Insight on Coaching
Coaching for IT Managers Transcript
Prepared for: Prepared by:
Insight Educational Consulting Ubiqus Reporting
(IEC)

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0:28 Tom Floyd Hello everyone and welcome to Insight on Coaching.
Insight on Coaching explores the many facets, flavors, and sides of the emerging
professional coaching field.
I’m Tom Floyd; I’m the CEO of Insight Educational Consulting, and your host for
today’s show.
0:42 Tom Floyd Well today’s show focuses on Coaching for IT Managers.
Today’s show focuses on Coaching for Information Technology Managers. Billions of
dollars have been spent on technology in the last 20 years yet large scale IT projects
continue to fail. David Taylor, author the “The Naked Leader” books and someone
with 25 years experience in IT says it’s because there’s paralysis in most IT
departments.
1:10 Tom Floyd Managers face too many choices, are afraid of ‘getting it wrong” and would rather
debate, discuss and disagree than take action. With information technology such an
important ingredient in business success, our question of the day is can coaching
help address the paralysis David references, along with some of these challenges?
1:34 Tom Floyd Well information technology is such an important ingredient in business success, and
our question of the day really is: Can coaching help address the paralysis that David
references, along with some of the other challenges that you’ll hear in a few minutes
as well.
1:48 Tom Floyd Before we jump into our conversation with our guests though, as always, I’d like to
share some statistics and data that our research team came up with to set the stage.
And to begin I’d like to look at a few statistics about the IT industry overall.
First one; several industry studies say that more then 70% of IT projects are
abandoned before completion.
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2:16 Tom Floyd A 2003 report from the Standish Group, an IT research and consulting firm, found
that 95 percent of application integration projects either fail to meet expected
schedules, exceed planned budgets, or simply do not meet stated business goals
In Britain, 7 in 10 government IT projects have failed, according to the chief
information officer of the Department for Work and Pensions.
A 1995 study, again by the Standish Group, showed 31% of software projects would
be canceled before they ever get to the completion stage, and 53% will cost a
staggering 189% of their original estimates.
Wow is all I have to say to that.
3:00 Tom Floyd In Wisconsin, the Speaker of the State Assembly just announced the formation of a
special taskforce to examine multiple failed computer projects within state agencies.
And recent state reports show that nearly 170 million—certainly no small change
there—was wasted developing state computer systems that eventually failed.
3:21 Tom Floyd Well a natural question that I’m guessing a lot of you had as I was reading through
some of those is—how did some of these things happen?
Well that’s the next piece a research team went out to explore.
They tried to identify a few reasons why this happens.
A 1998 University of Maryland study reported that several factors contributed to failed
IT software development projects, which included:
Lack of senior management commitment
Lack of user involvement—both things I’ve certainly seen from a changed
management perspective before—
Lack of user requirement specifications
Poor project planning
and problems within the project team themselves.
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Additionally, a web survey released by Comp TIA on March 6th revealed that:
4:02 Tom Floyd
28% of the more than 1,000 respondents for the survey said that poor
communications were the primary factor behind those project failures
18% blamed insufficient resource planning.
13.2% said that deadlines were unrealistic.
Almost 10% sited poor project requirements
And lack of stakeholder buy in and support and undefined project success were
other reasons sited in the survey.
Some other interesting info that we found, these from a recent Deloitte Consulting
Report.
According to the report, out-of-control innovation projects are susceptible to the
\"bandwagon problem,\" says Anthony Warren of the Farrell Center for Corporate
Innovation and Entrepreneurship at Pennsylvania State University. It occurs,
Warren says, when a project has so much exposure that the people who
supported it can't let it fail. \"They pour in more and more resources,” Warren
explains. “Because it's so visible, every smart person wants to be on it. It sucks in
more money and people, and no one will stop it.\"
Another factor listed in the report is the usual career development path for Chief
Information Officers. That path tends to be technology-centric and does not
typically prepare future CIOs for their role as integrators of business and
technology, functioning as a conduit between the two worlds. Very little of their
prior experience typically prepares them for their new responsibilities, and they
may not know where to go for mentoring and counsel.
5:56 Tom Floyd The last thing that I’ll reference is a review from a new book and the book is called
The Art of Installation and the Science of Implementation by Thomas Shubnell and it
presents an eloquent view, to say the least, of the skills required by today’s IT
leaders.
Now according to Shubnell:
New project leaders must be skilled and educated.
They must assess inherent abilities to lead under duress as well as understand
and communicate at any level in an organization.
They must be born leaders and schooled tacticians with appropriate implements
at their disposal and resources at the ready.
The new project leaders must accept change, embrace change, advocate
change, instigate change, react to change, and even incite change in the team
and the organization.
