Fine Tuning: How IT Efforts Map to Shifting Business Needs

Posted by: Louis Kaczmarek, Strategic Policy Architect, Department of Information Technology

Here’s a resource management question that almost everyone can relate to: how exactly do large project teams adapt to shifting business requirements?
 
One answer can be found in a category of IT standards designed to help service organizations build their own adaptive best-practice IT governance frameworks; we like COBIT (Control Objects for Information and Related Technology).
 
COBIT's IT Governance components in particular outline how large organizations can institute repeatable processes that translate corporate strategy into IT projects that deliver the most value.
 
Change is constant, that’s a given but how do we ensure that priorities and dependent projects are considered as these reprioritizations take place? What is the most efficient way to manage this process? If it’s a new project, what needs to be delayed or sidetracked to start this new effort? One key component is having just the "right amount" of process structure so that priorities auto-correct without excessively slowing things down. It’s not a secret that finding the perfect way to do this takes a lot of work but once completed, the benefits are substantial.

Now that we are better at deciding what to build/buy we can more effectively execute using our other favorite set of IT industry standards, ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library). ITIL provides methods to ensure that what you set out to deliver is actually being built and, once you’ve built it, you are measuring how well it’s fulfilling the business driver that spawned it.

 

 

Comments

[Kevin Prefontaine]

Well written, Louis.

I especially appreciate your comment about "having just the "right amount" of process structure so that priorities auto-correct without excessively slowing things down."

The dynamic nature of our work really requires keeping that in mind.

Thanks for the info!

[Louis Kaczmarek]

Thanks for the feedback Kevin.
I found this UCLA article on nimble frameworks that may be of further interest:
http://www.itpb.ucla.edu/documents/2009/UCLAITPrinciplesExtractforITPB2009-02-06.pdf

[Bhagvan]

Hi again,I really like your aaorppch. How do you think it could work for CIOs in highly decentralized environments? E.g., one of the UCs (Berkeley?) has something 25-30 CIOs. Getting them even to coordinate or work together must be quite a challenge, let alone develop a strategic plan.Keep blogging!Cheers!Tim Flood