Question

Topic: Strategy

How To Achieve Long Term Business Value From It

Posted by vasudev_kamath on 9/5/2013 at 6:24 AM ET 125 Points
Enterprise Planning Collaboration to achieve maximum long term business value from IT projects

In our company we have a variety of business units and functions that have competing priorities all striving to support our corporate objectives. It is often challenging for the Enterprise IT function to plan for and meet all expectations, as necessary compromises have to be made to ensure we focus on delivering the best value across the group with the available resources.

We are looking for better ways of focusing and balancing our short term tactical planning (basically minor system enhancements or deployments, for example, adding an small attribute to an existing system) and long term strategic planning (For example: Converging process and systems on common platforms to achieve economies of scale, moving all sales funnel activity to SFDC(Sales Force dot com), putting ALL trouble ticket management on a single instance of Remedy) to improve business value output, and ensure transparency through the planning activities to keep all stakeholders aligned.

Today, each business function collate their IT requirements mostly in isolation from one another and asks IT to provide technical implementation costs and timeline ROM (rough order of magnitude) estimates all of their un-prioritized list of requirements. Typically the ask (demand) is 5 times the available resource (supply), and prioritization of tasks between functions/BUs(Business Unit/SSU(Shared Services Unit) is condensed into short period at the tail end of AOP(Annual Operating plan) phase, with all groups fighting to retain their projects at the sacrifice of others.

What are your suggestions for implementing a new and enhanced planning and decision making process for prioritizing IT projects to the right portfolios to achieve maximum long term business value from our IT projects.
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RESPONSES

  • Posted by Moriarty on 9/5/2013 at 7:46 AM Accepted
    When it comes to long term business value, look to your clients. Look to the ones that value what you do, and come back for more. Because they are the small proportion of all your clients that drive MOST of your profits. Please them, and you'll please your shareholders.

    I'd like to focus on one thing you've said: "It is often challenging for the Enterprise IT function to plan for and meet all expectations, as necessary compromises have to be made to ensure we focus on delivering the best value across the group with the available resources."

    What are your customers seeking of you? Why are they choosing you before anyone else? Focus on this one thing and make no compromises to anybody. That way you'll please your best clients - and your worst ones will demand things of other people and won't annoy you any longer. You can apply this at corporate level, group level, any level you like.

    Don't focus on pleasing everyone - focus on pleasing those who bring you the most profits. Do the things they like, and make sure that everything else you do supports this drive. You may find that there are areas of your business that make you a loss - yet in striving to please everyone, you forget to make a profit. Be warned that sometimes you can use these as a "loss leader" an entry level service that brings in future good clients. Take a good look where your relationship with clients has grown from.

    With all this information about your clients, you will find that most of the questions you've asked take on very different qualities. They'll all but arrange themselves and it'll make them way more powerful too.

  • Posted by vasudev_kamath on 9/5/2013 at 9:04 AM Author
    Hi Moriarty,

    Thanks for your valuable inputs and suggestions althought whatever you suggested is true in theory it does not fall true when it comes to delivering IT projects to end users or internal customers.

    What we are looking for here is is there a solution or a formula to work around in IT for such kind of scenarios or platforms that we have suggested to get a user buy in to get the work done in least amount of time with minimum change requests and not affecting the budget.

    Regards,
  • Posted by Moriarty on 9/5/2013 at 9:35 AM Member
    Sir, you are supplying a product. Someone needs it. That goes for any industry - IT, shipping or music. If you are looking for specifics, you need someone with direct marketing experience in the IT industry - but who still has clear vision of who it is you're dealing with. And why.

    I will warn you, they will be hard to come by and very, very expensive. Perhaps you should get in touch with Mr. Goodman who has experience handling people at corporate level? I work with small extremely dynamic businesses, the kind that can catch boundaries.
  • Posted by Jay Hamilton-Roth on 9/5/2013 at 11:10 AM Accepted
    IT must be involved in each of the business function planning meetings - both to understand the priorities and to share the IT needs. Everyone wants everything ASAP, but the planners need to understand the competing needs you're facing to better prioritize and/or increase IT resources.
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