It is a truth universally acknowledged, that firefighting is one of the noblest professions in the history of humankind. However, in the business context, the term ‘Firefighting’, refer to critical situations that require emergency allocation of resources to tackle unforeseen problems.
Firefighting is a familiar territory to an IT professional. In fact, it will not be an exaggeration to say that IT teams in most of the organizations are doing just that – resolving issues as it arises and just about ensuring the business operations are not affected. This results in much higher operational hard/soft cost i.e business risks, loss of productive payroll hours and revenue.
This begs the question – So how do you fix this problem? Answer is IT Process and Strategy.
Why do you need IT Process?
Today, with modern technology innovations, IT processes with appropriate accountability becomes measurable in dimensions never before possible. With this interconnected process – and information – management can perform accurate and far-reaching impact analyses, test alternate scenarios, and evaluate their costs and implementation possibilities (and difficulties) to make decisions with full knowledge of their implications.....read more
One of the key benefits of process and a process-based organizational engine is that organizations are able to lower their business risks, eliminate soft cost, such as security, performance and compliance regulations, if they are – or are becoming – truly process-based. Because once processes (and their encompassing business architecture) become central to the organization, a wide array of things become simpler, faster and cheaper...read more
Journey to IT Process from Firefighting
If you decided to change your reactive IT department to process based IT department, Congratulation! It’s hard work but you will reap all the rewards later. In your organization’s journey to this change, you will face challenges and obstacles. And here’s top 3 challenges any organization will face during this change:
Mind Set & Skill Set – Change: The biggest challenge by far is implementing a Process Mindset when changing your reactive IT department to a process-based department. Your IT team should ‘think and breathe’ the process in all they do. It can be daunting to both know where to start and how to achieve a Process Mindset within the organization. How do you make sure the whole organization sets off in the direction of ‘think process’ with the same mindset? How do you ensure that people are not scared by the concept of ‘think process’? It’s critical that your team understand that ‘think process’ is a normal part of daily life.
- Leadership challenge: It’s human nature to any change, your staff will push back on your approach and their previous logic. Do you have enough information and knowledge to educate and coach your team in new direction?
- Skill Set: Its different skill set to deliver IT services in reactive approach than process-based department. Your staff will require training and new skill sets to complete their jobs. Do you have bandwidth to provide training required for your staff?
Process Integration, Automation and optimization: Many studies have shown that stand-alone department process will create silos and increase IT operational cost dramatically. It becomes critical for organization to integrate IT process with other business operations i.e Sales, Marketing etc. By enabling process optimization and continuous process improvement, you can take a more strategic approach to reducing your operational costs and reducing business risks.
- Measure: Process approach allows you to measure every aspects of your IT operations. If you can’t measure, you cannot automate or optimize. Build IT Process to measure.
- Continues Improvement: Your continues improvement involves that your organization deploy ongoing process to review current business results, review gap analysis and make adjustment to optimize current process to meet business objectives.
Additional work and current operational challenges: Any change to your current IT approach will cause additional work for your staff. As a business leader, you should understand your current workload for IT operations and estimate additional work by changing your IT approach. For most organizations, this is not feasible, and it stops them moving forward with their approach. Organizations without means to measure staff workload failed to distinguish between mind set issues, workload, staff push back to process etc. To get over these challenges, you will require higher level of commitment, discipline to push through workload issues and structure/consistent approach to achieve your business goals.
If you are embarking on above initiative, you can understand that any mistake will introduce greater set back on your objectives. You need a partner with primary focus on implementing IT Process and who can guide you to achieve your goals. Talk to our team:
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Also review – Impact on Revenue blog
