Bob Lambert

In a recent article at Information Management, Maria Villar and Theresa Kushner offer 4 Steps to Create an Effective IT and Business Partnership, a very useful list of ways to ensure “strong partnership between IT and business”.  To the authors this partnership “is the most important, and often overlooked, component to successfully managing critical business data. Undertaking business intelligence, data quality or an enterprise data management [program] without full cooperation and collaboration between IT and the business is a formula for frustration.”  The authors suggest these four steps: “know your partner, develop a relationship, define roles and responsibilities, and establish open, regular communication channels.”  I recommend reading this article because IT folks (like me) seem tempted to neglect the habits that enable building a solid relationship with business people.

That said, it seems to me that there’s something missing.  Consider one BI manager I know who has fractious relations with his business customers.  I won’t go into detail, but trust me, relations have been rocky, and reviews from key business players poor.  What this person does extremely well is to build rock-solid, reliable systems, deliver on time, meet business needs, and ensure that the solution meets regulatory and audit concerns.  This BI group is essentially unchanged after many years, enduring even the recent recession in a devastated industry segment, and outlasting many of its critics.

To me, building a good relationships is important, but execution is the sine qua non of IT/business alignment.  Think about it.  Say you hire a really nice contractor to fix a leaky roof.  However personable he is, you won’t hire him to replace your windows if the roof still leaks after you’ve paid the bill.

My view: if you want to do it right adopt Villar’s and Kushner’s excellent suggestions but the fundamentals remain the same:

1. Either (a) present a robust business case that all accept, or (b) pay attention to what you’ve been asked to do
2. Deliver what was requested/promised in 1
3. When things change go to 1

“When you are in the middle of a story it isn’t a story at all, but only a confusion; a dark roaring, a blindness, a wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood; like a house in a whirlwind, or else a boat crushed by the icebergs or swept over the rapids, and all aboard powerless to stop it.  It is only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story at all.  When you are telling it, to yourself or to someone else.” – from Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood

Whatever project management approach a team uses, sometimes everything falls apart, commonly due to work piling up at the end, but sometimes due to a key individual leaving, or a pivotal assumption no longer holding true, or many other reasons.  When that happens, the project can become like a whack-a-mole game, with leads working from issue to issue as they pop up faster and faster.

I served as one of many workstream PMs on one very large project where this didn’t happen.  Out of the seeming chaos the multi-million dollar IT project came in on time.  Here’s my view of what we did to succeed:

• Had very clear interim milestones that were generally known and served as reference points for discussion.  I’d characterize them as a milestone per workstream per month.
• Held seemingly interminable weekly risk/issue discussions.  These were open, no holds barred reviews of anything at all that could endanger achieving milestones.  Often risk/issue discussions are polite exercises in avoiding the fact that the emperor has no clothes, with team members carefully avoiding forbidden topics.  On this project everything was open for discussion.
• The program manager excelled at visibly not sweating the small stuff, directing workstream leadership to handle their localized risks and issues themselves, and focusing program energy only on those he judged to have overall impact.
• Each of the many workstreams had its own project schedule; the program insisted on detail where it mattered but not where the detail was irrelevant.  For example, there was a minutely detailed cutover plan for production migration.

Many of us were surprised when the chaos all came together on time with surprisingly few glitches. I attribute this program’s success to the program manager’s unflappable focus on milestones, encouragement of unfettered group risk/issue analysis, and ability to parse program from project concerns.