Managing the flow of an infinite supply of worthwhile projects through a finite IT operation takes finesse. Here's how to avoid the backlog and the chaos.
不久前,IT顾问马克·a·吉尔摩called in to help an IT department that was struggling with project overload. "They'd gotten this kind of attitude -- the executive vice president calls it 'Burger King Syndrome,'" he recalls. "Their approach was, 'You can have it your way.'"
该企业高管认为IT可以提供他们想要什么，只要他们想这样做。销售人员已经得到进入询问开发团队能够在一个星期内创建应用程序，履行承诺，他们会为客户做的习惯。吉尔摩，在圣何塞有线Integrations公司的总裁说，其结果是，IT员工们花费约他们80％的时间反应，危机或难以满足不可能的最后期限，而不是从容地规划自己的工作负载。
与此同时,回答基本技术改进en't getting done. For example, Gilmore was surprised to discover that, though the company had a large data center with several hundred servers, there was almost no virtualization.
"You can't operate that way because it creates chaos," he says. "The quality of the work gets degraded. People's happiness level gets degraded, and it becomes a miserable environment."
不幸的是，这个特别的情况已成为许多IT部门的常态。“这原来是一个长期的问题，” Gartner的分析师Robert处理程序，谁指出，他的公司的研究表明，至少有三分之一的资金技改项目目前都在积压，等待IT人员对他们说开始。这不是一个好兆头，他说 - 特别是因为有这么超载IT专业人员可测量比那些以合理的工作量生产力较低的有力证据。
经济改善可能要归咎于增加应变。在Computerworld的预测2013调查结果显示，受访者43％表示，他们预计今年的IT预算上升，从去年的36％。百分之六十四的预期作出了重大的IT投资。与此同时，59％报告说，控制成本是一个优先事项。在现实世界中，其转化为越来越多的流经IT部门，其人员编制水平已经持平项目。
"Over the years, there had been pretty steady improvement, with backlogs going down and developer productivity going up," Handler says. "The most plausible explanation is that the credit collapse of 2008 led to companies stopping everything they possibly could." In 2010, he notes, IT productivity again began to slip, leading him to suspect techies were once again getting overloaded. Sure enough: "We started looking at other data sources and saw backlogs building up," Handler says. Piling more and more work onto IT is like pouring too much water into a funnel, he says: It works for a while, but then "all of a sudden there's too much and it makes a big mess."
Project Management
Should You Reserve Some IT Capacity?
It's always a bad idea to plan more projects than your IT department has the capacity to carry out. But should you plan substantially fewer, keeping some IT work hours in reserve for contingencies?
That's what Gartner analyst Robert Handler advises. "In theory, if everyone came to the table during budget time with information on all the systems they need, it might be possible" to plan to work at full capacity, he says. "But a week or two after budgets are done, there are already a lot of requests for new stuff. We're in a complex world and there are changes constantly coming from markets and legislature. They destroy the predictability of projects."
Few IT operations are effective at dealing with the unpredictable nature of their work, says Handler. So he looked at other fields for inspiration. He found it in new product development. "Their response is to maintain reserve capacity for uncertainty," he says. He believes IT departments should do the same.
"Some business leader will say, 'We need this project to do business,' and if the CIO says, 'No, we can't, we're at capacity,' the answer will be, 'Then we'll get it elsewhere because we need it!' I suggest you reserve capacity for that situation." IT's goal should be to run at 80% of capacity, reserving the extra 20% for "things that come out of nowhere," he says.
Todd S. Coombes, executive vice president and CIO at ITT Educational Services, disagrees. "I've worked in environments where you set up contingencies, and I prefer to work based on historic data," he says. "If my data from past projects tells me I need to reserve a certain amount of time for unplanned activities, we'll work toward that, rather than assume we need to build in an extra 20% thinking things might go wrong." When people know they have that leeway, they tend to use it, he explains, adding, "I like to have things a little tighter."
库姆斯说，他使用的每一个IT员工的时间详细规划，然后有他们跟踪他们的活动项目的进展。“我们可以看到历史上他们的实际花费他们的时间，”他说。“这是一种规划和设置我们的能力目标的反馈回路，收集真实信息，然后研究这些数据。”这一过程使得越来越准确的规划。
This way, Coombes can plan for the unexpected on those projects that warrant it. "I don't know exactly what unexpected thing will happen, but historically I know it's going to be something," he says. "So we will build that into our capacity model. But it's based on what we know to expect."
- 敏达Zetlin
A High-Level View
How do you stop the madness? It begins with a long-term, high-level approach that takes IT's most important goals into account. Unfortunately, many IT shops aren't taking such an approach. "When I stepped into this role a couple of years ago, we probably had more than 200 projects going at any given time, but we were responding to a lot of quick-reaction type things. There wasn't much of a coherent strategy that linked all those things together," says Joe Mahaffee, executive vice president and chief information security officer atBooz Allen Hamilton，管理和IT咨询公司在弗吉尼亚州麦克莱恩，这不得不为$ 5.86十亿的收入在2012年。
So Mahaffee and his team worked with corporate leaders to identify seven strategic initiatives they believed would be important and then plan what needed to be done to complete those projects within a couple of years. For instance, a decision to move to unified communications allowed the firm to stop spending money on extensive PBX systems. "Now if we're modernizing an office, we invest in voice-over-IP technology instead," he says.