Again with my change management hat on—totally smiling here.
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6:46 Tom Floyd Well in the next hour we’ll look at what’s behind these statistics and we’ll also look at
the special challenges facing IT today. Now of course, our primary focus is how
coaches can be assistance to IT and business leaders alike during large scale
technology roll outs.
7:01 Tom Floyd Well we have four guests with us today; John Baschab, John Mooney, Tim Phillips,
and David Taylor.
Let me give you a quick overview of each of their backgrounds and then we’ll dive
right in.
I’ll start with John Baschab.
John is the President of Management Services for Technisource. John has written
two books, The Executives Guide to Information Technology and The Executives
Guide to Information Technology – Version 2.
Both examine the keys to managing a successful IT department.
Both are currently used at major universities, including Southern Methodist
University, where John is an adjunct professor of engineering and management
information systems.
Welcome to the show, John.
7:39 John Baschab Thank you very much, Tom.
7:41 Tom Floyd Our next guess is John as well, John Mooney.
John Mooney is an Associate Professor of Information Systems at the Grazadio
School of Business at Pepperdine University here in California.
He teaches, researches, and consults on business executive engagement in IT
management.
Some of his research interests include eBusiness transformation, IT outsourcing,
assessment of IT business value, IT support for organizational transformation and
effectiveness of IS management practices and electronic commerce.
Welcome to the show, John.
8:13 John Mooney Thank you, Tom. Pleasure to be here.
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8:14 Tom Floyd Pleasure to have you here.
Our next guest, Tim Phillips is the President and Founder of Sense of Service, a
coaching firm in Houston.
Tim is a recognized leader in the area of human capital performance management
and business relationship development and maximization. Tim has helped a broad
array of organizations including BP, Comsys, Blue Cross Blue Shield, Merrill Lynch,
ESPN, Verizon Wireless, and the United States Marine Corps.
Welcome to the show, Tim
8:39 Tim Phillips Thank you, Tom. Great to be with you.
8:41 Tom Floyd Great to have you.
And our last guest David Taylor is with us from London England.
He’s the author of the Naked Leader series of books.
He’s a recognized global authority on leadership with over 25 years experience
working inside companies throughout the world. And his clients include political and
business leaders, royalty, and athletes.
Welcome to the show, David.
9:00 David Taylor Hi, Tom. Thanks.
9:02 Tom Floyd Well as with all of our shows, this show will definitely be less of an interview and
more of a conversation.
We’ll be talking to all four of our guests as a group today.
And to kick us off, the first question that I have is about the statistics on tech project
failure – they really were stunning. If bridge or highway or ship building projects
failed at this rate tens of thousands of lives would be lost!
Why are the failure rates so high and why are they tolerated?
David, let’s start with you.
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9:43 David Taylor Well I think the main reason is, Tom, that we’ve become obsessed with process and
procedure and that’s taken precedence over really trusting our people.
I mean as a result projects become confused, we forget very quickly what the project
ever wanted to achieve, and people who are actually working on the project feel less
and less empowered as the project goes on.
And I suppose the whole thing seems separate from the overall aim of the company.
It’s seen as an IT project, when in fact—in my opinion—there shouldn’t be anything
such as an IT project.
It should always be a project on behalf of the organization.
10:17 David Taylor And one final comment on that, I think that it’s in IT’s own hands to change this.
So for example, if we worked more on informal relationships and communication, and
the perception of IT throughout the organization, perhaps we could measure
performance in different ways.
If we did this, I think projects would improve dramatically.
10:37 Tom Floyd And when you say that it’s really in IT’s hands to change it, from your perspective, do
you feel this is something that IT wants to change?
10:46 David Taylor I think that’s a very good question.
I think what coaches can do is they can identify the differences between IT projects
that succeed and CIOs that get on the board for example—and those that don’t.
So for example, CIOs that get on the board don’t talk about IT being separate from
the business.
They treat themselves as being one with the business.
And IT departments that are very well regarded have dropped this term, this crazy
term, user. I don’t know—you know Tom, there’s only one other industry in the world
that has the term user, it’s the narcotics industry.
With that term, how we’re suppose to be expected to be liked and valued by other
people in our organization, I don’t know.
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11:23 David Taylor And you know the final thing to do is service level agreements.
For goodness sake, let’s put them in the bin and forget them.
I mean, you try this, Tom, get your partner to cook you a lovely meal, and then when
you finished it and she asked you whether you enjoyed it, just say to her it was
satisfactory.
You know, it met my expectations.
These crazy words we use in organizations are nothing like reality and it’s time that
we, basically, put away all these stupid measurement tools and started trusting the
great people in IT to deliver.
