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IT Governance and the SDLC – Part 2: Upfront Requirements Elicitation

When discussing investment opportunities at governance meetings, senior managers invariably ask: “How much will the project cost us?” In the early phases of opportunity talks many IT leaders respond with the “SWAG” (Scientific Widely Aimed Guess) based on experiential supposition. Later, after governance approves a deeper investigation into the cost, IT leadership returns to governance with a slightly more predictable estimate known as a ROM or Rough Order of Magnitude, based on nothing more than executive level discussions, the research they’ve done from talking to vendors and presuming what resources will be needed. They don’t even have enough information at this point to distribute a formal Request for Information (RFI). Returning to governance, they supply a statement of work documenting what they believe is required, a Return on Investment (ROI) calculation based on the ROM, resource plan and projected schedule. If all goes well, governance is convinced of the projected derived business value and ROI and approves the project—all based on conjecture.

Nobody up to this point has gathered any of the actual requirements from the business users. The discussions thus far have all been very high level. This is highly ineffective IT Governance in action. You may also say this is IT Governance inaction. Ineffectual governance processes often lead down the path of conducting requirements elicitation and analysis early in the project life cycle but only after the project is approved and funded. This is always a bad decision and one that leads to more problems for IT leadership down the line.

When Business Analysts start the requirements elicitation process after the project approval and kick-off, it doesn’t take too long to discover the original investment estimates were way too low. Now that the true business requirements are known, the project team realizes the scope to deliver the necessary functionality to the business is much broader than they first thought. As the project proceeds several months down the road, IT leadership goes back to governance and asks for more money to complete what they started and explain why the original timeline has to be extended. Governance either reluctantly responds to the increase in funding or trashes the project altogether. Whatever the case, IT leadership loses credibility with senior management.

Do you think this scenario is farfetched? It’s not. I’ve worked in organizations that have followed this exact process and have witnessed it time and time again. Senior leadership’s loss of trust and credibility in the IT organization is always the result. It is a difficult if not nearly impossible obstacle to overcome. Trust and credibility can be regained over time, but it takes a lot more than continuing with the same processes that got you into trouble in the first place. It often requires replacing the senior IT staff and embarking upon a long journey of IT business process transformation.

The truth is that questions surrounding IT investment and prioritization cannot be fully answered until at least one practice area of the SDLC^[1] is executed and at least partially concluded. That area is performing the processes and practices governing requirements elicitation and analysis. This may also be known as a feasibility study. The question that now comes into play is “How deeply must I capture the requirements at this phase?”

The answer is variable depending on the project, but as a general rule of thumb, if we apply the Pareto principle to investment value and requirements, the resulting theorem says, “80% of the business value of an investment comes from 20% of the requirements.” This tells us that we don’t have to capture all of the requirements in the initial pass. We only need to capture the major requirements in a quantity sufficient to extrapolate a fairly accurate resource allocation and cost projection. A common practice is to pad IT project cost estimates with an additional 25% contingency anyway. By executing the requirements elicitation upfront, before project approval, you’ll provide much more accurate cost estimates, lower your contingency padding and reduce the chance of project overruns.

^[1]System Development Life Cycle.

<= IT Governance and the SDLC – Part 1

IT Governance and the SDLC – Part 1

By Victor M Font Jr 2 Comments

What has the SDLC got to do with IT Governance?

It has long been the tradition of board-level executives to defer all key IT decisions to the company’s IT professionals. The truth is that many board-level executives don’t understand IT well enough to manage IT effectively; and IT professionals don’t understand business initiatives well enough to decide how to invest in them. Deferring key decisions to the IT staff often leads to disconnects between the board’s strategic goals and real business initiatives and the investments IT makes. It leads to frustration at all levels.

IT governance is a business-driven function which focuses on the investment and prioritization of IT systems, their performance, risk management and enhancing a company’s competitiveness. It’s about ensuring IT investments harmonize with the enterprise’s strategic priorities. It’s about IT demonstrating to senior leadership they are receiving acceptable value in return for making IT investments.

In June of 2005, I attended a summer session on IT Governance and Leadership at the MIT Sloan School of Management Center for Information Systems Research (CISR) in Cambridge Massachusetts. The course was facilitated by Peter Weill and Jeanne W. Ross. Peter is the director of CISR and Jeanne is a Principal Research Scientist. Together they authored the book IT Governance published in 2000 by Harvard Business School Press. The book is about How Top Performers Manage IT Decision Rights for Superior Results. It is written for “concerned officers of the enterprise (CEO, CFO, COO, and other senior managers) looking for practical guidelines to improve their returns from IT investments.”

