Helpful is unhelpful. Why our IT Departments are so random and unstructured?

Published by Steve O'Donnell on Friday 23rd May 2008, 00:13 | Related | Filed Under

Simultaneously the most powerful aspect of and the biggest problem with IT Systems are that they are flexible by design. They are so flexible that that many of our people want to show how smart they are by being helpful and adding value. Unfortunately, being helpful is one of these things that inevitably leads to unintended consequences. What do I mean? Lets look at a real life example (names omitted to protect the innocent):

I take a call from a customer who is desperate for us to complete a project delivery to enable him to hit a deadline. He tells me everything is just taking too long and the committed delivery date is at risk. Our customer couldn’t understand why my team seem to be struggling. I am really surprised as these guys do this stuff every day, there was nothing obviously special or different about this project or this customer. A couple of calls later and the project is back on track, and we have a happy customer again. However I was intrigued how we got so close to failure on something apparently so easy and decided to investigate.

Despite us delivering hundreds of these items every month, we had not properly turned them into a product. A product with limited and clearly defined options and parameters that we had tested and could support. We had chosen to be helpful and smart and offer our customers too many options to choose from and when they did choose options, we sometimes struggled to integrate them (as a minimum we had a large test suite to run to prove the solution). In this case we were the experts and we let our customers down by being too helpful.

I have said before that IT needs to be one of two things, either kill the competition by using IT as a competitive advantage and drive profits or if we can’t do that then be totally reliable and cheaper than the other guys.

To deliver the cost effective basics we need to work on a couple of simple themes, improved Right First Time (RFT) and reduced Cycle Time (CT) metrics. Ask Toyota about right first time and how costs tumble when you only do things once and remove rework, ask EasyJet and Southwest Airlines about reducing cycle time in turning around flights and how that drives out waste and improves competitiveness. Ask BA and BAA what damage was done by failing to deliver Heathrow Terminal 5 on time and how much unplanned shareholder funds were dissipated in delivering the second time around.

The really amazing thing is that IT as competitive advantage has the same rules, improve RFT and CT in IT delivery and you can get there so far ahead of the competition that you can blow them out of the water.

So how do we make improvements in Cycle Time and Right First Time, we apply the Rule of One. The Rule of One is simple (all good rules are) and states categorically that we choose to do things one way, that we choose to reduce complexity in everything we operate and everything we do. The Rule of One states that if we make things simple and standard we can invest in automation and templates and that simplicity simultaneously drives out mistakes (RFT) and cuts delivery time (CT).

The Rule of One hates helpfulness and loves standardization.

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Phil Sheehan 4 months ago 1 point
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Sounds so simple and is common sense but requires a significant change in thinking from the IT Dept to operate at this optimal level.
Questions like: Why have we done it this way for the last 10 years, how can we improve, do we even understand the impact on the client?
It comes back to the end to end process and ironing out any decision points so that we have a standard way that everyone understands.

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Steve O'Donnell 4 months ago 1 point
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Thanks for the comment Phil. At the risk of repeating myself (never stopped me before) letting Techies run IT is like letting the lunatics run the asylum. If we accept the base principle that IT only has business value if it kills the competition or gets cheap then there is no place for boys toys.

When we place customers at the center of everything we do, we build business value. Businesses that have customers willing to recommend them and their products grow SUSTAINABLY 125% faster than their competitors and are significantly more profitable.

Actually it is not hard to see and understand what good looks like, (as you said), the problem is sharing that vision and getting everyone on the same page. Once people start getting it though, change happens overnight. One day it is random and unstructured, then before you know it no one needs to ask for guidance anymore they understand the vision and act accordingly.

I have seen it happen and it is awesome. It happened at BT in the retail broadband operations space and we turned it around so fast that even the guys living it were speechless.

Steve

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