And that’s what those departments and projects that are succeeding are doing that
those who are failing are not.
11:56 Tom Floyd I have a feeling if I said that my meal was satisfactory I wouldn’t be given many
meals going forward.
12:01 David Taylor You’d be chased out of the house with a knife.
12:03 Tom Floyd Yes, pretty much. Probably screaming for my life and running down the street.
I want to turn to everybody.
Same question from your experiences, just to build upon what David said.
Why are the failure rates so high? And why are they tolerated?
John Mooney, let’s go with you.
12:22 John Mooney Thanks, Tom. I want to build on something that David said.
David said that these are not IT projects; they should be viewed as projects on behalf
of the organization.
I have a similar, but different view, and that is—I agree with David, we should not
view these projects that we’re pointing to as being failures as IT projects.
I view them as being failures of IT enabled business projects.
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12:43 John Mooney In that, when we use the word failure it typically means it’s a failure to achieve the
business impact that was intended from the IT system.
Most of these projects, from a technology perspective, actually succeed. There may
be some bumps along the way, but ultimately most IT systems do come to the end of
their development lifecycle whereby they’re available and ready for use.
Where, from my perspective, the real challenge continues to emerge is that, in many
cases, perfectly good systems never get adopted by the users.
And I’ll go with David and sasy that you have to be cautious with that term. But they
are not adopted by members of the organization.
And if they’re not adopted, if these systems are not actually used, they can never
have the business impact that they’re intended to have.
13:33 Tom Floyd Well almost like just spending a bunch of money and putting it out there.
And if it’s never used, well you know, I think a lot of people seem to think it’s Field of
Dreams, if they build it they’ll come.
Well if they don’t know about it and they don’t support it, they’re probably not going to
use it.
13:44 John Mooney Correct. And there’s the fundamental flaw I think.
If indeed we do succeed in building this, the users will come, it will be used.
So then in terms of portioning blame and responsibility for this thing, if ultimately what
we’re trying to achieve here is business impact, it’s very clear to us who, inside
business organizations, are responsible for business impact.
And it’s business executives.
14:05 John Mooney So I think part of the naivety around this whole issue is the portioning of blame purely
on IT departments.
You asked the question why has it been tolerated, and I think it’s a great question.
I actually would say the people who need to step up and answer that question would
be the business executives, senior business leaders.
Why do senior business leaders continue to tolerate inefficient and wasted
expenditure on technology that has no business impact?
14:33 Tom Floyd Now that’s a great question.
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14:34 Tom Floyd Let’s go ahead and go on pause, we’re at our first commercial break.
Stay tuned everybody, more on Coaching for IT Managers when we return.
17:26 Tom Floyd Hello everyone, and welcome back to Insight on Coaching.
For those of you just joining us today, today’s show focuses on Coaching for IT
Managers. And where we left off John Mooney from Pepperdine University was just
talking about some of the reasons why so many IT projects are failing at such an
alarming rate.
And John one of the things you just mentioned was that from an ownership
perspective, why is the failure of IT projects and expenditures on IT applications
tolerated by business executives?
That’s a great question for us to ask business executives within the organization.
Now David, it sounded like you had a question you wanted to come back on that.
17:58 David Taylor Yes, what I was wondering was, John, were you suggesting that IT leaders—and I’m
talking about IT leaders that really cut the mustard, that really are good—are not
business executives?
18:09 John Mooney So I think where you’re getting to David I agree with in terms of—for firms that have
significantly, a very high dependency upon IT, for whom information technology is a
key neighbor of business processes and business strategy.
In those types of firms the senior IT executive very much needs to be part of the
senior business leadership team.
And I also subscribe to—I think what’s behind your question is that—in some cases
the likely failures around IT are exasperated because the senior IT leader is not at
the appropriate level.
So CIOs, if you take the CIO position, to me that is clearly a business executive
position.
And I think that there in itself is where we have run into trouble sometimes because
often—and Tom in his introductory comments talked about the career path that leads
to CIO. I think it’s unfortunate in that the obvious career path, maybe the historical
career path has been through the technical side of IT to CIO.
And those people, I think, often are not well positioned in terms of the business skills
that they need to have in order to be effective CIOs.
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19:21 John Baschab David, this is John Baschab, I would agree they should be an important part of the
senior executive team of the company.
After all, most companies are spending anywhere from two to ten percent of their
revenues in their IT budgets. What was interesting as we were doing the research
for the second edition of our book, were the statistics that showed that only seven
percent of fortune 500 companies had a CIO listed as one of their top five officers.
19:55 Tom Floyd Only seven percent?
19:56 John Baschab Only seven percent. So I mean while that’s probably true—
19:59 David Taylor [Crosstalk] what I’ve done is stepped over the footsy, you know, the top 250
companies in Britain, only 26 of the 250 have CIOs at the top table.
