Welcome to "The CIO Coach"

Welcome to “The CIO Coach.”  I hope to provide snack-sized advice tidbits to CIOs based on my experience coaching many, many CIOs over many, many years.  The CIOs with whom I’ve worked are partially to thank (or blame) for this blog because they told me I was helpful.  Their encouragement evolved into this idea to try helping more CIOs than the ones I directly meet.  So, hopefully this actually is helpful…and hopefully I remember to keep it snack-sized.    

I’ve seen many companies and/or CIOs that want IT to provide competitive business advantage but for various reasons aren’t successful making that happen.  Their struggles mirror those of many organizations since the statistic is that around 75% of IT projects fail, dramatically exceed budget, or severely slip in schedule.  Why is that? 

I’ve not once found a company with a “hire stupid people” policy.  In fact, the clients I’ve worked with have extremely bright, talented and accomplished staff.  So, why the struggles?

I’ve found that project execution success factors can be encapsulated in three categories:

Context – the “why”

Content – the “what”

Collaboration – the “who,” “when,” “where,” and “how”

Each of those can fill multiple blog articles themselves but in the interest of providing substantive snack-sized content, let me elaborate a little on them now.

Having proper context involves setting solid strategy aligned with stakeholders’ needs which requires aligning business executives with the IT leadership team.  As IT becomes a business competitive differentiator, then IT projects become business projects in need of business executive sponsorship, business leader involvement, business risk identification, business case development, setting business objectives, and establishing realistic project timelines.  Bottom line is: make sure you’re working on the most impacting projects for the business by assessing them like business projects – because that’s what they are.

Having proper content involves gathering business requirements and aligning them with technology solutions that are effectively deployed.  This calls for an effective requirements gathering process.  Trade-offs need to be weighed before translating functional and non-functional requirements into data, solution, security, and technology architectures.  Sub-optimal architectures often lead to sub-optimal solution design, configuration, integration, testing, migration, roll-out and ultimately business impact.  So, don’t scrimp on the architecture steps.

Having proper collaboration involves skills, metrics, project management, teaming and risk management.  When IT projects are business projects, the IT project management office should be completely integrated with the enterprise project management office and it should be staffed with skilled project managers.   Regular project health assessments should occur based upon analyzing facts and projected outcomes.  Teaming behaviors need to be encouraged via having a common vision and common processes as well as metrics and incentives leading toward achieving common business goals.

So, if you have the desire and business support to make IT a competitive differentiator but are struggling to make that happen, maybe it’s time to examine how healthy the overall enterprise’s environment is for project execution.