Are you fighting off alligators?

What do IT watermelons and alligators have in common?

"When you're fighting off the alligators, it's hard to remember you were trying to drain the swamp"

What do you think about when you read that sentence? When was the last time the teams or people around you forgot about the original goal and instead were just focusing on fighting off alligators?

It could be that managers were really good at fighting alligators, and created an alligator KPI. Now the team members are putting all their effort into fighting alligators.

At the business reviews, since every day coming into the office, the alligators need fighting off again... it becomes the focus of the teams.

When someone much later asks: "How is the Swamp Draining going?"

The answer could be: "We haven't had a chance to do that yet, but look at how good we are at fighting off alligators!"

In Enterprise IT, there is the concept of the watermelon effect. IT has a number of KPI's looking green, many times SLAs of different types, but the people in the organization perceiving IT services as less than good.

Alligators and Watermelons... Both the swamp drainers and the IT Service Desks feel like they are doing an excellent job, but the problem is that it is not solving the original problem.

Teams need clear goals that focus their effort on what matters. That is why #itxm (IT Experience Management) is so efficient, is that it naturally guides the service desk agents to focus on the swamp and not the alligators.

For those who are new to what Experience Management for IT is, watch the video below from HappySignals. It describes the underlying principle and reasons why end-user perception is a better starting point than the data devices and applications feed to dashboards.

People, Process, Technology... in that order.

This text was inspired by a lecture that Richard Jolly held at London Business School. While his talk is much about management principles and challenges, the learnings are much about human behavior and applicable on a wider scale.

So when you have an hour to watch the lecture, I can assure you it will be worth it.

#itsm #it #enterpriseservicemanagement #itsupport #humanbehavior #busybusybusy #humansciences #softskills #managementtheory