And interesting 19 of those 26 come from a non technology background.
So that’s only seven that sit on the main board, or the operational board, who have a
technology background.
20:17 Tom Floyd Wow.
20:19 John Baschab We have a way to go if you look imperially.
20:23 Tom Floyd Tim Phillips, anything you would add?
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20:26 Tim Phillips Well the thing I would add is, you touched on this in your opening in the sighting of
the statistics is—in the structure itself there is s tremendous lack of communication.
And it usually starts with—as you mentioned—executive sponsorship.
And who is the person at the end of the day that is ultimately accountable for
however we define what success is?
Very quickly, that evaporates—if it was ever there—and so as a result of that you
have internal IT organizations—which are typically maintenance and support
organizations. They are not design, development, implementation, integration
organization.
So then you’re forced to bring in an outside, third party consultant integrator who is
completely foreign to the entire culture of the organization and so now we’re going to
move forward and—what is their definition of success?
Their definition of success—
21:38 Tom Floyd Do you ever find that, in terms of when those third parties are brought in, that
companies are really expecting them to have a magic wand and solve the problem?
21:46 Tim Phillips Exactly.
You sold me the software and now use your magic bullets and install it so I flip the
switch and turn it on and everybody starts using it.
51:53 David Taylor As an ex-IT Director I almost hate saying this, but unfortunately you have to
sometimes bring in third parties because they seem to be listened to far more by the
business executives than IT leaders are.
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22:03 Tim Phillips Well said. And that goes to the respect within the organization for the IT organization
itself.
And what often happens is, you get into this terribly deteriorated state of
communication where the business community says, “oh those arrogant guys in IT,
they don’t’ get it, they can’t do it. We got to go hire a consultant.”
And on the IT side they say “oh those business users they never know what they
want and what they need. And they can’t communicate it to us, so we’ll wait until
they figure it out and then they’ll tell us what to do.”
We’re order takers.
And so as a result, you bring in some foreign third party who may or may not be the
right party, and then expect that to be the magic bridge between these two groups
within the enterprise.
22:57 David Taylor Tom, what I would like to know from everyone is, if that foreign third party comes in
and if they’re a coach, what sort of skills would you think are best for the coach to
help the IT leader with in order to get over these problems?
23:10 Tim Phillips Consultative communication skills, questioning skills, and being able to move the—
whoever in the business side that we’re trying to achieve a business objective—
establish before we ever start of resource planning or anything: what is the definition
of success from a business perspective with tangible business metrics that we’re
hoping to achieve using an information technology tool or process?
And if you can’t get to that square one, then you’re going to be over in this camp
where we’re 180% over budget and three years behind.
And then it rolls off in the ditch and it’s dead.
23:53 Tom Floyd Well Tim, just to build upon that a little bit too, how about—and I know you said this
before as well, because some projects fail because there isn’t a clear understanding
of the needs of the user community - how about coaching around requirements
gathering as a skill?
Or really working with stakeholders, for example, across organizations?
Really access and figure out what it is they want to accomplish before they build it.
Is that something that you would see as valuable in terms of how a coach can help
as well?
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24:22 Tim Phillips Yes, and one of the best ways that you can do that is to have the business
community nominate and dedicate, more importantly dedicate, full time one of their
respected rising stars within the business community to serve as that liaison and
sponsor.
And not throw it in the lap of the outside third party consulting firm to do the
requirements gathering.
24:54 Tom Floyd And in terms of how a coach can get involved, are these internal coaches or
advocates on the inside that should be doing the coaching?
Is it an external resource or resources that are paired with the rising star that you
mentioned?
What would that look like?
25:16 Tim Phillips Well sadly, in reality, the coach usually comes in after the client is mortally wounded
and it’s a little too late.
Best of all worlds and what works well is teaming a coach who serves as a facilitator
with a rising star from the business community, as well as teaming them with a rising
star from the information technology community as well as the person from—if you’re
using one—the third party consulting firm.
25:51 Tom Floyd So it’s almost like they’re a mini swat team or task force, so to speak.
You’ve got the coach, you got the IT rising star, the business rising star, and if there’s
a third party involved, somebody who’s really a liaison there too.
26:02 Tim Phillips It’s really an empowered mini executive team for the enterprise project.
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26:10 John Mooney So Tom, I’m just a little bit nervous here that we’re getting into the notion that the
coach, per say, can be a panacea here.
In many cases there are really difficult organizations and environments.
I remember a book a few years ago, Set Up To Fail.
