The most common problem found in every IT organization is the perceived imbalance between how many people are available to do all the work that other areas of the company would like to have right now. The reasons why this problem exists in the first place has its roots in the decision of executive management to approve projects without approving the required headcount to complete the projects. As one VP told us, “it (the disconnect between dollars and people) avoids the politics of having to say ‘no’. IT ultimately gets the really important stuff done and the rest essentially gets a pocket veto”. The second reason lies in all of the years where CIOs were asked to run IT as a shared service center with a strong emphasis on service. To business users, this has meant if they asked for something they should be able to have it.
In both of these workshops, we focus on the politics of the situation as much as on the straightforward steps to solving the problem. We outline what should be happening and then map the political realities to the goal and spend the end of the workshop focusing on what realistically can happen given the maturity of the organization.
For IT organizations
- MOVING BEYOND IT DEMAND MANAGEMENT TO EFFECTIVE STRATEGY EXECUTION
This is a specialized workshop designed to break the supply and demand logjam that exists in most IT organizations by switching to Adaptive Portfolio Investment Management (APIM). Many organizations have expressed the concern that they are “too immature” to do portfolio management effectively. The decision to replace the notion of demand (where all demand is good) with a value-based portfolio (where only the highest value projects are done) is a choice that doesn’t require process maturity. We’ll show you how to lead your entire organization along the path of change with a timeline that will be uniquely designed for your organization.
The audience for this is the CIO and direct reports
See course description - Supply Management for IT/Resource Capacity Planning – Based on experience, many IT organizations need as much help on the resource supply side as they do on the demand side. Having supported hundreds of IT organizations over the years we’ve seen most of what goes wrong and have advice that we can tailor to get the supply side in sync with the demand side. This workshop will actually look at such issue as executing strategy in an agile environment and adopting a product mindset to better manage day to day operations.
The audience for this is the CIO and direct reports.