall. Which encompasses much more then just hardware and software. Logistics, agreements, training, procedures, authorization, etc, etc. The whole shebang.
I know, the boring basics are a tall order, difficult to explain, dreadful to lobby for and usually viewed as a waste of money, standing in the way of progress, over detailed and non strategic. Sigh.
Without a solid foundation with future planning in mind (damage and change) entire towns turn out to be build near or on quicksand, vaporizing water supplies, retrieving shore lines, earthquake areas, tornado areas, flood lands and what not. Just the little facts of life for which it helps to plan ahead for because else buildings crumble, drainage pipes crack and people start to find their luck elsewhere (usually the first to go are the ones you then need the most but ignored before). Maintenance costs start climbing, revenue goes the opposite way, the investments needed to turn the boot around are ouch while available budgets are declining.
Not that there's a need to plan for Armageddon, but rather make use of common sense. IT is all interconnected. Often in various, not parallel, ways. Details matter. Change something here, add something there, and the whole nature of the beast can alter. Again, it's more then just hardware and software.
Of course, techs are essentially business enablers. Their job is to make sure that what the business requires works as planned. It's not their place to decide what the business requires. However, listening to their suggestions about the how to get the what should be taken into consideration. It's not that their goal in life is to frustrate the business, rather the opposite. And they're not afraid of change, it's their mantra.
Nothing worse then a decision maker with no more then a conceptual understanding about the nuts and bolts that makes a business tick who doesn't take no for an answer while refusing to take into account internal expert advise. Or worse, lays down not only the what but also the how. Often, such decision makers end up getting exactly what they want. With such power management comes a lot of liability and your trusted external advisers will make sure that that ball lies in your department.
The real lesson? Before driving change through the IT landscape make sure you form a top-bottom team that acts and operates as a team and not as individual work groups. Yes, there needs to be leader, but more often then not he/she needs to be a people manager. IT is a team sport in which also the ball boy can make the deciding difference, simply by announcing that small, but all so important, little detail. And that does include the rest of the (user) organization. Lots of various expertize to be found there that can also reveal seemingly unimportant details.
There's only "we", not "us" and "them". Don't care how many project management rules that breaks.
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