One of the most common themes I hear as I talk to IT organizations is that they have somehow lost the trust of their business partners in being able to deliver timely solutions. The first indication of eroding trust is often when the organizations you support begin going to outside vendors to purchase solutions without involving you in the process. While that might be an obvious warning sign, the frustration that is driving them to that option has likely been building for some time. If letting the business directly outsource solutions was an acceptable outcome, you could just accept those losses and move on. After all IT never has enough resources to meet all the demand anyway. Unfortunately, those solutions almost always come back to IT to support once they are implemented. When that happens, they are one-off solutions that require expensive contracts or specialized skills to support and don’t fit into an overall systems architecture. The business got something that works, but now it’s up to IT to support for the next 10-20 years. IT ends up looking inefficient in managing support costs for solutions that are all different and cost too much. Sound familiar?
Every IT organization I have ever seen has more demand for services and new capabilities that it can respond to with the resources it has available. Many IT organizations don’t have a visible way to make business-driven decisions about what the most important priorities are on an ongoing basis. IT organizations that are overwhelmed with demand often make more commitments than they can deliver on successfully. It may also be easy for business stakeholders to dump unfiltered demand on IT and then complain that IT can’t get it all done. This creates long queues of demand that make your business partners wait years for results and just makes matters worse.
I’ve taken on the leadership of organizations in this situation many times and I can attest that reversing this dysfunctional, vicious cycle is one of the most difficult problems an IT leader can face. Trust is a precious commodity that is very difficult to gain and very easy to lose. To reverse the cycle and begin to earn back that it comes down to three important things.
Commitment, communication and culture.
Commitment
Commitment is about managing priorities for the investment the company makes in IT and showing results for the investments that were made. The solution starts with an open dialog about getting your business partners to own their IT priorities and the process of filtering it to ensure that visible tradeoffs are made based on available IT capacity. The business needs to think of IT as a limited resource and take ownership for how they consume it. The demand management process needs to be built around the concepts of queue limits, cost of delay, WIP limits and small batches of work to optimize throughput.
Everyone in your organization needs to know that a commitment to deliver is made jointly at all levels of the organization and between the business and IT. That commitment is taken seriously by everyone that has a role in making it happen. You set the example in the way that you make shared decisions about what your organization works on and measures results on a day-to-day basis.
Communications
At an organization level communication is about providing regular and insightful information about what the company’s investment in IT is delivering in terms of value and services. IT should hold itself to the same standards of performance and contribution to the bottom line that every other department is expected to deliver. Showing accountability through transparent reporting is something that many IT departments don’t have the capability to do or take the time to master. It’s also tempting to not want to show service and support performance metrics until they paint a positive picture about how things are going. It’s good to start with a baseline, even if it’s ugly, and show incremental improvement over time.
At the project level open and transparent communications start from the very beginning as you engage the business to set expectations for how you will work together to achieve common objectives and continues throughout the development process. When things don’t go as planned the best thing you can do is own up to it, resist the temptation to point fingers, and demonstrate a direct and deliberate approach to getting things back on track. Agile organizations make release burn-downs and cumulative flow diagrams of their development teams readily available and visible. Issues are owned and resolved at the appropriate level and by the appropriate stakeholder. Senior management from business and IT stakeholder areas should make a habit of attending system demos and release celebrations. Progress is much more visible in an agile organization and communication is frequent and honest. Nothing is hidden.
Culture
Creating a culture that values engagement and shared success is the best way to earn the trust of your customer or partner. These actions need to start at the top and be reinforced consistently at every level, in every interaction IT has with the business areas they support. Every company has a unique culture, but a few common themes are important to enforce. Teams must be empowered to make decisions that are based on clear mission and direction. There must be a continuous focus on improving everything that the organization does. Leaders must continually reach across organizational boundaries to deliver results and strongly discourage actions that perpetuate silo building and finger pointing.
An agile organization actively embodies the best aspects of culture, commitment and open communications. Agile practices by their nature draw the product owner into the process and engage them in a process of shared success. Commitments are more real-time and reality-based. They are made with the acceptance that change as inevitable. As a lean-agile leader you know how to display a strong sense of commitment in your thoughts and actions. You trust your teams to make the right decisions and do what is best for the customer. I practiced commitment, communication and culture to strengthen and grow trust with my business partners long before I became a lead-agile leader. Agile is not a cure-all for dysfunctional IT-business relationships, but the same concepts run through the value statements in the Agile manifesto – individuals and interactions over processes and tools; customer collaboration over contract negotiation; and responding to change over following a plan. Leaders create a culture in their organizations and companies either deliberately or by default. Which will you choose?
The Agile (IT) Organization 