How have you modified your strategic planning cycles to account for potential disruption while still maintaining progress on foundational IT initiatives?
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Brad, I agree completely. I am currently in year three of delivering such an initiative, so let’s connect and I can share our experiences. The biggest change for us has been moving away from traditional IT leadership, where we would create three- to five-year roadmaps with a clear sense of direction. With technology evolving rapidly, we have learned that we must be more flexible and nimble to respond to the strategic needs of the organization.<br><br>What has worked well for us is ensuring full alignment, with IT as one leg of the stool supporting corporate strategy. Rather than IT having an independent roadmap, we now align with the overall corporate strategy. This could mean supporting M&A activity, driving organic growth, or responding to changing business or economic needs. This alignment has been extremely beneficial, as it transforms IT from selling its needs to the business into being a collaborative partner. Brad, I fully acknowledge where you are in the process. The conversation needs to be about enabling modernization while maintaining the flexibility to address additional needs as they arise. We’re almost at the finish line, and I’ll be happy to share how it turns out.
Our approach centers on prioritization across all our teams. As head of the IT PMO, this is integral to our function. The process involves business justification and ROI, ultimately coming down to prioritization and communication. While our teams may identify certain initiatives as highly important, the business may sometimes agree and sometimes disagree on the path forward. Therefore, communication and internal prioritization remain my primary focus in navigating these decisions.
We are having similar conversations within our organization. Our main challenge has been working through portfolio planning and priorities, specifically getting executive leaders to reach consensus on corporate priorities. We rolled out SAFe and aligned all the Agile Release Trains to business objectives but lacked strong program management and leadership-level agreement. We are still working to ensure that, for example, if we can only launch a certain number of new products per year, all tower leads agree on where those efforts should be concentrated. Concurrently, we are undertaking a significant technology modernization initiative, which requires ongoing discussions with our business partners.
Our business partners are now requesting a three-year period to allow us to advance the technology so we can deliver faster in the future. It is a challenging trade-off—we have committed to it and now must execute, setting ambitious targets for what we need to achieve by the end of this period.