A strategic approach won't work without the support and participation of upper management. That's why many IT departments find that establishing a governing group of some sort -- one made up of IT leaders and their upper-level business counterparts -- is the first step to taming a chaotic IT workload.
“大约一年前,我们改变了我们的模型govern all IT projects," Mahaffee says. "There were four governance models that had some sort of contact with IT, and we centralized all that. Now we have one governing body providing direction and helping us define priorities." That group includes Mahaffee, Booz Allen CIO Kevin Winter and leaders from each of the company's marketing teams and major departments. All in all, the group is about 15 people who meet fairly frequently. "It helps me keep alignment with the business," says Winter. "Requests get funneled to this body so decisions aren't made in a vacuum. Everybody around the table gets a say in what gets funded."
Knowing When to Say No
More important, there is top-level backing for decisions about what doesn't get funded. Experts agree: The only way to put an end to IT overload is with the support of upper-level management. One of Gilmore's first acts at the company with the overloaded IT department was to decree that IT would not take on new projects for a time. And he did that with the complete support of the company's top executive, who had heard about enough problems with technology projects to know something had to change.
"If you try to start doing this without top-level support, business group leaders will go back to the top executives and say, 'IT isn't giving me what I need and therefore I'm not meeting the goals you set for me,'" he says.
Project Management
承包商收拾残局当IT部门重载
工作时只需简单地得到完成和IT员工都超载，一种解决方案是外包一些工作的一个新项目。承包商有其局限性 - 它可能不适合外包项目管理，他们不会有多么特定公司的职能或工作重点是什么的详细知识。但是，与承包商的工作确实给许多拮据IT部门提供了灵活的劳动力时，项目堆积起来。“我有很多谁使用规则公司合作即三分之一的IT项目工作在内部完成，三分之二是外包的，”报告布鲁斯·迈尔斯，在AlixPartners的董事总经理。
对于马自达在北美的业务，依托IT承包商是生活的一种方式，根据CIO Jim DiMarzio. This is partly because the auto industry in general strives to keep full-time head counts low, but using contractors also gives the IT department, which has 42 full-time employees, the ability to shrink and expand at will, says DiMarzio, noting that while his Hiroshima-based Mazda Motor Corp. is a $21 billion global business, the automaker's U.S. operation is relatively small.
"Because we knew we were head-count-constrained, we put together a strategy where most of our full-time employees are analysts and project managers," he says. "We want our staff to be the people who could run this place. We can always go find programmers when we need them."
On most projects, Mazda IT employees serve as lead analysts and subject-matter experts, while contractors do the actual coding. "While they're off doing the coding, our staff will be working on other projects. We try to prioritize so that there's a focus on a primary project and there's always a secondary project they can work on at the same time."
但是，当危机时代真打，比如在车型年的变化或本财年的开始，马自达可以增加承包商参与。“如果我们发现我们是很好的系统分析员出来，我们将采取较小的项目之一，其打包，并有销售商之一做一应俱全，”说一点：Dimarzio。
When that happens, "we insist that there be fixed-price bids on those projects," he adds. "That helps make sure they stay within their time frames and pay attention to the projects. It's not a never-ending supply of money coming their way."
马自达还具有现场每个服务提供商的一个或两个代表，使他们能够了解公司会从承包商最为受益。这一点很重要，因为马自达也有自己的高科技项目的方法，并坚持认为承包商遵循它。
Some contractors have become virtual employees, working on-site on an ongoing basis. "There are enough projects that we always keep them fully occupied," DiMarzio says. "We want to keep them on our account rather than someone else's account." And when IT is ready to hire someone full time, they're ready and usually willing, says DiMarzio, adding "I've converted some contractors to employees."
- 敏达Zetlin
“我通常我参与了有关要推迟项目的对话 - 但是我们的企业领导也参与，”说Todd S. Coombes，执行副总裁兼首席信息官ITT教育服务，总部设在卡梅尔，印第安纳州，与全国各地的140个校区中学后教育公司。“我们的高层管理人员小组一起工作很好，我们都在讨论作出决定之前，通常情况下，我没有在该级别发送邮件。我可以在较低的水平有，我不介意，因为我有我的老板的支持。”
When you do have to say no to a project, your goal should be for the person who hears that no to feel good about the rejection. This is especially true if you're seeking to reduce or eliminate影子IToperations, which are typically set up by business executives who decide to take matters into their own hands when they can't get IT to provide a desired technology quickly enough. "If they hear no without having bought into how that no was arrived at, they'll get it from someone else," Handler warns.
The key is transparency. "If you have a CIO deciding what gets done and what doesn't, the people who get their projects done will be happy," he continues. "The people who don't get their jobs done, if they think the CIO was fair and really thought it through, and if they understand the reasons for the decision, they'll still be happy 80% of the time."
你也许可以通过让公司的高管字面上登录到该进程以增强活力，他补充说。“如果你让人们同意过程的两个目标和过程本身，他们往往会接受的，因为这种现象称为它的承诺一致，”他说。这种影响双打，当人们认同的东西而不感到强迫和做了一些积极的信号该协议。
Measuring IT Capacity