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Characteristics of an Successful It organization

by Zebulon Pooka

How effective is your IT organization? How do you know? Do your business sponsors agree? Determining effectiveness, like quality, can be highly subjective. In many cases, effectiveness is determined by the last service or project that your organization delivered. Additionally, disappointing outcomes are given much more weight than positive outcomes. We need to define effectiveness characteristics of IT organizations before we can improve effectiveness.

What is Application Maintenance and Support? If you are typical, you have Application Maintenance and Support teams consisting of a fixed number of resources deployed to provide following types of services:

1. Resolution of Incidents and Problems 2. Consultation Services - Answer questions about the operation of the system and provide planning services to customer 3. Scheduled services such as planned enhancements to add capabilities or provide custom one-time access to information

Flexible: IT provides on-demand services (problem resolution and consulting) as well as scheduled services (enhancement and projects). High priority problems, mandated requests, and changing business requirements disrupt planned completion dates, scope, and estimated effort. Effective organizations must balance variable demand, changing priorities, and changing requirements. In order to achieve this flexibility, organizations must manage requests, schedules, priorities, scope/requirements, staff deployment, and staff knowledge to optimize results and minimize impacts.

Most of support activities are short in duration and require detailed knowledge of the system or time-consuming analysis and research. In order to avoid the time-consuming analysis, support teams are typically staffed with knowledgeable experts. It takes so long for a person to learn the application, organizations resist transferring staff which limits staffing flexibility, adds costs, and increases waste.

Efficient: Each of these characteristics conflicts with others. A balanced approach is required. Efficiency is typically sacrificed to improve flexibility. Efficiency can be improved by documenting knowledge, cross-training, using repeatable processes, management tools, and limiting the variety of technical environments.

Reliable: Reliability applies to the applications, infrastructure, and the people delivering services. The processing capability (infrastructure, networks, applications) must be reliable but the staff must also reliably deliver IT services. This means defining success criteria, conducting quality reviews, testing, and numerous other activities that ensure the consistent delivery of services and processing capability.

6. Treat Estimates as Commitments When the project team is established, the estimates should be reviewed by lead members of the team and any issues should be identified and resolved. Once the issues are resolved, the team leads should accept the estimate as a commitment. When assignments are made to individual participants, they should also review their assigned estimate and raise issues or commit to the estimate and date.

Pro-active: IT must be able to anticipate requirements or problems and take steps to prepare for spikes or avoid problems. By understanding the business need and the existing capability and tracking changes, IT can anticipate and manage pro-actively. This will require repeatable processes, metrics, and increased communication with the business. Solution Strategy These characteristics can sometimes contradict each other and result in waste. The extra process rigor that makes us predictable may also impede our efficiency. In order to balance the characteristics, IT must redefine their role and their culture. In addition to operating and supporting the existing processing capability, IT must recognize that business requirements will change and that an effective organization must be able to respond to changes. In order to deliver value, IT organizations must exhibit the Effectiveness characteristics that have been defined in this document. This will require running IT like an independent business which is accountable for costs and revenue and they must prove their value to their customers on a daily basis. Success is not measured by meeting or exceeding expectations. Expectations may be impossible or unreasonable. Success is measured by managing expectations, making commitments, and meeting or exceeding commitments. IT must provide leadership and not simply wait for the business to decide how to leverage technology. When IT demonstrates their value, they will once again be viewed as an investment and not simply a cost to be reduced or eliminated.



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New Unique Article!

Title: Characteristics of an Successful It organization
Author: Zebulon Pooka
Email: info@ACRMcorp.com
Keywords: project management,project office
Word Count: 660
Category: Marketing
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