Organizational maturity and the process of maturing an IT organization is a difficult and painstaking process. Don’t pull out your hair; accomplish operational maturity by breaking the changes down into manageable steps. As with any large-scale change in a company or organization, small increments will get you to your milestones.
In our latest blog, we present a case study of how we helped a large government agency to achieve operational maturity with a measured, planned process.
Recently, we worked with a large government agency that maintains a worldwide network and provided IT services for a variety of government customers. Much like a commercial company, this Federal agency needed to address growing operational costs and speed to market issues with new technologies that were in demand by customers. The organization was in a culture of “one-offs”. This means the agency was a requirement-based engineering organization, which addressed each customer requirement with a unique engineering solution. This was very labor-intensive and did not scale. Instead, it led to solution incompatibilities and long service delivery cycles.
Eat the elephant one bite at a time, and then laser focus…
First, operational maturity begins with picking an area of high value that you build consensus around. In this case, the focus at first was on automating the infrastructure and service provisioning process. This occurred because the organization was in the middle of the deployment of its next-generation infrastructure. In order to accomplish this, the organization needed to move from viewing itself as a requirements fulfillment shop to a provider of standard services.
This change was well-timed as the organization made a document to describe the services and capabilities provided by their new network infrastructure. Standardization of the network infrastructure and services offered was necessary to enable automation of the infrastructure and services provisioning. Furthermore, this regimentation also benefited the organization by minimizing the amount of documentation necessary for each infrastructure node installation. Third, it provided more predictable service characteristics. Overall, this produced a network infrastructure consolidation and reduced provisioning from the normal days and weeks to hours and minutes.
Eat your peas, please! (Document your processes)
The second part to operational maturity is documenting the organization’s business processes; this is necessary to enable the processes into a workflow management system. Indeed, we all have processes on paper that sit on the shelf. Concentrate on processes that can be “enabled” quickly and leverage technology for automation. Many people yawn at endless meetings about boxes and arrows on a process flow diagram. Process documentation can be painful, but it is worthwhile. As the old adage goes, “You don’t have to like peas, you just have to eat them”.
In our case study, process documentation existed, but had little direct impact because the organization was not required to follow the process flows. By “enabling” the process flows into a workflow management system, everyone in the organization came under a set of common business processes and metrics. Likewise, as they addressed operational issues, managers adjusted the workflow. This forced line-level managers to think about how work within their unit affected other units involved in the entire process. Finally, the workflow management system became the common bond within the organization and dramatically reduced service fulfillment time.
Achieve Operational Maturity Step-by-Step
Managing workflows in an IT organization does not have to be a headache. It requires careful planning, systematic changes, and cooperation from the top-down. As outlined here, start with an area of most need in your company and focus efforts on improving processes there. If the process works, document it and ensure that the process is transferrable to other departments. In the end, operational maturity improves the company’s bottom line. Put your teams to work with better communications and create workflows that scale your company.