According to Weill and Ross:

Top-performing enterprises succeed where others fail by implementing effective IT governance to support their strategies. For example, firms with above-average IT governance following a specific strategy (for example, customer intimacy) had more than 20 percent higher profits than firms with poor governance following the same strategy.

All companies have some sort of IT governance. Effective IT governance includes well defined and documented processes for work uptake, decision making, budgeting and estimating resources, approvals, IT value realization, project reporting and change management. Many IT governance committees are comprised of the senior most leaders from all strategic areas of the business, not just IT leaders. With a finite enterprise budget, there is competition for capital project dollars. There must be a governance process in place to assure that the right projects are getting the right amount of investment at the right time to improve bottom line profitability and shareholder value.

Weill and Ross assert that effective IT governance answers three questions:

What decisions must be made?
Who should make these decisions?
How will we make and monitor these decisions?

To further explain the first question, they say, “Every enterprise must address five interrelated IT decisions: IT principles, IT architecture, IT infrastructure, business application needs, and IT investment and prioritization.”

The SDLC figures prominently in executing the answers to all of the interrelated decisions above with the lone exception of IT principles. IT principles are subordinate to corporate principles established at the enterprise level. They support or enable strategic company business goals, guide the development and implementation of the SDLC and steer the decision making process in the other four areas. We’ll explore the linkage between IT Governance and the SDLC further in my next post.

IT Governance and the SDLC – Part 2: Upfront Requirements Elicitation =>

Taking AIM at Organizational Change Management—Part 2: Cultural Fit

By Victor M Font Jr Leave a Comment

To fully realize a change management strategy, make sure the change fits your culture. You’ll also need detailed reinforcement and communication plans. Cultural fit is as individual as companies themselves. Every organization has its own variety of cultures and sub-cultures. Most businesses establish a target company-wide culture through their mission statement, vision, values and leader behaviors. Senior management demonstrates the cultural norms as they interpret these tenets. How these creeds flow down and become the organization’s cultural norms may differ from group to group within a company just as strategic goals start at the top and evolve to fit each group’s contribution to the overall strategy. There is no one-size fits all approach to cultural fit. There are tactics however that can guide your moves.

First, define the cultural dimensions of each group impacted by your change. For the SDLC, this is your entire IT organization, senior management and your business users and customers. The SDLC represents a broad sweeping change. It is important to first focus on the “low hanging fruit.” Exploit the aspects of the change that produce the highest yield and lowest risk. Take advantage of any opportunity to lead with results rather than rhetoric. Altogether avoid or reduce the initiatives that are more about image and not reality.

Each of your target groups need to have sponsors who are capable of identifying the cultural characteristics that support the change as well as the values, behaviors and “unwritten rules” that resist the change. Positively reinforce and emphasize the behaviors that support the change. Provide high visibility rewards and recognition for attaining the desired state.

Regardless of how effective your positive reinforcement is, you will face cultural resistance. Someone once asked me, “Why is it necessary to have a company-wide SDLC? We all do things now that are effective for us, why change?” This individual was a member of one of the working teams building and vetting the SDLC processes. His question caught me off guard. He didn’t understand the big picture even though he was serving as a change agent and involved with the very construction of the SDLC. As I thought things through, I realized this question is a direct result of my failure to effectively communicate the vision to the change agents.

For each major source of cultural resistance, you need to discover the answers to these three questions:

What are the values, behaviors and “unwritten rules” that are motivating the resistance?
What is it about the culture that reinforces the “unwritten rules?”
What is it about our system that rewards the “bad” behaviors?

Armed with this intelligence, you can then work to define and implement specific changes that reduce or eliminate the cultural dimensions that reinforce change adversity and execute those that reward the new behaviors. Develop a positive reinforcement plan that is stronger than the motivation to keep the status quo. It requires significantly more sponsorship attention, discipline and stamina to inspire a group to move from “discomfort and resistance” to “opportunity and need.” The sponsors must “walk the talk” and visibly display the new behaviors even if they are individually painful.

Consider offering financial rewards as part of your positive reinforcement plan such as a salary increase, bonus, prize or perk for demonstrating the new behaviors. Apply the positive rewards immediately after observing the performance of the new behaviors. Celebrate early successes and wins. Do whatever you can to make it more difficult to continue to operate in the old state.

Build an effective communication plan that explains the objectives and rationale, the time frame and the cost of not changing. Implement the communication plan early and communicate often. Send out frequent progress updates. Focus the organization’s attention forward and generate an excitement about the new changes to the SDLC. Commission surveys or walk around the floor to learn if people understand the message. Are they getting it? Keep your communications credible, comprehensive and clear.

