What are the advantages of increasing visibility into transformation initiatives?
CIO in Software, 501 - 1,000 employees
It is really good to have a feedback loop with the business. Before I implement something new, I always try to figure out what the reporting will be: How will I give visibility to create a nice feedback loop? It is super important on the business side, because if they don't trust us, they will not come to us at all. They will just go around us instead. Getting the business to actually work with us means giving a certain level of transparency. If you can't provide some transparency as to what the queue is, and where someone is in the queue, people are frustrated. And I understand that. They have a business problem that they are trying to solve, and if they can't get a firm expectation from you, they’ll solve it themselves because their thinking is, "I need to get this done. This just has to happen."Director of IT in Software, 1,001 - 5,000 employees
One of the things I’ve always introduced for all transformational initiatives is defining the success metrics upfront and co-authoring those with the executive project stakeholders. This helps in two ways. First, it provides accountability. For example, when we are in the depths of user acceptance testing (UAT) and people say, "This isn't what we asked for," we can go back to those success metrics as a reminder. The second benefit is that it creates transparency for executive stakeholders because we can show how we are tracking things and the value that we anticipate from the project.Board Member in Healthcare and Biotech, 1,001 - 5,000 employees
A long time ago, when I became Head of IT, if I was talking to the business I would always have somebody from my team hanging around. And I continued doing that over the years, until my last CIO position. As a result, that person from my team would get visibility. And I would have different people going to different meetings with different departments, just to make sure that there is a connection.After having the first conversation, I would hand my team member to that business lead and say, "This person will be your key contact, and they will take over the work for your business teams’ initiative." Then I would keep going back, once a fortnight or maybe once a month, to check in and have a coffee with them, just to make sure that everything is on track. Anything that was not working would come out during the monthly management meetings anyway, and that was a good opportunity to talk about the larger picture.
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