Which is more important — skills or manners?

The right answer: Both. Because while mediocre employees will never create excellent results, everyone else will torpedo the work of a brilliant but obnoxious co-worker.

Likewise your IT organization. Excellence is important, but not until after the rest of the business invites you to participate. Relationships matter.

Nor is having a “good” relationship sufficient. You have to have the right kind of relationship — one you’ve designed. But how do you do that?

Last week I introduced a technique for starting the process of designing your relationship with the rest of the business, called either “scenario-based design” or “tales by the campfire,” depending on which stage of the consulting sales cycle I’m in. It replaces abstract generalities with illustrative anecdotes as a way for IT leaders to explain to each other what they’d like IT’s relationship with the business to look like.

Once your team has shared these anecdotes … and probed at them, because you need internal consensus on this … what happens next?

Extract a set of between five and seven relationship design principles. These are abstractions tested against each campfire tale to make sure they’re valid. For example, if one campfire story talks about mandatory adherence to IT standards, “they’re our customers” won’t survive as a design principle. Coercion isn’t something you do to a customer, after all. (Unless you’re an IT vendor, but let’s not go down that path.) Examples of relationship design principles: “There’s no such thing as an IT project, only business change projects, most of which have an IT dimension.” And: “To the rest of the company, IT appears to be a unified whole, in which every IT employee acts as an ‘ambassador’ for the department.”

What good are these design principles? They’re what you need for the next step — to figure out how IT has to change. That’s the payoff.

What really matters in all of this is that you have a structured process to help you figure out what new skills and knowledge your employees will need, how some key processes will have to change, and perhaps what new tools you’ll have to put into place so you can have the right relationship with the rest of the company.

See? Telling tales by the campfire can be pretty useful. You bring the marshmallows.

Internal customers aren’t.

Customers make buying decisions. Those who use your products and services are “consumers” or “end-users.” The distinction matters, and in my consulting practice I advice clients to reject “internal customer,” which turns IT into a separate service provider, in favor of a more integral, strategic relationship.

Which is way too abstract to be useful.

Relationships must be designed. To help clients design their relationship with the rest of the company I’ve been using a nifty technique with the expensive-sounding moniker “scenario-based design.” Once a client agrees, though, I switch to its other name: “Tales by the campfire.”

The idea: Examples communicate better than abstractions and generalities. Telling tales by the campfire means using specific examples to explain what you want the relationship to look like in action. It’s an excellent starting point for redesigning a relationship.

It only takes a few hours. Ask each member of your team to describe a specific interaction between IT and the rest of the business — both how it happens now (a scary campfire story) and how it should happen (a heartwarming tale of courage and wisdom). Here’s one example:

How it happens now: “June Summers in Accounting called LAN Support because a new employee was starting the next day and would need a PC. Jack Frost in LAN support asked June for the exact specifications, and explained that the standard delivery time for new PCs is three weeks. June got mad because her new employee was starting the next day; Jack got mad right back because June was being unrealistic, and the whole thing became a giant mess.”

How it should happen: “When June first notified HR that she was going to hire the new employee, HR immediately e-mailed LAN Support with the details. Based on the e-mail, Jack Frost contacted June to verify that the standard configuration for that profile would work for the new employee, got the new PC on order, and then configured it, tested it, and installed it on the new employee’s desk before the new employee started.”

The telling of one anecdote is just the start of the process, of course. Tune in next week for another exciting episode of “Redesigning IT’s relationship with the rest of the business.”

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