Publikováno: 12. 6. 2022
Paul Wilkinson, a well-known, highly respected and acclaimed professional, decided to end his rich and very successful career and retire.
He summarized the main experiences, knowledge and impressions from his 40-year career and the subsequent process of leaving in an extensive blog, which he made available to us. Given its scope, we will publish it in 4 consecutive sections.
5 Key barriers
Here are the top 5 summarized barriers (Taken from the ‘State of the Union’) that are preventing transformation success, and the related ABC cards we see every year which is why we could have predicted these barriers. I have also added my post-it tips (10 Post-its to add to your backlog of ‘continual improvement’ actions).
- Barrier: ‘Not aligning the initiatives to strategic priorities and business outcomes
The Number 1 ABC card: matches exactly the above key finding in the State of the Union analysis.
The card: ‘IT has too little understanding of business impact and priority’ (Top scoring card 15 years in a row. Globally).
Other top scoring cards ‘Everything has the highest priority according to the business’ and
‘Neither partner makes an effort to understand the other’.
The fact that these cards consistently score In the top chosen cards and have done for 15 years was one predictor.
It is also a risk! Do you recognize these in YOUR organization? Are you gambling with your transformation?
VOCR
How else could we have predicted this particular failing?
I have asked more than 30.000 people doing ITIL ‘Put your hands up if you can tell me the definition of a service according to ITIL?’
Less than 5% of hands go up.
‘Do we need to know?’ I hear people asking. (‘We only needed to know that to pass the exam!’ – See point 3 below)
‘YES. We need to know!’ As Simon Sinek is always saying ‘Start with the ‘Why’’
The four key words in the definition of a Service are ‘Value’, ‘Outcomes’, ‘Costs’, ‘Risks’ (VOCR).
Measuring value
Indeed when I ask in workshops ‘why is your organization adopting X framework, What VOCR are they expecting to achieve?’ I very rarely get an answer, the most common answer is ‘I don’t know, I was told to come to this training to get the certificate’.
If we don’t know what VOCR the business needs and EXPECTS. Then – as a CEO said to me – ‘If you don’t know this, then how can you measure that you are getting what you didn’t know you wanted to get in the first place’?
We don’t! (As confirmed by findings in the inaugural report from the Value Stream management Consortium.Respondents when asked if they ‘measure the actual value realized by new features in their products?’ 72% replied “Rarely”, “Once”, or “Never”)
Governing IT
But it isn’t just an IT issue.
It is also a Business issue, the way in which the business ineffectively Governs IT.
I wrote two articles on ISACA site around this topic. (IT Governance for dummies part 1 & part 2). One finding in those articles was ‘…The CEO was shocked at the results. Only one-quarter of the managers surveyed could list three of the company’s five strategic priorities. Even worse, one-third of the leaders charged with implementing the company’s strategy could not list even one.’ These are the very same business managers who are insisting that ‘their’ features have the highest priority!
The ABC card ‘Neither partner makes an effort to understand the other’ shows the CIO and CEO sitting down with a marriage counsellor. The question is who needs to play this role? We See Product Owners emerging, Service Owners, BRM’s (Business Relationship manager) all claiming this space from their own SILOed perspective.
‘How is your organization fulfilling this role and ensuring that ‘value’ is understood through the ‘value chain’ or ‘value streams’ that need to deliver value?’
‘Are you effectively governing these explosive demands for scarce resources, and ensuring your transformation initiatives are aligned to strategic intentions?’
The great new word in the ITIL definition of a service, added in ITIL4 is a game changer word. It is ‘Co-creation’ – we cannot solve this long standing challenge without working together.
TIP1: Read the ‘State of the Union’ article and send the various links to people who NEED to be made aware.
TIP2: Get the CobIT goals cascade and go and explore key goals from different business units.
Identify priorities & conflicts
TIP3: Make Monday Go and meet a user day! Send everybody into the business for one day.
Explore VOCR! Have them come back and present to their team. Invite a customer to present to team.
- Barrier ‘The need for executive and middle management commitment and Leadership skills’
These are two regular top scoring ABC cards in workshops, and have been for the last 15 years:
‘No management commitment’ (You have my full commitment apart from time, money, effort and juts so long as I don’t have to be involved)
‘Walking the Talk’ (Don’t do as I DO, do as I SAY)
What is commitment?
Whenever we adopt the latest ‘Shiny New Thing’ (agile, DevOps, Lean, ITIL4, ‘Transformation’), it inevitably means changing attitudes, behaviors, culture.
This requires leadership. Managing Organizational Change, Managing Behavior Change.
We adopt the latest frameworks, send people to get the latest certificates and then HOPE that the frameworks will deliver value.
These frameworks and new ways of working can only work with management ‘commitment’. But we have been saying this for the last 40 years!
But what does that look like? What behaviors demonstrate ‘commitment’?
Managers always say, ‘But we are committed!’ Yet teams in our ABC of ICT global workshops often choose the card ‘No management commitment’. One problem is we have never defined the behaviors that demonstrate this.
What does walking the talk look like?
Leadership is even more important now in this age of digital disruption and ‘new ways of working’ – turning organizations on their heads so to speak ‘from project to product’, end-to-end ‘value stream management’, ‘self-empowered teams’, lots of new buzzword bingo terms.
The problem is this has never been done before! All of this ‘agile transformation’ stuff is new! Leaders are ALSO poorly equipped and struggling to bring about the ‘mindset’ and ‘culture change’, yet in every cycle this is a challenge and in every cycle managers rarely go onto the same training as their teams and rarely invest in leadership development initiatives, we throw leaders in at the deep end and expect them to manage the transition with ‘managerial skills’ rather than transformative leadership skills, and managers think they can’t show that they don’t ‘know’ the answers. Here is an article showing how one management team discovered what walking the talk needs to look like.
Part 2 ends with this paragraph. Part 3 continues with paragraph “In a workshop with 15 CIO’s”
Autor:: Jaroslav Rokyta