Chapter 20: Improving IS Performance: The Role of the Value Chain Chapter 21: The Myths and Realities of IT Sterring Committees Chapter 22: Achieving Enterprise Culture Change through a Project Management Program
Chapter 23: Developing Applications with the User in Mind
Chapter 17: Prescriptions for Managing IT
Priority Pressure
Tom Rose
OVERVIEW
Ideas for better managing IT priority pressure become clear when the demands placed on IT professionals are viewed through the lens of the project management discipline. What is meant by the project management discipline is not the complex set of methods and tools that are generally associated with project management, but rather the resourceful and disciplined management of few key attributes of IT
projects. Looking at IT work in this way focuses attention on the set of critical power and influence issues that lie at the heart of implementing successful IT-based performance improvement. This chapter contends that those IT professionals who effectively manage this aspect of IT projects better manage priority pressure. The goals of this chapter are to outline the project management perspective and enumerate a few key prescriptions for effectively addressing the power and influence challenges of IT projects.
THE NEW IT PERFORMANCE ENVIRONMENT AND THE
PROJECT MANAGEMENT PERSPECTIVE
The project management-based perspective of IT work reveals that throughout the project life cycle of design, development, implementation, and maintenance, IT
professionals face the challenge of managing dynamic tensions that exist between a few critical project factors. Better management of priority pressure begins with an understanding of these project factors and their relationship.
The Power of Three
As project managers, IT professionals must produce deliverables that satisfy three task factors. Deliverables must (1) meet certain quality standards, (2) be installed within a specified period of time, and (3) be completed within a specific budget.
From the project management perspective, the principal task of IT professionals is helping users fit their aspirations for information technology-enhanced performance improvement with the realities of time and resource constraints.
To keep these interdependencies in mind and in the minds of users, one IT
organization uses the slogan “Good, Fast, and Cheap: Pick Two.” “If you want fast and cheap, then you cannot have good.” “You can have good and cheap, but then you cannot have it fast,” and so on. A key implication of the project management perspective is that IT professionals today more carefully manage the interdependencies between quality, time, and cost.
While engaged in this task today, IT professionals are being asked to more evenly divide their attention between each of the task factors. Historically, IT professionals have been perceived to focus more on quality (as they, not the user, defined it) to
the near exclusion of time and cost considerations. The legacy of such practice was user complaints that work products were off target, late, and over budget. The specter of outsourcing that haunts IT managers today is, in part, due to the unfortunate legacy of these complaints.
Better managing the relationships between quality, time, and cost occurs when IT
professionals successfully address a couple of key project planning and project tracking and control challenges. In the project planning phase, when requirements and specifications are being established, disagreements among users about performance improvement priorities or user anxiety about making costly decisions (e.g., large financial investments in IT; significant changes in business processes) are common and can make it difficult to establish commitments about quality, time, and cost. Directly engaging these difficulties (e.g., implementing a group priority-setting session to resolve user manager disagreements, working with the user management team to build a common vision of how requirements will be implemented, influencing users to adopt a more gradual and incremental approach to innovation) is necessary to resolving them. Proceeding without such clarity creates problems later in project life cycle.
Later in the project life cycle, changes in the project environment frequently occur and invalidate initial commitments about quality, time, or cost. User requirements shift; tasks exceed their estimated completion times; budgets are slashed. When project tracking and controlling practices detect changes, trade-offs between quality, time, and cost must be negotiated. Deliverables may have to be scaled back to address budgetary constraints. Timelines may have to be extended to allow for the development of increases in desired functionality. Budgets may have to be increased to complete project deliverables more quickly, and so on. Assertively engaging users in problem solving about such tradeoffs is another important aspect of better managing the project task factors.
To maintain the proper relationship between quality, time, and cost, tough choices are often required. What makes these choices difficult is that one is not often selecting between a clearly good and bad choice. Rather, the choices are often between good and good.[1]
A Question of Balance
As IT budgets have soared and user demands for optimal ROI have increased, managing quality, time, and cost must be accomplished with recognition of a fourth critical project factor — customer satisfaction. User complaints about a lack of responsiveness, the inability of IT professionals to engage users about their IT needs in “user-friendly” terms, a lack of reliability about time lines along with related service sins have all produced a heightened awareness of customer satisfaction and the means used to secure it in many IT organizations.[2]
To address the greater importance of customer satisfaction, the quality, time, and cost framework introduced earlier has been expanded. Exhibit 1 displays this expanded view of IT project management.
Exhibit 1. Maintaining the Balance: The Project Management Framework The implication of this framework is that IT professionals must balance alignment among the task factors (i.e., quality, time, and cost) with the press of the relationship factors (i.e., customer service and customer satisfaction). If IT
professionals allow the balance to tip too much in the favor of task factors, too little emphasis is given to the relationship factors. Project managers may successfully complete the tasks on their project plans but create off-target work products and frustrated customers.
On the other hand, if the balance is allowed to tip too much in favor of the relationship factor, the opportunity to deliver timely and cost effective work products is lost. Creating a service balance is the second major theme underlying changes in the IT field. When the balance is achieved and maintained, IT professionals come to be respected as business partners by users because they build useful work products for satisfied customers.
Viewing IT work through the lens of this project management framework emphasizes the importance of balancing four critical project factors: quality, time, cost, and customer satisfaction during project planning and later in the project life cycle. To achieve and maintain this balance, IT professionals must directly engage in the power and influence dynamics of implementing organizational innovation.
Productively managing these dynamics helps preserve the balance between the project factors and enhances the IT professional’
s ability to manage priority pressure.
Five prescriptions for achieving this are as follows:
1. Sell good ideas by emphasizing benefits that the user or customer perceives as valuable.
2. Build a common vision of project outcomes and how people will work together to achieve them.
3. Generate commitment to ideas or implementation plans by getting users to modify them in the direction of personal and business interests.
4. Engage conflicts directly and resolve them efficiently and effectively.
5. Assertively enforce standards of IT excellence.
Each of these ideas is developed in the following sections.
[1 ]This idea is borrowed from Quinn, R. (1999). Managing Deep Change. San Fransisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
[2 ]Longenecker, C. O., Simonetti, J.L., and Mulias, M. (1996). “Survival Skills for the IT Professional.” Information Systems Management, Spring, 26- 31.
PRESCRIPTIONS AND “HOW-TO” SUGGESTIONS
Sell Good Ideas by Emphasizing Benefits that the User
Perceives as Valuable
The starting point for an IT project is selling senior management within the user group and within the IT function on the idea. Consequently, the efficiency with which ideas are sold is one important means of managing priority pressure. The power of persuasion depends largely on whether the rationale used to support an idea resonates with the decision- maker’
s interests. To sell ideas more efficiently, the
rationale for an idea must reflect the user’
s priorities. In short, reasoning should
always outline “what is in it for them.”
When selling ideas, IT professionals sometimes get stuck on technical issues, specifications, and justifications. Although technical details are critical, as facts, they have limited power to influence users and senior IT management. As a result, one of the main priority management prescriptions is that IT professionals need to develop sufficient business expertise to engage users in terms that they will find compelling.
IT professionals who add this expertise to their technical competence have the greatest organizational impact. Many IT organizations are experimenting with the role of user or client relationship manager to help establish client sensitivity within IT
organization.
Selling ideas effectively also means having good ideas. Good ideas are designed with knowledge of the practical time and resource constraints within which they will be implemented. Not all business problems require state-of-the-art solutions.