Archive for February, 2010

Sounds like a pretty straightforward question and one that many people and companies would answer “yes” or “of course” to since technology is so pervasive in all aspects of our business and personal lives.  But, this term is less subjective than you might think in terms of business and has been given some specific attributes that help define whether a company is “IT Savvy” or not.

The business definition of the term is fully defined and explained in the book IT Savvy: What Top Executives Must Know to Go from Pain to Gain by Peter Weill and Jeanne W. Ross. As Weill and Ross explain in the book, being “IT Savvy refers to the planned, ongoing use of a set of interlocking business practices and competencies that  collectively derive superior value from IT investments”.

For most hard core technologists this definition will seem a little too vague and consultant-ese to really apply to the day to day wok in IT but Weill and Ross go into much more detail on their definition and provide a practical framework in which to think about IT and its support of a business.

Weill and Ross go on to further highlight five characteristics of an “IT Savvy” company:

1. IT for Internal and External Communication – Intensity of electronic communications media such as e-mail, intranets, and wireless devices for internal and external communications and work practices.
2. Internet Use - Internet based architectures (i.e. open) for key functions like sales force management, employee performance measurements, training and post-sales customer support.
3. Digital Transactions – High percentage of digitized transaction executed with both suppliers and customers.
4. Company-wide IT Skills - Technical and business skills of IT people, IT skills of business people and ability to hire skilled IT people.
5. Management Involvement – The degree of senior management commitment to IT projects and the degree of business unit involvement in IT decisions.

Weill and Ross also layout some well defined categories of IT investments and conclude that the most IT Savvy companies are investing more in the Strategic and Informational areas of IT than their competition.

1. Strategic - used to gain competitive advantage by supporting entry into new markets or by helping to develop new products services or business processes.
2. Informational - provide information for purposes such as accounting, reporting, compliance, communication, or analysis
3. Transactional – investments that are primarily used to cut costs or increase the throughput for the same cost.
4. Infrastructure - shared IT service s used by multiple applications (servers, networks, laptops, customer databases,)

Considering these high-level attributes would you consider your organization IT savvy?

Big failures can result from the best intentions. The IT product selection process is a good example. Some of the biggest mistakes in the growth of a company’s technology infrastructure occur during inadequate solution selection processes, including those that use Requests for Proposal (RFP) and competitive bidding.

We just published a major white paper – “Avoiding the Product Selection Quagmire” – that details what can go wrong with IT product selection efforts. It also describes what should be done to overcome risks and run a top-notch RFP or competitive bidding project.

In small to mid-sized companies, IT teams often get caught off guard by the unanticipated demands of the product selection process. Although competitive bidding is a well-known best practice, many organizations lack the practical experience or the tools to execute a selection process effectively. Companies who find themselves “reinventing the wheel” with each product selection project will likely encounter any of a number of risks:

• A lack of expertise and experience in the full competitive bidding and product selection process.
• Failure to set up product selection as a formal project.
• Inadequate handling of requirements.
• A lack of balance between business and technical emphasis.

When these pitfalls occur, the company could end up making a buying decision for a solution that won’t be adopted, isn’t aligned with the real requirements, or costs much more than a better solution.

Here are the white paper’s key recommendations:

1. Set up each product selection effort as a formal project.
2. Augment your internal expertise as needed: Partner early on with a provider of talent with experience conducting product selection projects.
3. Engage an internal or external business analyst to gather and document requirements.
4. Leverage existing tools and methodology to execute the selection project.
5. Foster a good partnership between business and IT throughout the project.
6. Choose the appropriate type of competitive bidding request, one that best suits the project objectives.
7. Adopt a component-based, reusable RFP format and structure.
8. Adopt a standard, reusable timeline for the bidding and selection process.
9. Conduct the selection using a complete decision package.
10. Prepare early for the transition to implementation.

The paper explains each of these recommendations in detail, giving IT practitioners a practical set of steps for reducing product selection risk and raising IT’s profile as a key contributor to business success through quality technology purchases.

The white paper “Avoiding the Product Selection Quagmire” is available free on our Resources page to all registered visitors to our site. Registration is free and gives you access to all of our other free white papers, articles, templates, and work samples.

At the end of a project, after the team is done with the long hours and occasionally short tempers, it’s a challenge to focus on that last project phase: Closing. Team members start to focus on other activities, and it’s often left up to the project manager to play the final act as a solo, archiving the project materials and tying up loose administrivia.

But project closure provides one of the best opportunities for improving your overall project execution. It’s the time when completed objectives can be compared to original intentions, when a team can scrutinize its methods and processes to determine what worked and what didn’t. The team activities of project closure – the “lessons learned” meeting, the closing report, etc. – provide one of the only opportunities for retrospection amid the busy operation of a full portfolio.

One of the best ways to learn about the effectiveness of a project’s management is to evaluate the project through a survey of team members and stakeholders. A written survey helps guide reflection, spark recollection, and focus on key points of execution that require the most vigilance in maintaining project excellence. Surveys collected over a number of projects provide valuable historical insight into the effectiveness of particular methods, and help guide decisions about adapting your PM methods to your organization’s unique circumstances.

In our Resources section on this site, we’ve posted an example of our IT Evolution project evaluation survey form for our registered visitors. It’s built from a number of sources combined with themes from our own experience. Feel free to download and use the survey for your own projects, and start building a history of your successes and improvements.

(If you haven’t registered yet, you can sign up using the “Registration” link on the upper left of the Resources page.)

You most likely know that you can sort items in Outlook by clicking the column title in the message pane. A second click of the same column toggles between ascending and descending sorts.

What you may not be aware of is that Outlook isn’t limited to single column sorting. To create a secondary sort, first create the primary sort by clicking the header of the principal column. Then, hold down the [Shift] key and click the header in the column that will be the secondary sort criteria. This can be used to easily locate e-mail without utilizing the search function: for example, a secondary sort based on Subject or Size within a primary sort by “To” can greatly simplify locating a specific e-mail, particularly from a Sender with whom you frequently correspond.

I’ve been a “firefly” Twitter user for a while, meaning that I’m on and off about Twitter from time to time. I think that at least the concept of the platform has meaning for project managers and team leads because of the crucial impact of communications on project success. I’m just not sure that the best implementation of the concept has appeared yet.

In the meantime, Toby Elwin at the Project Management Hut has put together a useful compendium of Twitter knowledge for project managers that goes beyond what novices need to know. He’s clearly an enthusiastic advocate of using Twitter as a project communications tool:

You have an obligation to communicate, but with Twitter you now have an opportunity to communicate more efficiently, more effectively. 4 reasons to use Twitter for project management:

• Concise messages
• Topics filtered by keyword (more on this below)
• Link to documents or websites
• Track communications by user and using a time stamp

I wish he contributed a few more words to how Twitter – or microblogging in general – should fit into an overall project communications approach. Some kinds of project communication are easily adapted for Twitter, while many are not. I’m also skeptical about Twitter’s effectiveness as a project tool simply from the perspective of user adoption. For Twitter to be effective in this context, all of the project team has to develop the Twitter “habit,” which means making Twitter and tweeting as much a part of your electronic communications activity as e-mail and web browsing. That takes time, and people new to Twitter don’t often grasp where its value lies. Twitter for projects works best in environments where the team members have already drunk the Twitter kool-aid.

All the same, Elwin’s post provides helpful tips and lists of tools that can direct an early explorer of the Twitterverse to a better knowledge of the platform.

I’d love to hear from anyone who has experienced Twitter – or its more corporate-friendly cousin, Yammer – in a project context.