In recent times we have been talking about business projects and not IT
projects that are evaluated on business criteria and require business owners to
sign-off the impact it has. The funding for such projects is done by respective
business owners and part of their P&L and budget. This has also led to
higher ownership and thereby improved success. The enablement and partnering by
stakeholders has changed the way IT has traditionally acted in the role of
creator of solutions now focusing more on business outcomes.
Many CIOs that I talk to now are creating significant impact with
business partnership extending to the customers of their internal customers.
The outward focus has created many new opportunities for making a difference to
the company. The resulting rise in credibility puts the business savvy CIO in a
position of advantage which they are willingly capitalizing. On the flip size
it is creating pressure for the IT teams to manage expectations and the
pipeline of new projects; an interesting problem to solve.
Not too long ago I was at a conference where the speaker raised the
question on how does IT impact the business – process, efficiency and
effectiveness. He spoke about looking beyond the obvious KPIs and metrics used
by business and IT teams, challenging CIOs to go higher to view the impact
technology is creating. A supply chain or customer engagement initiative has
larger impact than the immediate efficiency or new capability it creates. The
new capability can be a game changer for enterprises competing in a low margin
hyper-competitive world.
A company implemented a supply chain project to bring visibility and
transparency downstream and upstream. Connecting vendors and suppliers linked
to a demand forecast or sell-through resulted in improving the order
fulfillment resulting in increased revenue as well as bringing down the holding
cost of raw material and inventory. This led to improved customer satisfaction
which in turn got them incremental business. Thus the impact was not just
visibility; it also created new opportunities with existing customers.
The initial project when it was drawn up had modest expectations of
visibility impacting supply and consistency of execution. The result it
delivered was however beyond the defined outcomes. The limits were based on
known direct impact not factoring in the derived benefits which it actually
delivered. It took some time for the stakeholders to connect back these to the
small project taken up by IT for the supply chain team. The acknowledgement of
the nonlinear impact took a while and raised the team morale.
This case study had every CIO thinking about the nonlinear impact their
initiatives had created which they had failed to capture in the post
implementation reviews, management debriefs or meetings. Almost everyone had a
set of projects that had delivered the ripple effect of positivity which they
shared with each other. The speaker urged them to change their thinking beyond the
immediately visible to a holistic view of how every project can potentially provide
a higher ground for discussion. He also cautioned that It may not be obvious to
begin with.
We are all conditioned to believe that large high value multi-functional
long duration projects are the ones that create new capability for our
companies. I am not discounting this belief; smaller projects too can have a
cascading effect that creates a competitive differentiator at least in the
short-term. They are rarely captured as baseline benchmarks in the initial
stages. The post implementation review (PIR) rigor which is quite weak
culturally (except when things go wrong) needs to change to bring forth the
benefits.
CIOs move their teams from project to project with a sense of urgency to
fulfill the pipeline of new initiatives and keep the business happy. It is
imperative for the CIO to enforce PIR for all projects not limited to the
traditional post go-live capture of learning, but also review the same again in
three months, six months and a year after the solution has been
institutionalized. PIR is not about what went wrong and what worked or for that
matter whether the stated business benefit was delivered. It can be about the
nonlinear impact.
Go ahead and make a beginning and you will be surprised !