We’ve only touched upon a few aspects of organizational change management. There are a lot of moving parts to any organizational change, but especially so when rolling out a SDLC. An organizational change management strategy is much broader than the few examples I’ve presented here, but for a SDLC implementation, it is absolutely essential.

<= Taking AIM at Organizational Change Management – Part 1

Taking AIM at Organizational Change Management – Part 1

By Victor M Font Jr 1 Comment

I am a student of the AIM Methodology of organizational change management. AIM is an acronym for the Accelerated Implementation Methodology, a proprietary approach developed and perfected by Implementation Management Associates, Inc. (http://www.imaworldwide.com). Pfizer included me in a pilot AIM training program after their Learning and Organizational Development group decided to deploy the methodology to the Research and Development Division. I became a vocal advocate and champion of the process, even sending one of my direct reports to school to become an instructor.

Don’t confuse this AIM with the other popular AIM, Oracle’s Application Implementation Methodology. Oracle’s AIM is essentially a legacy SDLC for the Oracle applications platform. The two AIMs couldn’t be more different. Also, don’t confuse organizational change management with project change management. Change management in a project context is very different from organizational change management. Project change management is a process by which changes to projects are formally introduced, vetted, approved, tabled or denied. An organizational change management method is not typically part of a SDLC or project management method although elements of organizational change management, such as communications plans, may be.

Organizational change management is about people’s behavior. Organizations are comprised of people and their behaviors formulate the accomplishments of the organization. Organizational change management explores behaviors to achieve greater results in performance which in turn drive bottom line value.

Just as IT system development methods share commonalities, so do change management methods. Regardless of the method you choose to follow, the core fundamentals of organizational change management are the same and must be observed if you want to achieve success.

Change management starts at the very top of the organizational structure. For IT, this starts with the CIO or CTO as he or she defines the strategic vision and goals. The CIO’s goals are aligned with the overall strategic goals of the organization as determined by the Board of Directors and the CEO with his/her senior staff. To successfully deploy an organizational change such as implementing a SDLC, it must be a strategic goal of the senior most leaders. As strategic goals cascade throughout the organization, it creates alignment with a clear and common language and understanding for the change.

Once goals are defined and distributed, assessing the organization’s readiness for change is the next step. How do you do that? Surveys are a good method. The goal of an organizational readiness survey is to uncover the barriers that exist within your organization’s climate, both current and historical. Barriers that may have impeded the progress of previous changes must be discussed to capture lessons learned. You’ll also want to uncover implementation strengths. What has gone right in the past that we can do again?

Identifying the approach you’ll take to implementing change follows the readiness assessment. You really only have two choices here. You can force your hand and generate compliance using the hammer approach or you can choose to build commitment and buy-in by managing the transition. On the surface, you may think the hammer approach is a little heavy handed and it may not be a good fit with your personal values. There are reasons where the hammer approach is the right approach. What if the change is due to regulatory, HR or safety compliance?

The second approach, transition management, requires more time to adapt a change. The organization becomes increasingly focused and the additional time allows for course correction along the way before implementation. You’ll gain greater buy-in, produce less waste and achieve greater precision in your implementations. Transition management is particularly effective when implementing changes in customer service, quality assurance and developmental paradigms such as the SDLC.

Organizational change will not happen efficiently without the right sponsorship. We’ve already talked about strategic goals cascading from the top down. Sponsorship is making certain the right people are doing the right things at the right times to demonstrate their commitment and ownership of the change. You’ll need an Executive Sponsor who has sufficient authority to authorize the change and commit the resources to make it happen. Then you’ll need Champions who can influence the organization’s commitments levels and Change Agents who’ll plan and execute the implementation.

Tomorrow, we’ll take a look deeper look at one of the most significant key success metrics of organizational change management: cultural fit.

Taking AIM at Organizational Change Management – Part 2 =>

Changed Your Mind?

I’m so sorry you changed your mind about buying the book. Did you know that if you had purchased this book today, you would be entitled to a free download of the companion reference app for the Android platform when it is released in early 2011. Well, that’s neither here nor there for now, but I do hope you’ll come back and visit and maybe even change your mind about owning this masterful collection of best practices for system development in the 21st century.

Before you leave, maybe you’ll reconsider. I’ve placed a buy now button here for your convenience if you do:

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Search Results for:

IT Governance and the SDLC – Part 2: Upfront Requirements Elicitation

IT Governance and the SDLC – Part 1

Taking AIM at Organizational Change Management—Part 2: Cultural Fit

Taking AIM at Organizational Change Management – Part 1

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