I think one of the core issues here in a lot of business organizations attempting to
adopt and implement large scale IT systems that the organization—and in particular
to pick up on what someone was saying a few minutes ago—the relationship
between the IT department and the business executives is fundamentally so
dysfunctional that not even the best coach in the world alone can bring about a
successful outcome.
26:53 John Mooney To me, I think one of the critical things that has to happen very early on—and maybe
before the coach comes in, or maybe as part of the engagement of the coach—is
really to set up a functional partnership.
A working relationship between the senior business executive of the particular
business unit that’s going to be impacted by this IT system.
And then the IT organization that’s going to support the project.
And I think there needs to be very clear clarity around—as John was saying I think—
what the ultimate business impacts are that are expected and what the measures of
those are.
But I think there needs to be very clear accountability around who is ultimately going
to be responsible for the achievement of those business impacts.
27:34 David Taylor John, this is David, I am—if there is one characteristic across projects I’ve seen that’s
succeeded, it’s been where the senior business and the senior IT executives have an
incredible trusted relationship whereby they have informal communication everyday.
I mean, let’s face it, project manager meetings are a complete waste of time, they’re
just designed so you can protect your back.
And these people have such trust in each other.
They can—on an ongoing basis—they can find out and ask each other every day if
there are any show stoppers? What’s going well, what’s not going well?
Is there anyone else we need? Is there anyone we need to get rid of?
And with that level of communication they can achieve a lot.
28:13 Tom Floyd I’m going to go ahead and go pause again, I’m hearing the music for our next break.
Stay tuned everyone, more on Coaching for IT Managers when we return.
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31:30 Tom Floyd Welcome back to today’s show focused on Coaching for IT Managers. We’re
privileged to have four outstanding guests on today’s show: David Taylor, John
Baschab, John Mooney, and Tim Phillips.
I want to land back on a point that came up before our last break.
And it was a very good point about not setting an expectation for a coach to come in
and be able to solve world hunger basically on some of these engagements.
I also want to come back to some the historical things mentioned that tend to go on
between business and IT organizations.
31:59 Tom Floyd One of the things that was mentioned was historical tension, so to speak—or a rub,
for lack of a better word—between the business side of the house and the IT side of
the house.
To help our listeners understand that a little bit more, from all of your perspectives,
why does that exist?
Why is there such a rub?
32:19 John Baschab This is John Baschab, in our business we interview a lot of CIOs in helping to asses
their IT departments.
And one thing we’ve noticed is that often times—and this is particularly true for mid
sized companies—the CIOs have come through a technical track, either from the
operations side or from the application side.
And they haven’t necessarily developed a lot of outside relationships with the
business executives.
32:45 John Baschab And so one story that really sticks out for me was a CIO who could tell us down to the
penny what their datacom bills look like, but didn’t know any of the spouse’s names
of any of the top executives of the company.
And as we were discussing before the break, it is of critical importance to have that
day-to-day working relationship with the other senior executives in the company.
And if you don’t have that you’re going to have a lot of trouble getting your initiatives
pushed through and getting the support that you need to get anything done.
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33:11 Tom Floyd Do you find that as a skill, it is just not something that CIOs and other folks on the IT
side are naturally thinking about?
For me for example, it naturally occurs to me to reach out to people. I’m very people
focused, very relationship focused.
And a lot of that’s based on my job as a consultant as well, but I also think I came out
of the womb talking, so to speak.
I’ve probably been talking since the minute I hit this earth.
33:35 John Baschab Yes, I don’t think it’s a natural part of the way IT “thinks.”
As we talk about coaching, a good place that I think coaches can help is, getting
CIOs more externally focused, both within their company, and outside their company,
on developing relationships.
Anybody that’s been in sales does this naturally, but CIOs don’t necessarily.
33:52 David Taylor I think we need to be careful when we use the word naturally.
I mean we can assume that all CIOs are human beings and when they were children
they naturally spoke and they formed relationships.
I think that the thing is though, that they perhaps end up looking at technology, and
let’s face it, in the last sort of 25 years, technology people have been rewarded for
how much technology they understand.
Until suddenly one Monday they’re told they’ve got to build relationships and be
business executives.
34:15 David Taylor And that’s why I think they need to go back to the basics of communication and
building relationships.
And actually back to influence and persuasion as well.
And that could be external, it could be internal. Tesco, I don’t know if you’ve heard of
Tesco, one of our most successful organizations, what Terry Leehe does is he
actually moves his executives around.
So one year he’ll have the IT director look after a finance area and visa versa, HR
look after IT.
And he believes that provides really broad executive business experience.
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34:43 Tim Phillips Good point, I’d echo that.
And something you said earlier dove tails into this, you have to move away from this
traditional SLA mindset where you’re just simply keeping the lights on and everything
running and humming at 99.9%.
