Giving the user community the opportunity to experiment with prototypes, recommend upgrades, and influence implementation plans early on and often increases the likelihood that the installed system will be well received and ultimately used.
Putting participation into practice presents the IT professional with a few challenges.
For participation to work, users must trust the process, view their input as voluntary, experience the process of participating as rewarding, and see their ideas significantly affecting work products.[4] IT professionals may have to intervene to insure these conditions will exist before asking for user participation. This means influencing user management. For user managers to support participation, IT professionals must illustrate that the benefits of participation exceed the risks to productivity created by having their people devote time to project work.
Engage Conflicts Directly and Resolve Conflicts Efficiently and Effectively
Once project plans are underway, change happens. Requirements shift, the client does not meet its obligations in the project plan, and budgets can be reduced.
Changes within the IT group can also occur. Tasks may exceed initial estimates. Key programmers leave to join other firms. Differences in opinion among IT professionals about the best approach can erupt into conflicts that push projects off track.
When this happens, IT professionals must assertively engage key stakeholders (e.g., users, user management, IT management) in problem solving about the trade-offs that must be made in quality, time, cost, and perhaps even customer service agreements. Assertiveness is critical because users (and admittedly IT management on occasion) would prefer to avoid making necessary but difficult decisions about trade-offs between quality, time, and cost. Interestingly, resolving such conflicts may be best viewed as a typical and not unusual part of what IT project managers do. In survey research of professional project managers, it was discovered that they report spending an average of 12 hours per week resolving conflicts.[5]
When engaged in problem solving about trade-offs, stakeholders sometimes become frustrated and retaliate by challenging the competence or creativity of the IT project manager. IT professionals sometimes respond to such challenges by retreating from their legitimate interests. In a misguided effort to please, some over-commit to all three factors although significant changes in the project environment necessitate adjustments. The result is priority overload, stressed-out IT personnel, a loss of credibility and influence, suboptimal IT work products, or missed timelines.
Assertively championing one’
s basic interests, exploring alternatives with affected
parties even when they are not enthusiastic to do so, and collaborating to construct win-win agreements is the better response. Unfortunately, many people drawn to information technology (like many drawn to other technical disciplines) have a personal aversion to conflict. Consequently, for some IT professionals, enhanced negotiation skills is necessary.
Faithfully applying project management disciplines can limit the amount and scope of project conflicts that IT professionals have to manage. Conducting risk assessments early in the project life cycle to identify factors that might threaten project deliverables is one such discipline. If a risk is detected early (e.g., weak user management consensus on requirements) and focused problem solving occurs about what contingencies are necessary to address it (e.g., identifying a resource that can be used to do team conflict resolution with user managers), project disruptions caused by the risk can be effectively contained.
Providing regular user management updates is a second project management discipline. When updates work most effectively, not only is progress reported, but threats to project deliverables are reviewed and user management support of efforts to limit or resolve those threats is secured.
For some complex projects, more substantial organizational conflict management mechanisms are required. On large IT initiatives, the relative priority of the needs of different user groups can change over time. Because IT resources are often relatively fixed, reallocating resources to respond to a increased urgency for one user often means reneging on commitments made to other users. To address shifting priorities between users, some IT groups convene regular, periodic meetings of steering committees or users councils. When such mechanisms work well, users collectively learn about urgent priority changes, explore alternative responses to these situations, and finally make mutual decisions about priority changes and IT resource reallocation.
In these settings, IT professionals facilitate the preparation of information that enables these groups to make sound decisions. By promoting quality dialogue between users, IT professionals enhance organizational problem solving.
Assertively Championing Standards of IT Excellence
In certain circumstances the primary task of the IT professional is to ensure compliance with organizational standards concerning how IT technology is used. In other words, IT professionals are sometimes asked to give greater emphasis to their role as enforcers of senior management IT policy and less to their role as internal consultants. Occasionally, it is necessary for IT professionals to use the full measure of the positional power vested in their role by the organization and prescribe specific actions that users must take to be in compliance with corporate IT standards.
