UF Postings Past: Why Is the Business So Impatient?

If you work in IT or on IT projects, you probably have faced impatient users. They never seem to understand why IT moves so slowly. Here’s some hints as to why they’re so unhappy:

Let’s say the business writes up a project proposal. They research their business process, identify key problems with it, define good goals for the project and turn a beautiful proposal over to you. Let’s say they spend a good, solid 6 months putting it together. They’ve done their homework. All you have to do is implement it.

But wait, it’s not that simple, is it? The proposal has to go to IT management (and possibly some sort of advisory committee) for approval. IT has, after all, dozens of projects on its plate, in most companies, and can only do so much. IT probably already has tons of projects started that are ahead of the proposal. Let’s say it takes 2 months to get it sold to management and approved.

Now it needs a budget. You can’t buy hardware and software without a budget, right? This is capital expenditures. It has to go through financial planning. Let’s say it passes their eyes with flying colors, again in only two months. That means that money is approved for it- starting next fiscal year.

Now that the project has a budget, it has to wait for staff to manage it. You can’t start the project without a project team. If you want to do the project effectively and efficiently, you have to take the time to search for and find quality team members. The hiring process of finding quality employees can take months.

Now work can begin, right? Wrong! You have a project proposal in hand, a budget, and staff. You need a project plan, project scope, requirements… you can’t build something corretly until you’ve defined exactly what you’re building.

As you can see, the list goes on and on. The business is impatient for a reason, and it is a good one. They need what they need now. They’ve asked for it, they’ve done their work, and now they’ve nothing to do but wait. And wait. And wait.

The business must recognize though that if they want IT to do a good job, they have to give them the time to do it. In today’s world, you must plan ahead. IT can give a business agility, but only with a lot of planning ahead to be sure the right things are in place at the right time. If you plan perfectly, sometimes you can just hand over a proposal and get a solution immediately, but odds are, it is going to take time.

Even if the solution is coming ‘off the shelf’ from a vendor, there has to be someone in IT who understands and can support the product. There has to be a server for it to go on. That server needs to be built, secured, put into the backup plan, disaster recovery plan… the list goes on and on. Solutions take time if they are to be done well.

You must also remember that it takes time for a good reason. If the business is going to use any tool, it *must* be reliable. There can be no excuses. Any unreliability is cutting into the way business is done. Cutting corners on implementation will always, always cut into reliability sooner or later with software.

The other side of this is that IT has to learn to be more flexible. More and more IT departments nowadays hide behind the project scope and requirements gathered at the beginning of a project instead of being guided by them. Business needs change over time. If they didn’t, IT would not be as valuable to the company as it is.
On the other hand, business changes. If it takes IT a year to get the project going, don’t be shocked if the business’ needs have changed already.

Be ready to adapt to the changing needs of the business, even during the middle of a project. Yes, these changes are expensive. Yes, they are a risk to the project success. Yes, scope creep can keep you from ever getting your project done. Scope creep happens, however, because business changes. If it isn’t changing, then you better be worried about your business, because it isn’t growing and evolving.

The bottom line for IT is this: building software for the business that they don’t need anymore doesn’t do anyone any good. Keep up with changing times and changing business.

The bottom line for business is this: Plan ahead. Don’t expect overnight solutions. Find the best solution to the problem at hand and learn to forecast problems in the future so that you can have what you need in place at the right time.

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