I love playing golf, mostly for the challenge that any time I think I have master some part of the game give me a hole or two and I’ll prove that I have not. In the reading of a CIO Insight article this weekend, it really struck a cord with me about the value of continuing to improve your IT processes. In the company I run Wirevibe, we are constantly improving our software development process. From software project to software project over the past several years we have continually altered the project delivery process to get better at what we do. Right now if you are thinking you don’t need to make changes to your software development process or if everything seems to be running fine the way it is, this should be a huge red flag that you still have more to do. If projects are not being delivered to your expectations you already know you need to take a deeper look on how to drive more operational excellence.
One point of clarification when making changes to your IT processes, you don’t have to overhaul them to make improvements. And I would actually advise against doing a huge overhaul of processes which is more painful and not show value for a long while even if they are successful . Taking continuous improvement to your IT processes you make small changes to improve your overall execution. These changes should be made at the start of a new work cycle and not in the middle of one.
So where do you start to determine how you can make these changes:
1. Ask your team – most of our improvements come from suggestions from our team. We stopped using Basecamp to manage projects and moved to Jira based on team members suggestions to break development tasks into more fine grain components. This has made a huge difference to move all our clients into one tool, but still have different project workflows per project and client. Our junior members of our team adapted more rapidly then some of our senior members and lead our transition to the new tool-set.
2. Interrogate your vendor hand-offs – most large companies today have outsourced some or all of their IT processes. The vendors, many which are constantly improving their internal IT processes to meet financial targets, can’t do it alone. You should look at the way your company hands requirements over to the vendor and how you validate their work product. In my dealing with our clients, trying to get validation of requirements that require them to make a business decision always takes time. We have had to build these decision points into our project schedules upfront with the clients and give them dates so our delivery is not impacted. The improvement of the communication of information can produce much better operational performance in IT.
3. Don’t ignore best practices – the old adage we can skip steps to save time rarely pays off. No matter how small the project effort is, follow your basic IT best practices. I got convinced that for a small two page web application we were developing we could skip the design document and just code it from the mock ups. I heard “Its so small it would take longer to write the document then to do the entire project”. While this ended up not to hold true, it seemed logically at the time. But when we got into testing there we all sorts of operational issues with the application that we wanted to work different ways. The problem, we skipped the design document where many of these issues would have been hammered out. So look for what areas your IT teams are the weakest in and focus on implementing a standard just in that area.
These are just a few things to look at to improve operational performance – what are your thoughts on others?
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