And that’s my focus and that’s the only needle on the dial I’m watching.
And as a result of that, the perception of the business community is, this is basically
an ongoing support function that this person is responsible for.
They really don’t have a lot of business acumen, they don’t understand ROI and pay
out and the terms that we talk in.
And so as a result, they’re viewed as an outsider.
They don’t have a seat at the table.
35:33 Tom Floyd So it sounds like there are many different things that could help here in addition to
coaching.
It sounds like having a career development roadmap or a development framework,
and training and the things to really help build and instill some of these overall
business skills would also help.
Is that an accurate statement?
35:56 John Mooney I would agree with that Tom.
Actually it’s interesting, from David’s statistics, I think it’s already happening.
David’s statistics said that far more of the CIOs that he’s done his research on are
coming through a non technology—and probably, I’m guessing—through an
operations route, then people who come through a technology route.
So I think you already see that happening.
36:16 Tom Floyd I think the other thing that has to happen to alleviate this big gap that exists between
the IT departments and business units is that business units too have to stop being
willing to abdicate responsibility for everything related to IT to the IT department.
Business executives need to also embrace the fact that IT, in many industries now, is
fundamentally embedded in business processes.
And you can’t really separate it.
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36:44 David Taylor I agree with that. There’s an ultimate irony, Tom, here. And that is that most
business executives can get qualifications, and accreditations, and memberships
with professional bodies, but whenever a CEO recruits a IT director or a CIO, they’re
number one question is; what’s he or she like?
So this is the ultimate irony, these people have got a technology background and
what gets them promoted is their personality.
37:06 Tom Floyd Interesting. Now we started to get into this a little bit on the business side—so we
talked about some of the things historically that have caused the rub.
It sounds like on the business side some of it’s even not just with processing—with
understanding I should say—how the system’s going to be used within the current
process and advocating that.
But it sounds like accountability is almost an issue as well.
That a coach could really come in and provide some guidance about how the
business can be more accountable in the future for ensuring the success of the
project.
Is that a correct statement too?
37:49 Tim Phillips Yes, I would concur with that. This is Tim, Tom.
What we find is, sadly, the IT organization ends up being an order taker.
We’re going to spend X percent of our revenue or profit on IT this year because that’s
what the other peer group, other members of our peer group do.
So here’s your budget. But here’s all the things we want to have done this year.
And usually from that order taker perspective, the CIO or the IT organization, have
very poor communication and persuasion skills to be able to come back to the
business community and say, “this is really unrealistic.”
At the end of the day, there’s three things, you can have it good, you can have it fast,
or you can have it cheap.
38:40 Tom Floyd I use that same analogy!
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38:40 Tim Phillips But you only get two of those three. You pick the two that you want.
And you can have a very, a very cohesive and cogent conversation just using that
simple model.
Whereas today the IT—it basically is, here the IT order, you go out and get the
integrator. Here’s your budget.
And we have to have it in by December 31st when we close the books and turn it on
on January 2nd when everybody comes back.
So our entire sales force can start using it.
39:09 John Mooney I would like to add something in here too.
I think one caution that we have to add into our discussion, that is, not all IT projects
are similar.
And there’s different categories of IT projects that range in terms of the actual impact
that they have on the business and on the business executives and business
professionals.
There are many IT projects, pure IT projects around the installation and upgrading of
network infrastructure, of messaging and email systems, that happen in the
background, and they happen very successfully; upgrading of servers and the
building of capacity.
And those can happen very successfully completely under that responsibility of IT
managers.
39:49 John Mooney There’s a different subset however of IT projects which will really fall very much into
this notion of IT enabled business projects.
It’s projects in which we’re going to fundamentally change and then support a
business process through the use of IT.
And I think another thing to bare in mind here, that in some level, helps simplify the
problem.
Because it’s not all IT projects that require this close partnering between the
business unit and IT units.
And it’s not all projects which really require the business executive to have overall
responsibility and accountability for the business impact.
40:25 John Mooney I just want to add that in there too.
It’s not every single IT project that needs to be approached in the same way here.
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40:33 David Taylor There’s another irony there isn’t there, Tom? Because if IT leaders can actually do
so-called IT projects successfully, it’s saying that they can’t put those into business
benefit.
Surely every project—be upgrade of a server, or improving an email system—should
have a business benefit.
And if IT leaders—and I agree with you—tend to do those better, it’s a shame they
can’t put those into business figures. Because if they can’t put those into business
language, what chance have they got on the really big projects?
41:00 Tom Floyd Well in terms of those really big projects—and I think that was a great distinction that
was just made as well—two terms I’ve heard several times now are influence and
persuasion, especially in terms of really growing those skills more.
