In these tumultuous times, BizOps teams can be instrumental in ensuring the fast adaptation and effective execution required. This blog post examines how CIOs can help foster the organizational collaboration that is essential in fueling these teams’ success.
In today’s pandemic-wracked world, the imperatives for IT teams have shifted dramatically. The CIOs tasked with leading these organizations are tackling disruptive change, with new, critical initiatives arising that weren’t even on the radar at the start of the year. At the same time, the strategic imperatives that were there at the beginning of the year, such as leading digital transformation, haven’t gone away; they’ve only grown more urgent.
Further, while the demands and the urgency show no signs of letting up, internal teams also have to contend with unprecedented disruptions, adapting to remote workplaces, shifting roles, and revamped processes and workflows.
Within many enterprises, BizOps strategies are playing an increasingly central role. As organizations navigate these roiling waters, they’re increasingly reliant upon BizOps teams to tackle some of the biggest, most pressing challenges.
How do CIOs help position these BizOps teams for success in times of crisis? In a recent report, IDC analysts examine how BizOps is helping foster effective management in times of crisis. This report provides CIOs with proven approaches for applying BizOps to crisis situations, based on proven best practices of CIOs, BizOps practitioners, and business leaders. (See “IDC PeerScape: Practices for Effective Use of BizOps in Crisis Management.”1 ) In the following sections, I highlight some of the most important strategies the report examined.
More than ever, communication is the glue that binds employees together. While always important, in these times of remote working, communication has emerged as pivotal, the connective tissue that ties people together and fosters the comradery, collaboration, and coordination that are essential to continued business success.
Optimized communication channels need to be established, and that’s particularly for true for BizOps teams. BizOps teams are being tasked with responding to critical enterprise needs. Across the organization, various departments and teams need to be apprised so they can assist, inform, and advise BizOps teams—not run the risk of countering or stifling their progress.
To foster this organizational collaboration, IDC analysts advise CIOs to address a number of key efforts:
Under normal circumstances (did we ever have those?), the CIO’s responsibilities for making prioritization decisions were difficult. Maximizing alignment with strategy, fielding requests, and mapping efforts with resources available has always been tough. In these times of crisis, however, these efforts are far more difficult, and applying resources to the wrong endeavors is that much more devastating for the business.
Therefore, it’s vital that CIOs, BizOps teams, and business stakeholders are given timely, targeted intelligence. More than ever, it’s vital that individuals are equipped to make fact-based decisions, rather than simply taking on the projects backed by the loudest advocates.
Moving forward, about the only certainty is that BizOps teams will face escalating demands; more than they can handle. To avoid overtaxing staff, leaders need to ensure they’re prioritizing intelligently. That means identifying the right criteria for prioritizing BizOps teams’ efforts based on evolving realities, continuously tracking key metrics, and reprioritizing existing initiatives as needs dictate.
The IDC PeerScape report offered a great example that underscored the critical nature of intelligence in the current business landscape. In response to the emergence of COVID-19 and the prospects of significant drops in revenues in various segments of the business, a large financial institution’s leadership team sought to reduce capital expenditures. They had to determine which efforts and investments could be put on hold, and which couldn’t.
To make these decisions effectively, they needed intelligence. They needed to know what activities were under way, what dependencies were, what impacts there would be on resources, funding, timing, obligations, and so on. Architects worked with BizOps teams to furnish the insights required. They were able to identify options, understand impacts and dependencies, and develop a new, optimized set of priorities, and they collaborated to mitigate any potential unintended consequences.
In fast changing, uncertain environments, decisions, assessments, and course corrections need to happen more frequently. Top leaders clearly can’t be involved in all day-to-day decisions, which is why it’s now so vital to empower teams at multiple levels of the organization to make local decisions. To do so, it’s important to communicate clearly and to establish a common vision that can inform decision making, while giving teams the autonomy they need to make tradeoffs and modifications based on changing circumstances
With a common vision, communicated and reinforced by leadership, team members across the organization can be clear on their objectives and goals, key deliverables, and top customer requirements.
Across the board, speed is a powerful ally. Through BizOps, teams can accelerate their execution by getting business, development, and operations to work together more effectively. CIOs can further support the need for speed by establishing agile, closed-loop operating models across their organizations. In this way, teams can gather user research, develop hypotheses, introduce new features, get new capabilities in front of users, and employ real-time measurement to gauge results. Based on these insights, they can then revise their hypotheses, reimplement code, and continue to iterate.
It can also be useful to adopt a minimum viable product or service approach, which can help teams stretch resources while addressing urgent needs quickly. Through these approaches, teams can employ rapid and continuous learning, and foster the organizational collaboration that constantly reinforces and refines their shared vision.
The IDC PeerScape report offered a number of compelling examples of organizations that have made significant strides through BizOps in recent months. Following are a few of the highlights:
In the midst of so much change and uncertainty, it’s motivating and empowering to see examples of teams who are leveraging BizOps to not just survive these times, but to thrive. To learn more, be sure to download the report: “IDC PeerScape: Practices for Effective Use of BizOps in Crisis Management."
Kurt Sand is the Vice President and Head of Digital BizOps and Automation at Broadcom. He is responsible for a global team that delivers Digital Business Automation software powered by AI/ML that solves real world problems for the world's largest enterprises. Kurt has over 20 years of experience as a Business Unit General Manager, Strategist, Product Manager, Field Application Engineer, and Software Developer.
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