What are the common mistakes IT executives make when it comes to business alignment?

Many prioritize, focussed on technology first. Rather than business enablement.

Getting stakeholder alignment before kicking off your initiatives is critical; having their alignment throughout the journey is what will make them successful. The most common mistake IT executives make is not bringing the business stakeholders along with them on that journey through each step of this process. The CPQ journey was my first project and we made sure our business stakeholders were alongside us: They were on board and we worked closely on the requirements. But when we defined our goal in terms of what we would accomplish after the project went live, there was a discrepancy between what the business expected and what we were trying to deliver for executives to make us ready for the IPO Journey. 

The goal for us and our executives was to put CPQ in place; we wanted to standardize the systems so they would run the way any public company would run them and then book the deals. But our Deal Desk (DD) teams expected all of their current processes would be automated after this project, which is a little different than what we were aiming for. So we ran into some challenges after go-live with the revenue operations team. We automated a significant part of the DD teams’ process, but they also had to make some adjustments to align with industry standards. That part was missed; even though we were 70% aligned, that remaining 30% was a big miss. When we went live, they were panicking and saying, "CPQ is not working. I don’t think this is going to help us. This is only going to slow down our deal processing." We took their feedback in a positive way and decided to help onboard them to this new CPQ process by hand holding them through resolving their challenges.

For one month we had to go into hypercare mode by hiring more resources. I had to bring in a staff augmentation team, do a lot more hand holding in the deal processing, and fix a lot of issues. In one quarter’s time, their confidence level went up; I sat with them and explained that we were trying to roll out these standard processes, and educated them about the benefits they will get with this new process. But it was important to work with them and help them understand that it was a change they had to make because we are now operating as a public company. That taught me a key lesson: when we are embarking on a project, we have to first define a goal and then make sure the business stakeholders clearly understand the outcome in detail and what will come out of it when we go live with this project, which will in turn help us on this IPO journey.

We had to get everything done quickly because we were preparing to IPO, so we took all the lessons we learnt from CPQ projects and quickly got alignment between all the business stakeholders on the projects that we did over the next four to five months, in which we were 100% successful. The finance and sales teams knew what was coming out of those, so there were no surprises. Quickly incorporating the lessons we learn about what we can do on the technology side to make the stakeholders happy will take IT leaders and their teams a long way.