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April 06, 2006The strategy disconnect - when guidance meets practice
In previous entries to this blog I have discussed how a new breed of powerful software development tools is giving rise to another generation of inconsistent departmental applications and explained why the root of the problem lies in the informal application of diverse "best practices" to management. In other words, for a large organization in particular, the only way to regain control of your IT infrastructure is to apply a small number of general-purpose management principles consistently. First find a clearly-defined and self-contained set of management principles applicable to any kind of work, whether carried out by senior executives or junior programmers - then apply these across your organization at all levels.
Only in this way can you guarantee that the strategies and policies agreed at top level will be implemented at lower levels - and only in this way have you any chance of finding out what the status of such implementations are. Do your organizational leaders apply techniques such as Balanced Scorecard, EFQM Business Excellence, Activity Based Costing, Economic Value Added, and so on? Are these techniques seamlessly translated into work practices and resulting metrics at the lowest level?
In most cases, the answers are yes and no. Whatever senior executives may be told by their subordinates, by the time their guidance has been handed down through several levels of management and matched against existing operational systems, the chances of it getting carried out as intended are fairly low. The result of a new initiative is often simply to create more work, as people struggle to extract new statistics from old applications. The problem is not the guidance itself, but the fact that there is no management structure in place that is general-purpose enough to implement any such guidance.
The problem is not specific to IT, of course. Encouraged to "move with the times" by exposure to continually changing advice from keynotes, consultants, business bestsellers and the press, the fear of being left behind and desire to encourage initiative make it hard for a large organization to maintain management consistency in any area of operations. Yet in IT the stakes are particularly high, since it is getting ever easier to create complex and expensive disasters.
Of course, in a modern business environment, a particular set of management principles will only be a candidate for such across-the-board adoption if it is founded on the capacity to allow natural change to working practices on an ongoing basis. For instance, mechanisms for encouraging and implementing feedback are required to support the development of a learning, creative organization, and this makes (for instance) old-fashioned command-and-control styles of management unsuitable for 21st century business leadership. Work itself can and should change - but its management should not.
The heart of the matter is to distinguish the various forms of control that can be applied to work, of which there are 3.
- Strategic control is the definition of how work is to be measured. This is the what senior executives do when they apply (for example) Balanced Scorecard. However, strategic control may also be applied at lower levels. The fundamental output of strategic control is a set of metrics that indicate to other people the basis on which their activities will be judged - though it is up to the people concerned to decide how best to meet these criteria.
- Executive control is the sponsorship of specific work processes - initiating a project, organizing a bid, commissioning an evaluation, ordering a relocation, and so on. The essence of strategic control is to define the Roles applicable to a new work process, specify their responsibilities, and possibly to mandate that there are certain Interactions between them. Executive control can be applied at any level of an organization.
- Management control is the ongoing facilitation, monitoring and adjustment of a work process - from within, not from above. Though a person responsible for management control of a process may have line or project management authority, the essence of their Role is to work with all those engaged in the process. Again, management control can be applied at any level of an organization.
This simple breakdown, drawn from the theory of Human Interaction Management, is enough to support any form of work in any organization. In future blog entries, I will show how it can be implemented using simple proven techniques, discuss its application to IT, and show how it can be used to harmonize the work of application programmers building or customizing systems, business analysts defining services, and process designers defining end-to-end activity streams.
TAKE AWAY
Does your organization have a seamless means of translating the strategy visions of senior executives into the working practices at grass roots - a means that ensures the natural co-evolution of work processes and operational systems?
Or do you see people struggling to comply via inconsistent management practices and operational systems, with consequent waste of time and resources - not to mention increase in stress levels, and increasing disconnect between working patterns and application system interfaces?
If the second of these cases has an uncomfortable resonance for you, stay tuned to this blog.
Posted by keithhb in
Management
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