Enough “Strategy”

?I am a consultant and this is the kind of rant that you should read imagining Rutger Hauer’s voice in his famous : “I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannh?user Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain”.

Companies love strategies, at least they love talking about them.

Usually it all begins with some “strategic mind” high up in the company ranks enlightening a bunch of “managers” with his / her wisdom, condensed in a single sentence: “We need to do more with less”.

That sentence, possibly the most stupid sentence after “oh $#it, I forgot my parachute!” ever spoken by a human being, is supposed to be the whole guiding principle for the next (yet another) company reorganization.

It did not work the previous nine times, but we are quite sure it will work now… because reasons.

I often work with the IT function, normally what happens there is that the CFO or CEO tells the CIO “you are too expensive, do more with less!” and the CIO cascades that raw wisdom down his / her own organization.

The reality is that IT is expensive because while technologies are becoming more affordable every year, at the same time the processes that IT supports in an average company are steadily growing over time.

Infrastructure demands grow, but cloud services helped us get rid of internal data centers or at least to scale them down, that can help a lot with cost savings.

But growing demand over business processes to be supported increased demand for IT personnel being able to understand such processes, discuss them with the business functions and find the best way to implement solutions.

A consolidated trend to reduce that cost is to provide “standard” solutions, such as Global ERPs , Global CRMs etc., and admittedly it usually works (sort of).

The problem with that is how the processes get implemented: It’s usually the chosen system (don’t even get me started about Best Practices!) to dictate the processes to the business function.

In some areas this is somewhat acceptable, invoices are invoices after all, HR business is pretty much the same across different industries etc.

But the core business processes, where the company is actually competing on the market, are the real issue.

Assuming the company has competition of some sort, those will be quickly evolving and they will inevitably put pressure on the IT department to deliver some customized solution.. which is not possible since a “black box” (best in class, Gartner quadrant superstar etc.) solution was deployed.

IT would need massive human resources to tackle such custom needs, but, I hear you saying: “the IT Department HAS massive human resources already!”.

Good point, let me explain this one with an old joke.

Company “StrategicThinkers” and “ACME” challenge each other in a friendly rowing competition.

Both companies build a high technology boat, choosing the best materials, they train for 6 months and finally compete.

What happens is that StrategicThinkers, while being quite optimistic of the result at the beginning, loses, so they start analyzing what happened and after two months they realize that ACME won because they had 7 guys rowing and one giving orders, while they had 3 giving orders ad 5 rowing.

They are not StrategicThinkers for nothing, so they analyze the result, understand the problem and adapt their strategy, then challenge ACME again.

You guessed id: ACME wins again with even a bigger gap, usual debriefing, analysis, reorg etc. They now know they lost because ACME used the old strategy : 1 giving orders, 7 rowing and our heroes opted for 3 giving orders, 1 supervisor and 4 rowing.

“Ok, now we see a trend, time for an improved strategy”

Third round goes to ACME again, this time StrategicThinkers had 1 supervisor , 3 giving orders, 2 auditors, 1 consultant and 1 rowing.

They declared the project a success, fired the guy that was rowing because clearly he was not fast enough and gave a nice bonus to the rest of the team for a job well done.

That’s what happening in your IT department in a nutshell: too many managers, not enough doers (if any are still present).

Average managers don’t know how to do things, so if the department HAS to finally deliver anything, they will hire consultants (yeah they hire ME or possibly cheaper ones when they can, funny enough they usually hire us to MANAGE).

This imbalance between managers and doers is problematic in many different ways:

1) you should not hire managers, you should GROW them!

2) Consultants might not be aware of the details of your business processes, they are usually more proficient with systems than with solutions

3) Managers are excellent at meetings, so logically that’s what they consider “work”. A 1 month effort project takes 3 months meetings to decide if we should invest 1 month FTE to do it. Let me explain the math to managers: 1 FTE of a “doer” costs way less than 3 months FTE of “managers” (yes, they would not be meeting full time, but several of them would be involved)

So, is there a solution?

I am a consultant you remember that, right?… so, yes, of course there is always a solution!

Hire young and motivated talents, give them a career path, give them the opportunity to learn and, as current tragic events are teaching us, FEED YOUR SOLDIERS!

Coaching is key here: they should improve both technically and mostly in the understanding of your company’s core business processes.

Some will eventually become great experts and will coach a new generation of talents, some others will eventually become managers.

They will be superior to the managers you hired on the market, because they will know HOW things are done, they will know your company processes inside-out and they will be motivated and invested in the future of the Company.

So, back to the “do more with less” mantra.

You really want to do more? Hire people who gets the stuff done, not people who talks about it!