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Dear Dr. Yeahbut …

I’m a CIO. I’ve been reading your stuff long enough to remember when you introduced us all to the idea of “Digital,” even though you didn’t call it that. Now I need your advice.

Like a lot of companies that are going Digital we’re wrapping IT-based value around our company’s core products and services. Now, more and more of our sales representatives are asking IT for custom services they want to give away.

This was fine when the requests were for our largest clients and prospects. But no good deed goes unpunished, and our sales reps have been going steadily down-market with these requests, pointing out that our company culture emphasizes fantastic customer service.

I’ve tried explaining that it costs us almost as much to provide custom services for our smallest clients as it does for our biggest ones. But I’m having a hard time holding the line without creating the perception that I don’t have a “customer service attitude.”

Any thoughts on how I can keep IT from drowning in requests for freebies?

Dr. Yeahbut says …

I don’t know what you’ve already tried. Here are some thoughts, ideas, and notions that might be useful to you.

Free sometimes makes sense. You’re right to figure offering free stuff to your company’s biggest clients might make more sense than offering similar stuff for smaller ones. But (I am, after all, Dr. Yeahbut), they can also make sense with some smaller clients, namely, those with potential to grow to become a major ones.

The business model for providing fantastic customer service is that it leads to increased retention and “walletshare” – the fraction of the client’s total spending for what your company provides that you get instead of your competitors.

But even if that is the goal, if your company isn’t going to recoup the cost of providing the custom whatever-it-is, then logically the cost should come out of Marketing’s budget, not IT’s.

Establish an ABC cost structure for IT’s Digital services. In a Digital world, the potential IT “surround” for the company’s core non-Digital (would that be Analog?) products and services is, if not infinite, unbounded. To rationalize pricing, not to mention the self-defense advantages, consider dividing your suite of IT Digital Surround services into three buckets:

A services are core, standard services. You provide them at no additional charge.

B services are premium services. You provide them at a reasonable additional cost. You manage that cost by parameterizing the services to make them configurable.

C services are tailored services, the ones I imagine are eating you alive. Do everything you can to provide tailored services on a time-and-materials basis.

Unless, that is, you can satisfy the client’s underlying need with a B service.

Apply the Not-Yes/Not-No rule. This is the rule that says the two wrong responses to any request are “Yes” and “No.” The right response to any request is “I’d love to do this for you. Here’s what it will take.” Then explain what it will take, which includes advice on how to run the request through the established governance practices your company uses to set IT’s priorities.

It’s recursion time. If your company hasn’t already established governance practices to set IT’s priorities then a top IT priority is establishing governance practices for setting IT’s priorities.

Requests for free IT stuff should be added to the rest of the requests for IT-related services that are already sitting in the IT enhancements queue or appropriate backlog. There’s no reason a sales rep should be in a position to make requests for IT that don’t go through the same evaluation process as everyone else’s requests.

They might get favored treatment, but that’s a different matter.

Enforce TNSTAAITP. That’s “there’s no such thing as an IT project,” and in this context it means that the governance practices in question aren’t really practices for governing IT’s priorities. They’re practices for governing priorities, period.

Bob’s last word: Somewhere in all of this, someone will offer up as justification for the request that “the client wants this.” Please, and I can’t emphasize this enough, resist the temptation to reply, “And I want a pony. And a Robot Commando. And an Easy Bake Oven.”

Especially in business settings, sarcasm needs to be its own reward because all of the other rewards you’re likely to get won’t make you happy.

Bob’s sales pitch: Launching a project with a novice project manager? Give them Bob’s best-selling book written specifically for people who are smart and motivated, but who haven’t managed projects before, Bare Bones Project Management. Reviewers say:

“Hard to Find More Value per Page.”

“One of my ‘Top Ten’ Management Books”

“Bare Bones PM is awesome!”

“The author is fantastic; don’t let this be the only book you read by him.”

“I was a novice to project management and this book was a godsend.”

“Arrived on time; delivered at the correct address.”

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The formula for persuasion consists of three straightforward steps: (1) sell the opportunity or problem; (2) collaborate in designing a solution; (3) formulate a plausible plan for implementing the solution that resolves, or at least ameliorates the problem or, in the case of an opportunity, successfully exploits it.

Political case in point (oh, don’t be that way – what follows won’t be tribal and will be relevant to leading in business situations): Here in Minneapolis we’re soon going to vote on amendments to the city charter. The most controversial is an attempt to address the clear and apparent deficiencies in how policing happens in our city.

What makes it controversial (and interesting from a KJR perspective) is how its proponents have failed to follow the principles of persuasion.

Sell the problem? As its proponents point out and its opponents don’t contest is that policing in Minneapolis needs to change. There’s broad consensus on the problem. Consider it sold.

Solution? It’s pretty vague – so vague that the courts have ruled that it can’t be on the ballot in its current form, on the grounds that voters can’t tell, based on the text of the amendment, what they’d be voting for or against.

Plan? Even the proposal’s proponents agree that there is no plan. Their plan is to figure out the plan once the proposal passes. Regrettably, if the proposal passes it would, by law, take effect 30 days later, which, given the vagueness of the solution, is an unlikely outcome.

Imagine you see the need for a change in how your company does business. For our hypothetical we’ll imagine you see severe inefficiencies in how it handles “non-strategic sourcing” (general purchasing, in case you aren’t FBC (Fully Buzzword Compliant)), along with many purchasers paying more than they should for the merchandise they need.

And so, frustrated with the status quo, you form a committee which does what committees do, and produce a proposal. Its explanation of what’s wrong right now is specific and compelling. Its solution, though … centralize non-strategic sourcing … is lacking in specifics.

But it’s the plan, which is to start work on a plan once the Executive Leadership Team (ELT in case you aren’t FBC) gives you the go-ahead, is what results in admiring guffaws at the excellent satire you presented to lighten the load created by so many of the other dreary proposals the ELT has to wade through, replete as they are with detailed financial and process optimization analyses, and fine-grained Gantt charts that illustrate their implementation roadmaps.

Which is to say the ELT laughs you out of the room before you even managed to explain you’re following Agile principles.

To be fair to all parties, your approach isn’t quite as absurd as it seems. While miniscule in scope compared to disbanding the Minneapolis Police Department, replacing it with a Department of Public Safety that might include policing functions should that turn out to be desirable … while miniscule in comparison, centralizing non-strategic sourcing in a large enterprise is no small task. Designing all of it in detail before implementing any of it would exemplify Waterfall at its worst, with lots of opportunity for blind alleys and into-a-corner painting.

And so, chastened, bloodied but unbowed, you read up on Agile and discover Agile isn’t what you’ve done. So you fire up the old word processor and write up a truly Agile approach, which is to say you explain the opportunity much as you’ve already done, but then ask for only enough funding and staff time to: draw up an Epic-level account of what the solution would entail; and describe a set of Agile business change methods that:

  • Rank lines of business from simplest to most complex …
  • Charter and create a “minimum viable product” centralized purchasing department …
  • Transition the simplest line of business to centralized purchasing …
  • Rinse and repeat until all lines of business have been transitioned to centralized purchasing, or, in a few cases, left alone on the grounds that the costs and disruption of transitioning them exceed the benefits.

Bob’s last word: If you’re really clever, you’ll figure out how to set this up so you can quantify the benefits of each line-of-business transition so they pay for the next transition.

Bob’s sales pitch: Want more about how to organize business change? Read (and share) a copy of Bare Bones Change Management).

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