I scanned my Twitter feed on Monday May 16th and found a post by Todd Williams called The Progressive CIO’s Model for Project Success. After the last couple of months of having to put our IT Services PMO team in place to rescue “business” led projects, I am compelled to question approach proposed by Todd.
Todd makes the point that IT organizations have been unsuccessful in building systems that meet their customer’s needs and fail in schedule, usability and scope. This is a true statement as long as it is taken in context. These symptoms of project failure (note: I did not say IT failure!) represent organizations that have a low levels of IT and Project Governance in their IT departments and in the rest of their organization. Todd suggests that “progressive CIOs” need a new approach which is opposite to today’s practices.
I disagree … progressive CIOs need to recognize that IT touches all parts of the organization and that IT is one of the only places in a company where a broad enterprise view can be well understood and supported. Growing and maturing a PMO (project,program,portfolio mgmt) in IT is the first step. Then moving that mature PMO out of IT to serve the entire organization should be the mission of a progressive CIO.
Next Todd suggests that because a business unit can use MS Office tools like Excel and Access to build small departmental applications on time, schedule and budget that we in IT should consider handing this work back to the business and concentrate on infrastructure.
If the user is better at creating useful applications and IT builds better infrastructure, then create an organization to mimic that model.
This is a huge generalization and does not come close to the complexity and scope of what an enterprise system project can entail. I will have to write a different post about the massive technical debt that our organizations carry due to all these departmental systems built with Microsoft Office tools!
There is a reason for having specific departments in organizations and that is to deliver on their specialized services. Human Resources should deliver HR services. Finance should deliver financial services. IT should deliver IT services. PMOs should deliver project services. Creating redundant Project Management services and IT implementation services in multiple departments adds cost, complexity and creates silos within organizations. Another big problem is this approach causes issues in departments that end up relying on individual experts who get sick, go on vacation, on training or leave the company. This makes the department vulnerable to not being able to deliver on service commitments to the organization. The level of risk of not being able to deliver a key departmental service is not something any senior leader should accept for their organization.
