What is the Best Approach to a Major IT Change Project?

This is one of the most common questions that my team get asked, especially for cloud and service migrations. The answer of course depends on the circumstances. What is more telling is the ‘approach’ part of the question.

We have learned that whenever we explore a little deeper within a business, we usually discover if there is an appetite for continuous process improvement (CPI). Specifically, linking IT processes and incremental changes to improve efficiency and quality.

Continuous Incremental Change

The idea of moving IT applications and resources to increase operational efficiency may seem abstract to CPI. But IT change programs can be the catalyst for delivering a continuous business development cycle strategy. This can be a key foundation for the best approach strategy if you want an IT service change programme to deliver on an ongoing basis.

Some of the best examples of businesses delivering sustainable IT change are where there has been a culture that embraces continuous incremental change. This is not to say these organisations are slow at improvement, but business and IT change can take a greater effect when mandated across multiple teams with a common focus on a goal of improvement. I have also seen an attitude towards risk reduction on larger projects with more people within cross-functional roles working within small groups of three and four.

"Leaders must understand the engine room’s complex systems while being sensitive to those who toil in them. Specialising in one while passing on the other will no longer suffice. Instead, leaders must stretch in both directions."

Gregor Hohpe,  AWS Senior Principal Evangelist

Succeeding in Economies of Speed 

One of the best ways I’ve seen this explained was by Gregor Hohpe,  AWS Senior Principal Evangelist. In his talk, “Succeeding in Economies of Speed”, he explained his view of achieving transformation success by using “four levers for change”. I was able to draw some parallels with some of Gregor’s content that resonated with some of our own findings.

1.   Stop Thinking of Delivering One-off Projects

As in one single and significant effort of change, only to then return to business as usual. Instead, organisations should be thinking of transformation more as many continuous efforts of improvement where there is no end-running state and where change is normal. To put this in context one of the biggest blockers in the initial stages of transformation can be lobbying the board for support and their trust to invest time, money and resource into a major IT change programme. Whilst the instigators of change are busy making the business case for the best technology platform and cloud provider they are often at odds with the rest of the operational teams when it comes to potential impact, disruption and reputation loss.

2.   The Classic IT Conflict

Here is where operational folk require harmonisation and standardisation to keep a smooth-running ship whilst the business is demanding change through Innovation and agility. Planning for a major change in one go that will significantly affect how an organisation’s customers, partners and employees will access its resources will always need careful consideration and rightly so. Disruption brings with it high costs and risks. That is often the only approach for some when a compelling event such as a major incident, a pandemic, building lease expiry, etc, occurs and the time to act is short.

What might be the best approach? If you were to ask that question of a Business Management Consultant some may talk first about understanding a leadership team’s attitude to risk and workforce culture. Whilst those attributes are important, when we talk to our clients, we look at the state of business readiness for a planned move or change. By this, we mean everyone across all affected business units is engaged and ready to embrace the proposed change. Technology is usually the easy part, but people and cultures take longer to adapt. So could the idea of changing the environment and continuing to improve on efficiency not always be one big project of disruption but integrated within usual working practices?

Let me be clear here, I don’t have all the answers to how to divide up your workforce from existing departmental workgroups into multiple smaller teams with more team leads. It may sound more bureaucratic, but according to AWS when a smaller team is aligned and can work as cross-functional groups, this can stimulate faster activity with actionable insights. AWS also refers to this approach as one of its levers for change.

3.   Moving Organisational Charts to Flywheels

The effect of more work groups that are aligned means that change programmes now become business practices where decisions can be made locally and more frequently. Much of the work we do with our clients is helping them make that first step towards IT change. Taking on the smaller lower-risk tasks at first (e.g., running a pilot or proof of concept) will help stimulate the art of the possible. We consider this type of experimentation activity healthy. But only if it is done once because it’s seen as disruptive and done in isolation from the rest of the business. It will seldom drive a desire to keep on experimenting and trying out new things regularly. 

Related Read: Download the ebook to rethink and revamp your operating models to realise cloud technology’s full potential.

Conclusion

To foster a culture of continuous innovation requires some lateral business thinking. Moving to a cloud operating model with fewer constraints from an incumbent will have its challenges. Operational teams that function as smaller work groups are one key step. Those teams must set common goals and process exceptions that allow freedom to step out and try new things. AWS’s customers agree that this can promote innovation and culture to embrace constant change.

This dispersed team formation can allow more decision-making to be done more frequently by taking smaller calculated risks. Decisions can be more localised down to a group lead or individual allowing for more immediate actionable results.

When tasked with evaluating a move of your IT applications for cost savings and efficiency think first about what outcomes the business wants and needs.

Questions you should consider:

• Are you just trying to make one part cheaper or faster?
• Do you want to revolutionise the way people work and engage with customers?
• How do you map out the journey rather than build a project plan?
• Do others in the business have sight of the journey that you want to take them on?
• How motivated and ready is your business to try something new?
• And keep on trying?

You may not know the answers to all these questions but spending some time thinking about them may alter your approach.

How Sify Can Help

Sify is ideally placed to help businesses build a sustainable, fully optimised cloud infrastructure that meets long-term business needs.

Sify offers deep expertise in all areas of cloud and IT infrastructure, combined with proven methodologies and frameworks to help analyse, design and optimise cloud environments.

Our proven experience and expertise have delivered for organisations seeking to optimise their cloud infrastructures, including reducing costs and ensuring resources are right sized, accelerating deployment time for new applications, improving alignment between business functions and helping firms integrate new cloud-based technologies such as AI or analytics.

The Key Challenges We Solve

With a heritage in IT Infrastructure, Sify has grown over two decades to provide a one-stop engagement across networks, data centre, cloud, digital and IT services.

Sify enables you to build an IT infrastructure that underpins business profitability, by delivering flexible expertise to fill IT skills gaps, and by deploying, managing and optimising complex hybrid environments to deliver the right combination of flexibility, security and affordability.

Here are the key challenges our Managed Services can help your organisation solve:

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• Optimisation
  Future-proof your business by optimising your use of cloud technology
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• Resources
  Increase responsiveness with access to the right scale and calibre of specialist IT skills as and when you need them
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• Cost Savings
  Make your IT budget go further by lowering your costs and becoming more efficient
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• Reduce Risk
  Control your risks by ensuring the security and resilience of your IT infrastructure

To learn more about how Sify can help manage change projects, visit our Cloud Optimisation page.