Organizing some thoughts I had put down while waiting for conversions to run on the weekend a large systems project went live, on original budget and original schedule.
In 25 years of working with great companies across a variety of industries, I see IT leaders engaging with business leadership to shape project commitments in three ways:
- Some answer “Yes,” to everything, work heroic hours and under-deliver
- Some just say “No”
- The best engage in a discussion starting with “Yes, and…”
Only the third type of leader has a great relationship with their business partners. There are many other prerequisites for a great IT / business partnership, such as the right organizational design, great people, great planning, and great project management. But it all starts with how you engage your business partners.
Stage One Leaders
IT is a service function, and most of us want to deliver good customer service. As an IT leader, anytime you are in an initial meeting and find yourself agreeing to scope and either cost or timeframe (or worst case, all three), you know you’ve fallen into the Stage One trap. Saying “yes” up front feels like you are supporting the business. However, if you have not done the work to understand what it will take to deliver under real world conditions, you will invariably underestimate – and no one else in the room will remember the caveats given with that initial estimate.
Out of our two dozen or so core team members on a recent project, four had jury duty in the last eight weeks leading to go live, and seven (7) had visits to the emergency room between Integration Test and production release! Try incorporating that in a project plan. An off-the-cuff estimate almost never properly accounts for the complexities and vagaries of a real-world project of any size.
No matter how early the team recognizes the over-commitment and tries to make it up by working harder, there is no number of all-nighters that can make up for a schedule that is off by a factor of 2 to 10. The business is disappointed at the delivery time and cost, even if they like the end application. If revenue goals or headcount reductions have been based on delivery of the project, the missed IT commitment means business leaders miss their targets, and perhaps bonuses. The business / IT relationship is off to a rocky start.
Stage Two Leaders
Having been burned by over commitment in the past, many IT leaders compensate by never committing, or setting dates that are so far out they know they will beat them handily. Two things happen once this pattern sets in. First, business leaders demand results anyway, using their own estimates since they do not trust IT. Second, when IT finally delivers these same leaders are aggravated at the effort it took to cajole IT to get there. Even successful delivery does not build good will between business and IT groups.
Stage Three Leaders
“With enough time and money, we can build anything.” The stage three leader puts in the time and energy to come up with a realistic project plan and cost, based on real world experience and some countable unit as the basis of the estimate. However, when do you ever get enough time or enough money, much less both? Getting a realistic estimate is a necessary foundation for a successful project start, but it does not take you the whole way. It is important to recognize that this is where the creativity starts.
Leadership cannot start treating the preliminary estimate as if this as an arm’s length vendor negotiation to drive to the lowest price. If they do, they’ll end up missing the biggest opportunity.
“Yes, and…”
The real power of the partnership comes when both sides start taking a “Yes, and…” approach. An ERP project may take millions of dollars and hundreds of person-years, but can some of the benefits be delivered far ahead of project completion, with a big effect on ROI? If Finance wants a nifty automated posting interface from one system to another, can you get them 90% of the benefit with an upload-able spreadsheet and have it done in a tenth of the time?
I always approach these suggestions as additions, not substitutions, at least at the start. The objective is not to cut scope, it is to creatively meet a crucial part of the business need even faster than the business is asking for. This drives three big positive outcomes for your financial and operations stakeholders:
- If the business decides that that the feature or solution is actually all they need – terrific, and you just lowered risk on meeting the overall go-live target or freed up resources for other projects
- If the original project is still needed, you have at least increased ROI since some benefits are being realized sooner
- Finally, if the full project will take longer than the business would like (which it always does) the impact of that timing is softened
Sometimes this also serves as a mini-prototyping exercise for a crucial part of the project, allowing adjustments to be made in the end solution.
In a business with competent management, the richest opportunities for out-performing the competition come from optimizing the edges: your interaction with your customers and/or your vendors. The same is true within departments of a given business, and in many organizations the IT / Business partnership is the most fruitful place to begin unlocking this value.