Although such standards help optimize the efficiency management of IT resources, on occasion, they can be inconvenient for some user managers. When users fail to comply with important standards, tough but skillful enforcement is required.
Consider the following case as an illustration. An IT manager was working with a user manager who disagreed with corporate IT policy and began contacting IT
suppliers directly to acquire the technology he desired. In response, the IT manager approached the user manager with the goal of assessing the particular difficulties the officially sanctioned technology was creating for the manager and offering assistance in working through such problems. The user manager responded by complaining that the IT professionals were being unresponsive and resisted attempts to assess his particular objections to the approved technology options. Further, the user manager began manipulating the IT professionals against themselves to secure the technology he wanted.
The project manager’
s response was to talk with the manager directly about the
policy violation and IT’
s role as enforcers of this policy. The IT manager also offered his support in helping the user manager escalate the issue to senior policy makers.
The IT professional said that he would advocate an exception to corporate policy as well as minimize the negative consequences the user manager feared the approved technology would create for his group if the exception was not granted. As this approach was more firm and direct than the user manager had experienced from other IT professionals, the IT manager wisely briefed his management before undertaking his plan.
In this case, the IT professional applied the positional power invested in his role by the corporation to enforce established IT policy and practices. Using the positional power invested in one’
s role is another underutilized means of managing IT priority pressure.
[3 ]McLeod, G. and Smith, D. (1996). Managing Information Technology Projects.
Cambridge, MA: Course Technology.
[4 ]Hunton, J. E. and Beeler, J. D. (1997). “Effects of User Participation in Systems Development: A Longitudinal Field Experiment.” MIS Quarterly, December, 359–369.
[5 ]Kerzner, H. (1995). Project Management: A Systems Approach to Planning, Scheduling, and Controlling. New York: NY: Van Nostrand Reinhold.
SUMMARY
The starting point for effectively managing priority pressure is to view IT work from the perspective of project management. In particular, this means recognizing that IT
professionals must engage end users in the decision making about how the balance between quality, time, cost, and customer satisfaction is preserved. When IT
professionals adopt this perspective, they embrace the practical politics of implementing innovation. This requires both courage and competence from the member of IT organizations. Effective human resource management practices can ensure that both traits are being selected for and systematically groomed. By encouraging the expression of courage and competence, IT professionals can become masters of, and not victims of, priority pressure. The investment organizations make in IT and the effectiveness of the professionals who are stewards of its appropriate application depend on this mastery.
NOTES
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.
3. McLeod, G. and Smith, D. (1996). Managing Information Technology Projects.
Cambridge, MA: Course Technology.
4. Hunton, J. E. and Beeler, J. D. (1997). “Effects of User Participation in Systems Development: A Longitudinal Field Experiment.” MIS Quarterly, December, 359–369
5. Kerzner, H. (1995). Project Management: A Systems Approach to Planning, Scheduling, and Controlling. New York: NY: Van Nostrand Reinhold
Chapter 18: Business and IT: Developing
Strategic Alliances
Andy Roquet
OVERVIEW
Every day, headlines across the country announce new partnerships between companies. In the current economic business cycle, strong companies are partnering with other strong companies where objectives are congruent, and each can bring value to the other. These partnerships come in the form of mergers, acquisitions, and strategic alliances. Strategic alliances are different in that both companies must be involved in making decisions and implementing the alliance because both have a vested interest going forward. Typic ally in strategic alliances, the parts of each business that overlap must be “cleaned up,” sold, or discontinued, and new linkages must be established between the companies. In the context of this chapter, strategic alliances entail the maintenance by each partnering company of its own management, identity, and ownership; and bringing mutual benefits to the table in terms of product, market, or other strategic advantages. In other words, this is a symbiotic relationship.