On a warm day in June 1963, President John F. Kennedy addressed a large crowd at the Assembly Hall at the Paulskirche in Frankfurt. It was the height of the Cold War and just a few months before that fateful day in November. President Kennedy spoke to the audience about the importance of the NATO alliance and perhaps more importantly, the change that had come upon the world. During this speech, he put words to the immutable law of change and declared “Change is the law of life and those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future.”

While the challenges we face as I.T. leaders are worlds apart from those of a cold war president (or any president for that matter), there are lessons we can take away from this about the dynamics of change. We can use these lessons to successfully communicate to our stakeholders the value I.T. brings to the organizations we serve.

Today, many businesses are facing great change.  As we explored in a previous blog, (2021: The Year of Hopeful Monsters) we see heightened focus on digitalization and product acceleration. We are also confronting the challenges of managing profound change in the workforce as the remote work movement gathers momentum from the pandemic.

Managing these changes while simultaneously improving our ability to communicate value to stakeholders is never easy. As we study truly successful transformation efforts of the recent past, we find three common themes we believe should be included in any CIO playbook for post-pandemic management. These themes include developing organizational wide methodology adoption, clarifying the I.T. roadmap development process, and enhancing I.T. metrics utilization. This post will focus on methodology adoption, with the latter topics to be covered in succeeding articles.

I.T. leaders know digital initiatives do not deliver themselves. They require various members of your business and I.T. team to come together and collaborate. Many teams struggle with this seemingly basic and very necessary ingredient. Start by asking some simple questions, including:   

  • Does the team have a well thought out approach?
  • Is the approach relevant and appropriate to the initiative?
  • How efficient/effective is that approach? How do we know?

Good implementations of appropriate methodologies help teams establish their footing, reduce interpersonal friction, improve time to delivery and most importantly, achieve the desired business outcomes. As a leader of the I.T. organization, it is up to you to ensure the team has mastery of the proverbial toolbox. That means expert level performance of the right tool for the initiative.

As you already know, getting to expert level performance in a business setting is no easy task. In addition to having your team well versed on the methodology, they need real world experience.  Consider planning and executing a campaign with your best experts on important topics in I.T. to get people engaged. These engagements can be as simple as lunch and learns, one day trials in design thinking, or budgeting in an agile environment. Feeling more adventurous? Go for a more rigorous week-long experiment with a design sprint. It is important to work with the team leading these campaigns make sure they are prepared. It’s even more important to get feedback, adjust and do it again. As you continue to run these types of engagements, you should be looking for a few things to occur:

  • Reduced project ramp up times. Teams get working much faster when methodologies are clearly established and appropriate for the work ahead.
  • Measurable improvements in deliverable quality. Teams will have less re-work and poor workmanship issues.
  • Shorter payback periods for technology investments. Projects get to market faster as they become leaner and unneeded features are removed from project scopes.

Developing your methodology playbook is an ongoing commitment. However, as you can see by the results above, it is a worthwhile investment. Too many I.T organizations are missing the future because they are mired in the past or the present. In today’s atmosphere, we must move our organizations to build the strength and knowledge to adopt change faster and meet the future head on. If 2020 is any indication, the future has no intention of slowing down.