October: Conscious Planning
October is probably the most grueling month of the IT planning cycle, given the exorbitant amount of time expended in meetings. Each department—Sales, Marketing, R&D and Manufacturing—will meet with its IT counterpart to plan next year’s projects. These meetings should be dialogue-driven events that result in a shared understanding of anticipated business drivers over the next 12-18 months, current market conditions, emerging trends, and specific strategies to capitalize on opportunities. In preparation for these meetings, it would also be helpful for IT to conduct a SWOT analysis (strengths/weaknesses/opportunities/threats) comparing your company to 3 or 4 competitors. Not only will this assessment point out technical strengths and weaknesses, but it is always wise to know what the competition is up to.
Unfortunately, October is also a time of enormous pressure, as both IT and the Business push hard to achieve MBO deliverables before the end of the year. Too often, the competing time constraints of completing existing projects while planning new ones causes Business to default on the planning side, leaving IT to design new projects on its own. This lack of input from Business leads to “silo” thinking: “We know what they [the Business] really want or need.”
Now, in a perfect world, Business would remain engaged with the IT Account Manager—the one who not only has the best vantage point from which to understand and articulate Business’s needs, but is also well-equipped to offer ideas and solutions to address those needs holistically (end-to-end) rather than piecemeal. But, if Business opts out and IT can’t get it back to the table, or IT believes it actually can do the planning on its own, the next step needs to be the creation of a business case, or …
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