HITS

M&E Journal: Ending Chaos in IT Organizations

By Brian Dawson, Business Manager, Affinity

Do you know how many projects are running across your IT organization? Is your IT organization chasing fires, working extreme hours, and not meeting the demands of the changing media industry? As the CIO, is your team constantly asking for resources and budget for application changes that just seem to appear out of thin air while the previous changes aren’t completed?

Imagine a media company that wanted to implement an advertising platform for cable TV and another group within the same company wanted to implement an ad platform for on-demand media. Both groups create independent teams to investigate possible solutions. While at the same time, both teams are implementing changes to the existing platforms that serve both functions.

After some preliminary research, one group decides to pursue a solution involving a third-party platform that can be configured and customized while the other group decides to design and implement their customer platform. Time passes, and it becomes clear that both groups are implementing similar platforms. After budget overruns and missed deadlines, a new initiative is developed to unify the two advertising platforms.

All the while changes are being made to the existing functionality. Teams are overworked, and there is no capacity to complete all the changes and strategy necessary to be successful. In addition, another 200 projects are running in parallel. The projects that get the most attention come from the leaders who are the loudest. Not a great way to run an organization.

This is a familiar story. From our perspective, it is easy to see where the team went wrong: executing on a sub-optimal plan. How could a CIO have noticed or helped guide the teams to stay on-track to manage the project differently, and keep a better view of the company’s fundamental goals? In the trenches, such clarity is difficult to come by. A constant barrage of requests, competition for funding, and lack of communication between teams makes good IT governance a perennial challenge.

New competitors change the game

In the entertainment industry, the changes are even more extreme. The shift from TV-centric consumption to streaming mobile consumption, and the entry of sophisticated new competitors controlling both content and distribution, has required entertainment IT organizations to up their game and develop internal tools to help their companies compete in the space.

Meeting these changing expectations can be challenging. For any given IT organization, there are more active projects than ever before, and the requirements of these projects are often themselves in a state of flux. Without an effective top-down governance system for keeping a 10,000-foot view on the activities of the organization, it is a near certainty that teams and leadership will fall into reactive patterns of putting out fires, rather than making informed, long-range decisions in line with the real objectives and goals of the company.

Many IT organizations have PMOs that play or attempt to play this role. In some cases, this is sufficient. In many cases, however, the PMO value-add is negligible at best: the reporting does not aid in planning. Fundamentally, effective IT governance requires information in a form that allows for proactive, and not reactive, decision-making.

What does this mean?

The view from 10,000 feet

First and most fundamentally, it means finding a way to get a 10,000-foot view of what the entire IT organization is doing – a governance model. This is easily the most valuable thing you could do. In a large IT organization, with hundreds of projects, the natural tendency is for projects to remain isolated from each other, for work to be duplicated, leading to redundancy in features, and for work to be poorly prioritized. This, of course, means that the IT org is producing less value per dollar than it otherwise could be.

A simple start is just to categorize and understand all the projects in progress and planned. Then schedule a regular cadence of updates. Not just a PMO update, but a planning update. When you look at projects that have a set of important attributes, it allows you to be better informed on meaningful projects and remove the drama of IT. Let the drama be done by the professionals in your organization–the content creators; not the IT team.

Better results with a governance model

When a CIO embraces a governance model, the company can view its portfolio and finally reduce risk to the organization. You can prioritize projects and begin to reduce chaos. The results end with a better-managed portfolio that is strategic with the business partners who ultimately fund the IT organization. Getting a 10,000-foot view means being able to see the entire set of projects in the org, their goals, their budgets, and their timelines. It should be easy for leadership to identify the benefit that funding the governance program brings to the company. With potentially infinite possible projects competing for resources, such a view is essential to prioritizing work.

The 10,000-foot view has other benefits as well. Without this view, it becomes impossible to do long-range capacity planning, let alone find duplication in the efforts of different teams. With a long view, it becomes possible to achieve great efficiency by finding overlap among projects, and developing tools and practices that can be shared across teams.

The benefits of improved prioritization, capacity planning, and eliminating redundancies are available to any IT organization, regardless of scale or industry. The question is not of total output, which is a function of the specific IT organization, but rather of effectiveness, which applies across the board.

To achieve these results is not just a spreadsheet that gets filled out, but a change to the culture of IT. Organizations like Affinity can help create a governance model that identifies all the IT projects and improves the entire organizations’ communication strategy that builds efficiency and creates new habits that change the IT culture. IT organizations need to embrace a shift in their Governance strategy to reduce chaos and meet the demands of the customers.

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