And maybe coaching folks on the IT side to demonstrate those to allow them to have
more effective conversations to push back when needed with folks on the business
side, etc.
To help some of our listeners out there who are on the IT side, what are some of the
typical care-abouts from the business side?
\\What are some of the pain points, some of the care-abouts, things like that? That
when trying to influence and persuade on the business side that someone on the IT
side should keep in mind?
41:42 John Baschab Well Tom that’s a great question and one that we’re dealing with every single day as
we coach CIOs on how to present their ideas.
And what’s interesting is that it’s not so much that CIOs seem to get wrong what the
business cares about.
But the portion of the time that they spend talking about those components is
disproportionate to the way the business cares about them.
So we will typically be helping CIOs prepare a presentation to give to the board to go
get an allocation to do some big project or another.
And the board will say we’d like to know what is it and what does it look like when
we’re done?
How long is it going to take? How much is it going to cost? What are some of the
big risks? What are the sorts of things that can go wrong? And what do you need
from us to get it done.
And the CIOs will often spend all of their time talking about what it is versus the other
things that people care about, which is the budget, the timeline, the capital required,
and what the risks are.
And so there’s this disproportionate focus on the—
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42:44 Tom Floyd I hate to cut you off; I’m hearing the music for our next commercial break.
Let’s go ahead and go on pause.
Stay tuned everyone, more Insight on Coaching when we return.
45:23 Tom Floyd Welcome back to Insight on Coaching, I’m Tom Floyd.
Before our last break we were talking a little bit about some of the “care abouts” on
the business side that IT managers can keep in mind as they’re communicating and
working with folks on the business side.
And it sounds like—from some of the things that we just heard before the break—that
in some instances it’s also not getting into all of the details, and getting to the point,
are both really important as well.
45:52 Tom Floyd And during our break, Tim, you just brought up some great points as well.
One of the points you gave was around being able to talk without using PowerPoint,
for example.
Can you talk a little bit more about that?
46:02 Tim Phillips Yes, I’ll be happy to. One of the things that we’ve found is that executive teams,
boards, decision making bodies have grown so tired and weary of having to—we call
it the death by PowerPoint skull drag—that it’s very refreshing when someone can
simply come in and talk as if they’re telling a story.
Here’s what we want to do, here’s the benefit we think we’re going to capture, this is
how we’re going to do it, here are some of the risk points. And then here are points
along the way that if we find that we’re mistaken going into this, this is how we can
disengage.
And present it as if you’re talking to a National Honor Society high school class.
46:51 Tim Phillips Board members are very bright. They don’t care about the technology or the tool.
Tell me what it does and how it will grow the business or we’ll save costs.
And then talk in terms of ROI and payout and traditional business metrics.
And then allow them—if you have someone in the audience who is a technology
maven, they will be sure to ask you the questions on the detail, and you’ll have those
answers in your back pocket.
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47:20 David Taylor You know building on that point Tom, I had some very powerful coaching when I was
an IT director on how to present at the board level.
It’s not really the PowerPoints or anything else that people have prime in their minds.
What they’re really thinking about is they’re looking at me, as an IT director, and
thinking, “can this person deliver it?”
And that really comes down to the personality, communication, influence and trust.
47:42 Tom Floyd Yep. And the relationship.
47:44 David Taylor And the relationship, absolutely.
47:45 John Mooney And Tom, I’m going to go one step further. I strongly believe that for large
significance IT enabled business projects—IT projects are supposed to lead to
business impact.
It should not be the IT executive that’s making the presentation to the board.
It should be the senior business executive of the division, or the functional area, that
the business impact is expected to emerge from.
Again, this issue of ownership and accountability needs to start at that very first
presentation that’s trying to acquire the resources for the project.
48:21 David Taylor I disagree. I think it should be either the IT executive speaking as a business person,
or ideally, two representatives, one IT and one other person in the organization
speaking together to form that sort of relationship straightaway.
48:33 Tom Floyd So in some cases it sounds like one possibility is to have the business side do it
more, but in others, to have both.
I mean how does it normally go down, so to speak? John Mooney, is it normally
that?
Is that the case, it’s normally the CIO or the IT director standing there by themselves
making that request?
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48:53 John Mooney I would say across all IT projects it’s more likely to be the IT executive who’s making
the pitch.
If you look at the subset of projects which have been successful—I don’t have actual
figures, but my strong intuition tells me that an attribute of successful IT project
outcomes is where from day one the business executive assumes primary
responsibility and ownership of that project.
49:25 Tom Floyd And David, how many times have you seen it?
Is it incredibly rare to see both the IT and business person together present the
case?
