A few simple tools and techniques can help ensure success as you implement your technology agenda, whether it's big and bold or focused on operational improvements.
For companies that define their technological strategy based on an annual calendar, the last days of January and February mark a transition from the development of their strategy to its implementation. This can be an exciting time, but also a time that can test our resilience and capabilities as leaders. Initiatives that seemed like a “no-brainer” when shared with colleagues can suddenly encounter significant resistance from unexpected parts of the organization, just as seemingly simple initiatives can run into unforeseen challenges when it comes time to be implemented.
A well-crafted strategy is essential to the success of a technology organization , but it is of little value without effective implementation. Just as a high-resolution map and the latest GPS technology are considerable resources in navigation, they are of little use if you don't know how to use the data they provide or how to navigate the right path to get to your destination.
As you begin executing your technology agenda, consider these tools to help turn your strategy into reality.
Identify milestones and measurements
Technology is generally a discipline that prides itself on having a solid grasp of collecting data and deriving insights from data. Despite this, we are sometimes unable to use the myriad of data available to effectively track the progress of our global strategic agenda. Typically, this is not due to a lack of known tools or data, but rather a lack of defining success criteria and goals for achieving those criteria.
Ideally, this exercise should be completed as you develop your year's strategic agenda. For example, a popular CIO publication provides a list of Eight Top Priorities for CIOs in 2023 , with “building resilience” at the top of the chart. This is a laudable goal, but how do you know if your technology organization is more resilient? What measures indicate your current level of resilience and what activities will you undertake to improve these measures? How will you know which measures are most effective?
Items like “build resilience” are similar to loosely defined personal goals like “improve fitness.” At first glance, these are laudable and appropriate goals, but they lack details about how you will measure progress and what activities you will undertake to achieve steady progress. Without thoughtful metrics and milestones, organizations with vague strategic objectives will perform much like individuals who want to “improve their fitness” – perhaps by making some minor or dramatic changes over a short period and then returning to previous behaviors.
Contrast this with an individual translating the broad goal of “improving fitness” into a concrete measurement – their time to run a specific distance. They can quickly and repeatedly test their performance against that benchmark and create a plan with defined workouts to help them reach that goal. If there is a specific timeline in which they want to achieve this goal, they can adjust their workouts or adjust the goal if progress is faster or slower than expected.
A similar approach can be applied to an organizational goal such as building resilience. First, identify specific cases of how resilience will manifest itself. This could be the time needed to recover from a network outage or a repeatable test such as a simulated hack or disaster recovery exercise. These activities serve as measurements and evaluate your progress as you implement your goals.
You should also set periodic milestones, essentially progress checks, toward your goals. When developing your strategy, set specific goals for each of these milestones rather than leaving them vague. Leaving some wiggle room may be tempting, but ultimately you're doing yourself a disservice. By setting defined measures and milestones as you develop your strategy, you will be able to assess how realistic your goals are.
If you find that your team easily surpasses each milestone, perhaps your goals were too conservative and should be adjusted. On the other hand, suppose you are missing the first few milestones by a wide margin. In that case, you may need to accelerate investment in that strategic objective or do some “strategic debugging” to understand why a gap exists.
Set appropriate guardrails
Effective milestones and measurements must be combined with “guardrails” indicating ranges of acceptable results. For example, if you are measuring your team's response time to a simulated outage and set a goal of 24 hours, what does it mean if the team completes the goal in 6 hours? How about 36 hours? Top and bottom guards define the acceptable range for a specific measurement, and results outside that range should signal that further investigation is needed.
Installing guardrails is often overlooked as it seems like an activity task that will be evident during execution. However, when an atypical result occurs without appropriate pre-established safeguards, your team will be unsure whether that result should be concerning or within acceptable ranges.
Setting barriers before beginning implementation in earnest also forces some critical strategic discussions. If you're trying to implement something new where your teams don't have experience, broad safeguards may be appropriate, and you might even plan a measurement exercise that recalibrates future milestones. If you are implementing an urgent objective, you may need narrow safeguards that identify problems early.
Missing a milestone by 3% could be perfectly acceptable and commendable in one case or a red flag that requires immediate attention in another case . Establishing guardrails in advance prevents debate during implementation and reduces the human desire to accept an outcome as “good enough” and move on when it could be forewarning.
Tune your “Implementation Machine”
There are dozens of bromides about the importance of strategy execution, and they are essentially correct. The perfect strategy with well-designed measures and milestones, combined with perfectly calibrated guardrails, is useless without effective execution and implementation.
As such, it is critical to assess and “tune” your implementation capabilities early in the process of implementing your technology agenda . Just as a new athlete is unlikely to perform at an Olympic level with a few months of training, your technology organization cannot meet goals significantly beyond its ability to implement.
Make an honest assessment of your current implementation capabilities as you define your strategy and begin implementing your technology agenda. Think of these capabilities as a “deployment machine,” which today has a specific set of performance parameters and the potential to upgrade various components to increase these capabilities.
