In one of my recent engagements, the customer, a leading Telco provider was going through a lot of change initiatives, many of them relating to enforcement of the local telecom regulator directions. Out of that their IT department had a new vision and mission to support the business:
- Be the leading partner in providing Digital Solutions and Services to enable customers to excel in the digital economy
- Develop, deliver, productize and operate Modern IT solutions that positions the company as leading digital technology adopter and offer Unified Digital Experience to our customers.
It was clear that in order to achieve the above the IT department needed to support an unparalleled customer experience, facilitate transparent and efficient inter and intra company communication and align with and contribute to the organization’s strategic goals and business objectives
It had become also clear to Business Insights that to achieve these objectives the IT organisation must achieve operational excellence across in all areas of involvement
The IT department needed to be assessed if it is ready to accommodate these changes, if it has the right skillset, mindset and organisational structure. It also needed to be assessed if it provides value to its clients, internal or external.
Our initial hypothesis had been that the vision of IT from senior management was not always cascaded down the organisation, and where it was not always reflected the strategic vision. Complementarily, risks and issues escalation and problem-solving were not happen systematically and where they were these processes were not always aligned to the objectives being blocked by various problems.
As part of the engagement Business Insights was tasked to give recommendations around the future organisational structure of the IT department, its new process architecture as well as build a roadmap for solving many of the HR issues of the department.
Adding organizational layers or sub-functions is seldom justified…
The IT department aimed to be customer centric hence the temptation to adopt structural solutions such as adding an extra layer of management or setting up a new group to act as a bridge between separate functions was prominent. What we did advise the customer was that too often, though, such solutions have the opposite effect from that intended. Instead of improving communication and transparency, they increase the number of interactions needed to make decisions, create barriers between different groups, cause role confusion, and move products and employees further away from customers.
We were able to convince the customer that a more productive approach was to eliminate duplication by determining the “best” location for a particular piece of work. Better collaboration could be achieved not through structural solutions that add needless complexity, but by changing people’s behaviour and by extension the company culture going forward. That meant defining detailed ways of working (how and when groups need to interact, how to escalate etc.), defining individuals’ roles and responsibilities, clarifying decision rights, and identifying where handovers occur and who should be involved.
One of the main initiatives was to create the role of IT business liaison. This is a job role that represents IT (information technology) to the business. The IT business liaison is primarily responsible for the implementation of new technology solutions that improve business efficiency while meeting corporate business goals. Therefore, liaisons should understand business strategy identify technologies that will improve and enhance an organization’s business goals.
It was very tempting – and originally very strongly expressed by the department leadership – to create this role and position it within the IT strategy domain, however the IT business liaison is a support role and this person is often the single point of contact between an organization’s IT and business teams.
Typically an IT business liaison is to improve communication and collaboration between the IT department and its business divisions but also to ensure all departments are aligned to meet overall business goals, hence the recommendation was to place this as an independent team in parallel to the IT delivery teams.
Cross-functional roles means “empathetic” people
Jobs that that are positioned on intersections involve high degrees of interdependency. Consider the business liaison. Delivering the best solution/service for a business unit involves participating in the development process and influencing (not necessarily decision-making) so that the service is modified to the business unit needs.
IT needed to create such roles and define the technical and “soft” skills that equip people to do them well, such as the ability to empathize with different functions or roles, the ability to balance between decision making speed and consultation, and the assertiveness to resolve conflicting priorities without surpassing formal authority. The need was to look for individuals who had the drive to get things done outside official roles and across organizational boundaries, and who were adept at building trust, defusing conflict, giving constructive feedback, and establishing common ground between disparate groups.
It all ended up to having a lean and agile department and that required continuous effort…
We did advise the customer that in many cases, restructuring programs seem to work initially but then go into reverse cause old ways of working return. To remove that danger, we needed to gain momentum by sustaining accountability both during and after the restructuring. For instance to shorten time to market, we needed to focus performance metrics on speed rather than risk avoidance and use internal and external benchmarks to define realistic goals and deadlines.
Using real-time tracking tools that show at a glance the impact achieved was instrumental to help to keep people motivated about the progress their efforts were achieving. To emphasize accountability, leaders integrated broad strategic goals into processes and linked them to individual employees’ targets.
It was a top down and bottom up approach, utilising our 3 lenses approach as well as the “golden thread” methodology… and it was the right recipe for success.