49:36 David Taylor It is sadly rare because usually business people—outside of IT are suspicious that
they are going to be blamed for anything going wrong—right from the beginning this
is.
We’ve got major public sector projects here where, you know, it’s a bit like the
business executives saying to IT, “you go ahead and present, I’m right behind you.”
And what they mean is “I’m ready to stab you in the back when it goes wrong.”
50:01 David Taylor But when I have seen it work well, when I have seen this relationship work well—and
I’m sorry, I am a bit of a champion for IT leaders here. When I see IT leaders step up
to the mark and become business executives, I can see these problems being
overcome.
And you know ,we all know on this call we spent a long time—me included— talking
about what goes wrong on IT projects.
There are also a lot of things that go right on IT projects.
Some major IT projects have gone in and have helped our society.
So I think everyone would agree with that.
50:26 Tom Floyd Oh definitely.
50:28 David Taylor Nobody said anything, Tom.
50:30 Tom Floyd Everybody else was quiet.
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50:32 John Mooney Oh for sure, there have been many successes both in business and in public sector.
And I think one of the responsibilities of those who are involved in writing and in
teaching clearly have, is to learn from those successful projects—and indeed, there
has been a lot of lessons.
50:49 John Mooney But you know it’s interesting, Tom, when you did your opening comments and you
listed your reasons that have been articulated about why IT projects fail, it’s quite
interesting, you look across those, very few, if any of those reasons, had to do with
the technology itself.
It was issues around project management, it was issues around communication, it
was issues around stakeholder buy-in and senior management support.
And what fascinates me is, after 45 years of business computing, we’ve known most
of those things for at least 20 years.
And so now the fascinating question is, why do we continue to tolerate this issue
when in actual fact, the knowledge about what should be done is pretty well
articulated?
51:34 Tom Floyd Well it’s like again, I must say sometimes people will tolerate something if it’s not
painful enough—could be one theory.
But then the thing that puts back in my mind is—this sounds pretty darn painful.
I mean, financially alone for some of these projects, it’s been painful.
Do you think that moving forward people are just going to accept it?
51:56 John Mooney You see, pain, though, pain is only impactful if someone, some individual, actually
experiences it.
And I think some of the issues we talked about around accountability are, there often
is no single individual who experiences the pain, there’s organizational pain, but this
muddiness around accountability has been a problem.
I do think—there’s one other thing I want to say real quick—I do think, in the defense
of IT, because I mentioned 45 years which seems a long time—in the history of
business of course, it’s a very short period of time.
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52:26 John Mooney And there is another aspect about IT that’s different say from engineering projects, or
construction projects, and that is that the underlying nature of IT continues to change.
We constantly have new technologies and new systems which become available.
And we are very prone to the silver bullet, or the magic bullet belief, right?
So the last time we did this, “oh that was old technology, it’s now obsolete and out of
date, this new technology, this one, this is the magic bullet that will solve our
problem…”
52:56 Tom Floyd Well we only have about two minutes left, so real quickly I want to go around to each
of you and ask you to summarize in 15 seconds or less, if you could leave one thing
in our listeners minds in terms of overall IT engagements and how coaching can
really help - what are some best practices to keep in mind?
What’s your 15 second summary on that?
David let’s start with you.
53:17 David Taylor I recruit people onto projects who’ve got scars on their backs from previous projects.
Focus on the perception of the project and the relationships and the
intercommunication.
And make sure that your CIO becomes a business person first and foremost.
53:30 Tom Floyd Thank you. John Baschab.
53:33 John Baschab Well two things; one, remember that there’s a Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs in IT.
Nobody cares about business IT alignment if e-mail’s not working.
So get some very good operation infrastructure people in and make sure that your
stuff is working before worrying about strategy.
53:46 John Baschab And then two is make sure that you are spending enough time with senior executives
and people outside the organization so that you’ve got the right relationships to be
effective.
53:53 Tom Floyd Fantastic. Tim.
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53:55 Tim Phillips You cannot over communicate. And the communication needs to be at a level that is
based upon a foundation of trust and really caring about making the other person
successful.
54:13 Tom Floyd Excellent. And John Mooney.
54:16 John Mooney Well I think if you think in terms of coaching in terms of IT managers, IT managers
need to think very explicitly about what business executives need so they can be
good partners in these engagements.
54:26 Tom Floyd Well huge thank you to the four of you. This has been a fantastic show.
As always, huge thank you to our listeners as well.
For more information about our show, you can of course look us up on the Voice
America Business channel, and you can also check out our website at
www.ieconsulting.biz.
Don’t forget you can download the podcast version of the show through Apple iTunes
as well. Just go to the iTunes store, click podcast, and enter Insight on Coaching in
the search field.
Thanks everyone, we’ll see you next week.
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