If you find a gap between the goals of your technology agenda and your implementation capacity to execute those goals, you have two options. First, you can narrow your goal. This may include modifying protective measures, milestones and barriers, up to abandoning or significantly modifying that element of your agenda. The second option is to increase the capabilities of your deployment machine. Are there strategic hires that can improve your team's performance? Can you use a partner organization to provide enhanced capabilities immediately? Is there an option to purchase new technologies or tools that enhance your implementation machine?
Take time to understand your current capabilities; if they are insufficient, consider adding some combination of improvements to your deployment machine to your agenda. Don't forget to consider the impact of your strategy on your implementation machine from a portfolio perspective as well. You can have the appropriate resources to implement each item on your technology agenda on its own. Yet, when combined, your agenda as a whole can outstrip the capacity of your implementation machine.
This exercise can also create a compelling proposal for hiring additional staff or utilizing partner resources. Suppose you have a consensus on your technology agenda and can readily demonstrate where your implementation machine needs more power. In this case, you can shorten debates about justifying costs and resources.
Start with small victories
With your technology agenda defined, measures and milestones established, and your implementation machinery in working order, the difficult task of execution begins. If your strategy is a little ambitious, it may seem overwhelming just to identify where to start.
In many organizations, you may be tempted to embark on seemingly necessary foundational activities, ranging from building consensus across multiple teams to designing the ideal operating model or waiting for supporting digital tools to be implemented. These activities can quickly turn into mini-projects that consume an inordinate amount of time while your strategy sits waiting in the wings and decidedly unprogressed.
While these foundational activities can be important, make sure they are secondary to identifying and executing small wins. Small wins are any manifestation of your strategy that can be quickly achieved and shared with internal and external teams and stakeholders.
Small victories achieve two critical goals. First, they create an initial momentum and tendency for action. Seemingly simple accomplishments can profoundly change the momentum of your teams. Just as half the battle of getting to the gym or running is lacing up your sneakers, a seemingly small accomplishment can also shift organizational focus from planning to execution.
Secondly, small victories prove to your teams that they can be successful. Your technology agenda probably has several ambitious goals, potentially delving into areas where your teams have no experience or, in extreme cases, asking you to achieve something that has never been done before . Focusing on these goals in their entirety can lead to analysis paralysis, where it is more comfortable to analyze and pontificate than to be afraid of failure.
These small wins can also reduce skepticism among stakeholders. There's nothing like success to silence doubters, and if you can string together a series of small victories, you'll find that critics will become neutrals or even supporters of your strategy.
As a leader, try to identify small victories that are part of a larger, more challenging goal. Set your teams up for success in addressing these goals, even going so far as to provide more resources or time than you think is necessary. Share these wins with the team and broader organization, and highlight the behaviors that created the success, rather than the brilliance of your strategy.
Small wins give your teams and your technology agenda a metaphorical tailwind that can propel them to more significant successes.
Don't be afraid to adjust (or abandon) elements of your strategy
While failure is anathema to many leaders, in the case of a strategic technology agenda, if all of your items are easily completed as originally planned, you are probably being too conservative. In the current economic climate, there is a legitimate concern about avoiding technology-driven confusion, whether it's untried technologies or massive hiring waves, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't have some “stretch” goals on your technology agenda.
Part of including these broad goals is understanding when they should be modified or abandoned altogether. This can occur for a variety of reasons, from goals that were simply too ambitious to changes in market conditions that force a significant adjustment to your technology agenda. In these cases, take time to adjust some element of your plan or consider abandoning that effort and redirecting resources elsewhere.
The best indicator that it's time to adjust an element of your technology agenda is to define appropriate measures and milestones early in your strategy-defining process , ideally before implementation begins. If you are well outside your limits when reaching a milestone, it is essential to try some debugging of the atypical result. Outlier indicates that some implementation element is dramatically different from what you assumed when designing your strategy.
Avoid the temptation to consider an outlier result “close enough.” It would be best if you had designed your measurements, milestones and safeguards with the best information and understanding you had when defining your strategic priorities. If actual results fall outside of these expectations, evaluate whether your expectations were missed or whether there is an unforeseen challenge facing the execution teams.
A positive outlier may indicate that you significantly overestimated the difficulty of a specific initiative. In this case, you may want to adjust that initiative by diverting resources elsewhere or making the scope of the initiative more ambitious.
A negative outlier may indicate that you have improperly estimated the effort required to deliver an element of your schedule, or that there is something incorrectly configured on your deployment machine. In either case, the outlier should serve as a warning sign that requires immediate attention, lest you allow an emerging problem to escalate until it undermines your initiative.
These tools should create a successful feedback loop that quickly alerts you to any parts of your technology agenda that are at risk. An analysis process that begins with checking and validating the assumptions you made when designing that initiative, along with the performance of your implementation machine, should identify whether the problem lies with your strategy, your execution capabilities, or some change. external that should trigger a reevaluation of both.
There is relatively little overhead to instituting these tools before diving head first into executing your technology agenda. At the cost of a few days of discussions and defining clear measures, milestones, and safeguards for each of your strategic initiatives, you will have a high-performance feedback loop that allows you to monitor the progress of your implementation machine. Seeding the effort with a few small early wins will keep the metaphorical machine running at full steam and maximize the chances of successfully implementing even the most ambitious technology agenda.
Source: BairesDev
