IT Metrics - How to manage IT while adding value to the business

You have been successful managing your IT department for several years getting a good rate of project achievements and positive feedback from many of your main stakeholders. You have driven your organization to the current stable position where you believe things will remain unchangeable. You are quite confident that everything you have managed to be done till today is more than enough to give you and your teams a long run stability. Yet, picture this, one day the CEO announce to the Board of Directors a shocking information; the business is underperforming for almost two years now and he has get a last opportunity to turn around the current situation during the coming financial exercise. You and your colleagues begin to alternate between panic, hope, confusion and in some exceptional cases, some complacency, as these few ones still believe things will not change too much. Unfortunately for them at the end of the week some strong messages are confirming the “worse” sce...

Project Management is undoubtedly one of the key IT activities any CIO has to properly address if he wants to appropriately run the overall IT agenda. During my professional career many people has approached me asking which are in my opinion the more important aspects of running a successful project, and why? I always come back to them with two main building block recommendations ; the first one is to focus on project communication during the entire project time frame. This is a essential element of a well manage project because doing a proper job on communicating progress, risks, mitigation activities, achievements, etc. we will increase the level of people engagement, both internally within our teams and externally through the entire business organisation. Some times under the pressure to deliver critical operational milestones we tend to focus on project operations and IT deliverables without having in place a proper communication agenda. This is a clear m...

An IT department has to be technology or management driven organization? This is a key question mark for many CEOs when confronted with the need to bring their own IT organizations to a different level of maturity. If he decides in favor of a technology driven organization then the IT department and its responsible person will be normally subordinated to someone at the Company Board level. In Europe the Finance Director is one of the first and common choices that many companies are following, as historically the Finance Director – CFO has been in charge of large company projects having high financial impact. If on the contrary the CEO decides that there is a clear need for the business organization to improve the overall IT performance then he will take the decision to bring his Head of IT to the Board level position. This dilemma differs between regions when comparing the number of companies in Europe having the IT responsible at the Company board level with oth...

If we compare the different management activities the CIO has to deal with while driving a complex agenda, there is undoubtedly one that overpasses most of the others in terms of complexity, criticality and value added for our organisations; we are talking about talent management. People management is an overly wide definition when we as C-level managers are looking at the continuous improvement of key development factors but also about their main core engine, people motivation through continuous professional achievements . Too many organizations, multinational or small businesses, have forgotten the importance of a proper management career through a smart talent management. Most of the young people that are currently hired by a company will be dealing with a clear lack of visibility regarding what they can expect from their organizations, what challenges they have to accomplish in order to go to the next level, which are the main targets the company is really expecting to ...