In an environment where there’s no shortage of fire drills, how do you determine which initiatives to prioritize and get everyone aligned?
It's easier to say, "You'd rather I work on this project than this project marketing. Okay. Let's talk about it." That's a lot different than something completely unexpected or unplanned for. And I don't necessarily even mean a security incident, but just something that's truly like, "You went and negotiated a partnership with who? And committed that we would do what?" That kind of stuff, we tracked very separately and constantly reported that back to the business so that we could clearly show, "Look, this is what we got done. We got a ton done. But there were plans to get these other things done, and we had the following four unplanned activities come in." So I think it was sort of getting to some level of metrics and data and where time was being spent and really being super transparent back to the rest of the organization. It didn't make this easy, but it changed the conversation. I'd just tell you, prioritization is different than unplanned work.
Yeah, we have a dashboard that shows what's shipped/delivered, what's coming and when/where the priorities are in terms of which company strategy and initiative does it support, if it's a P0 or a P1, who's the business sponsor... It's all there, and I think transparency is a huge piece.
And I find having that type of lens on what's going on just then serves so many other things, not just prioritization, but budgeting and/or hiring, how many heads should we be looking at, all those kinds of things. It certainly comes into play when somebody randomly says, "Hey, I'd like to get an overview of It." Suddenly, they're kind of like, "Hey, what do you guys do?" or "What have you been doing?" It's just so easy to be able to go, "Boom, bam. These are our critical services. These are the key projects." Then it's just kind of already there and ready. It's not like an exercise of going, "Oh, what would I want to share?"
I agree. I have that portfolio of work, and then I've got a whole IT scorecard. We've got a roll-up of the portfolio work, our operational scorecard, our people scorecard and our risk and governance scorecard.
This is part of where I think IT leaders play a big role in educating their business partners on what they do so they know how to better plan with you versus assuming you're just going to press a button that says “Done”
Well, the other point of that is it's not just done, move on, whatever it is. Now you have to resource it appropriately. You have to have an auditor come in every year, right? It's also this thinking about things not in terms of the initial, "Hey, we need to get this done," but then what the ongoing support of that is and that that is now part of the run rate, right?
It's the overlaying support. The longer-term aspects of that is where things start to basically get messed up.
2) What is the financial impact (positive/negative)?
3) What has to be done now vs later to resolve the situation?
4) What tech debt or other problem can be solved with it?