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|In: Career Management|Last Updated:

Which matters more, working on what’s most important, or doing whatever you’re working on well?

I raised the question a couple of weeks ago and several correspondents asked for more. Here goes.

As the figure shows, doing the work matters more, because no matter what you’re working on, if you never get it done, or deliver junk when it does get done, you won’t deliver any value (no, this isn’t intended to be “ripped from today’s headlines.”)ValueQuadrants

So unless you or whoever gives you your assignments has truly horrible judgment, if you get the job done, whatever the job, you will deliver some value.

Which means that if both IT governance … budgeting and priority-setting … and delivery are broken, fix delivery, because in the greater scheme of things, doing the work is always more important than managing the work.

More important, at least, if your measure is the value you deliver. If you value ego-gratification or the amount of power and influence you have, that’s a different matter.

But not entirely, because if those who set direction and manage the work don’t run competent organizations, they’ll need to add blame-shifting to their repertoire of management skills. Otherwise, the visibility they crave will backfire.

Which is the logic behind guideline #7 of the KJR Manifesto — before you can be strategic you have to be competent. If you can’t deliver the goods, nobody will care about your brilliant insights.

Especially with respect to IT, there’s another reason competence trumps priority-setting in the corporate hierarchy of values, and it’s a nice irony: If priority-setting is more important than getting the work done, that just elevates the importance of getting the work done even more, because there are only two meaningful outcomes of the IT priority-setting process — scheduling or rejection.

It’s like this: A list of projects, ranked by priority, is more or less useless. Some projects need the deliverables of other projects, so they can’t start until their predecessors are done no matter what their priority. Others depend on staff assigned to other projects too, so one or the other has to wait.

And, business planners, being planners, have an annoying habit of wanting to know what’s going to get done this year.

Right down at its core, what IT governance does, then, (really, business change governance but that’s a well-worn topic here so let’s not quibble) is maintain a projects master schedule. And because what determines when one project on the master schedule can start is when projects it depends on actually finish, they’d better finish on time. Predictably on time.

It’s that competence thing — without it, the project master schedule is just pretending.

Doing the work is always more important than managing the work. Want more evidence? Let’s go to annoying sports metaphors. Like, in football, the basic blocking and tackling wins more games than calling brilliant plays.

If you prefer baseball, if you don’t have great bunters and fast runners, there’s no point calling a suicide squeeze.

Perhaps you like historical metaphors. Consider the case of George Washington. By any reasonable measure he was barely competent at strategy and tactics, and any ability he might have had at logistics was subverted by the Continental Congress. What made Washington a great general was his ability to turn his troops into a professional army, and his ability to keep his army together (I’m relying mostly on David McCullough’s 1776 for this interpretation).

Does this mean leaders and managers are unimportant? Of course not. Executives and managers who have outstanding talent in their organizations and who manage high-performing teams are in that position because they’ve developed the ability to attract, recruit, retain, develop and promote the best employees in their fields.

Oh, and there’s one more reason doing the work is more important than managing the work.

Imagine you’re a manager. The employees who report to you aren’t particularly good at what they do, and they don’t function well as a team either. But, you figure you’re a good enough manager to overcome this disadvantage. So you start to hold people accountable, hold their feet to the fire, and hold their hands when they need it.

All this holding takes a lot of time and attention. Where does it come from? From your ability to gather information and think about what it means … exactly what you can’t afford if you think what matters is setting brilliant strategies and tactics, and making smart decisions.

It’s the Edison Ratio one more time: Genius isn’t just one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration. If the 99% isn’t very good, there won’t be any time left for the 1%.

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|In: Career Management|Last Updated:

Well this was painful, and it’s relevant to how CIOs can thrive in the PC-plus era.

Office 2013 stopped working on my Windows 8 tablet – every Office application crashed immediately after being launched.

Neither of Office’s two repair processes helped. Un- and re-installing Office didn’t help. Reverting to the last breakpoint didn’t help either. The Windows 8 refresh process did, but required that I reinstall Office. Which then refused to activate.

According to the first Microsoft tech I worked with, Microsoft limits how many times Office can be reinstalled on the computer for which it is licensed — a restriction not mentioned in the EULA. Anyway, for a mere hundred fifty bucks he was willing to sell me an extended warranty, after which he would fix my problem. I asked to speak to his manager and he refused. Not a good showing.

The next day a different tech grasped that this was a licensing server problem, not an Office problem, and quickly fixed it.

Let’s imagine a CEO accepts the now-popular suggestion that cloud computing and BYOD mean it’s time to move IT into the business departments, which will all happily replace the company’s expensive and complicated enterprise applications with cloud-based SaaS alternatives.

So they do, cheerfully buying their PCs from Costco and their copies of Office through Amazon, while using Dropbox or Google Drive for shared storage. (Contrary to popular wisdom, by the way, they won’t move off of Office, because they can’t. The alternatives just can’t handle what the company’s more sophisticated employees need; also, many of them exchange documents, spreadsheets, and presentations with vendors and customers who need to see them in unscrambled form.)

This arrangement works just fine. Until, that is, something breaks, like for example, Office starts to crash for no apparent reason. Only now there’s no help desk to call, because IT has been divvied up among the business departments, and, by the way, the company no longer has an enterprise license because who’s going to take care of buying one?

Answer: While decommissioning IT, most likely everyone would have figured out the need for some IT, to handle things like the company’s networks, PC provisioning and end-user support.

Which is how CIOs can survive the current round of why-IT-doesn’t-matter-anymore thinking: Embrace it.

Start with the IT service catalog. While some of its proponents took the catalog metaphor off a cliff (yes, that was intentional), suggesting it include such niceties as pricing, the core idea … that what IT does should be public knowledge … is a pretty good idea, and, by the way, the more political the management culture, the better this idea is.

So here’s what you do. As part of the next IT strategic planning cycle, gather the company’s executives together and make the following speechlet:

We all know about the cloud. You all probably know that “bring your own device” is a reality, and that we in IT are now asked to support a lot of employee-owned technology. You might have read some of the forecasts that say IT spending outside of IT will and should be growing a lot faster than IT spending inside of IT.

The cloud and BYOD are real, they’re important, and they mean we need to re-think how we make IT happen in this company. We all know spending is a bad place to start. It’s an output variable, not an input variable. So here’s what I propose.

As an executive team, our job is to establish the principles we should use for deciding what should happen where. With these principles to work with, my team will wade through the IT service catalog and figure out how our new principles change how we as a company make each service happen. We’ll bring the items that change the most back to this committee for review.

Once we’ve figured out who’s going to do what, we can figure out what this means to the budget … and whether we should be moving staff, too.

Yes, this will be uncomfortable. It isn’t the first time new technologies have re-drawn the business/IT boundary, though. The electronic spreadsheet, for example, moved most small-scale development out of IT, just as VOIP moved the telephone system into it. All in all you’re better off leading this parade than you are trying to stop it from happening.

And as a fringe benefit, it gives you an opportunity to remind the company’s top executives of all those things IT does that nobody seems to appreciate.

It’s all good. Or at least, it’s better than any of your other alternatives.

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