I am not sure I have run into a business over the last two years who didn’t say they needed something important done and could not wait for the time being given from delivery. Just a couple of weeks ago in talking with a Telco CIO he talked about the speed with which their business was changing and how he needed to develop solutions and changes in 5-15 days not 100 days or 2 years.
Almost all, if not all businesses know they need to accelerate change to be able to adapt to their market. Often they don’t know how and miss the ability to leverage their biggest assets, their people in the organization. Here are two examples:
- Major Enterprise Application Project – Bring the yellow bus full of external consultants, often bright MBAs who feel they know your business or where it should or is going and have them build this application over the next two years. Three things happen here:
(a) they don’t know and will have a hard time knowing your business like you and your people do, but how do you run a mixed team project to leverage both parties but still tie a vendor to a deliverable and timeline.
(b) Your business most likely will drastically evolve or change in the time from the start to end, so you have left yourself open to the "50% of IT project fail" statistic
(c) The business just aint that patient - The Microsoft commercial where the lady from Star Trek says to her team after talking about all the systems and office space etc that they have made state of the art and then asks, what doesn’t our competition have. Too which the answer is – our people.
So what do we need to do?
Come up with the tools, energy,
enthusiasm to start delivering results not deliverables. Of course
there will be deliverables along the way, but we need to create the
internal capability to move fast as part of our dna. So let’s change
the game.
Let’s…
- Build internal capability
- Create success which will breed more – Zest
- Leverage internal methods and processes, not just bring in
another. Let’s figure out how to do this inside not outside the system - Move faster in smaller cycles so that through expirementation and
learning we can quickly decide on correct or corrective actions - Decide to deliver results as our end goal not just deliverables.
One Rapid Result tool I guess I need to leverage is spell and grammer check
🙂
The trouble is that the bus full of consultants are well intentioned and believe all the the client needs is a better way and they will change. Trouble internal capacity to change is much more complex than knowing what is the right thing to do.
Often consultants are brought in when somebody has lost confidence in the IT organization to deliver. Tackling that issue of confidence will lead to long term results. Working with cross functional teams is great source of rapid results. Most organizations have lots of hidden capacity.
Suggest you proofread the item. Couple of mis-spells confused me. Item is really good. In Star Trek example it is “her” team.
Suggest for “so your 50% of IT project fail number steps in” instead, so your “50% of IT project fail” number steps in.