The CIO’s New Year Resolution: Removing Impediment and Accelerating IT Performance and Progression

 Practice the art of great IT management to make sure the culture/vehicle of the IT team is to recognize the critical role of raising and addressing impediments plays in any delivery. 

With the exponential growth of information, the role of the CIO keeps evolving rapidly in the midst of accelerating changes. The CIO needs to be engaged, and at the most senior levels to help influence and shape the business of the future.

People are the most important element of the business. To win and maximize strategy execution requires a continuous journey of nurturing the best team. To win and field the best team and drive successful change, who do you evaluate, develop, mentor, upgrade, and have succession planning programs? How to remove impediments and accelerate IT performance and progression?

Ask "what challenges do you expect to overcome": With an unprecedented level of uncertainty and ambiguity, it is important for CIOs to be inquisitive with learning agility, be open-minded to embrace diverse opinions, ask people what challenges they expect to overcome, bring the digital awareness among the team members. Usually, the employees’ input helps to get to the point of change. The leadership has to create a culture along with the team where they can express their problems freely. The main goal is to discuss the impediments in retrospective, identify the resistance behind, and make a plan to resolve them smoothly.

Another solution to remove impediment is visualization: In daily routine work, the teams often pretend they don't have impediments. If impediments are not visible, there are no impediments. Encourage people to talk about all the things slowing the work down in any way, managers might find themselves getting better results. If your team is on the right wavelength, someone mentioning an impediment should be music to their ears; their face should light up and they should be excited at the chance to help remove impediments and improve their productivity and effectiveness. Thus, visualization is important to deal with impediments. If stories are small enough, flow well from “to do” to “to be done,” and keep flowing well, then the problem shouldn’t be that big and can be solved with a step-wise scenario.

Good CIOs should have strong communication, influence, facilitation, and collaboration skills: The coach-style CIOs can help the team remove impediments, show people how to explore their own natural skill sets, talents, and strong sides, take into account their own objectives in line with working needs and business goals, accelerate their performance and unlock collective potential.

Because without a stellar staff, few CIO’s/senior IT leaders will be able to achieve much. To overcome challenges of change management and problem-solving, the main emphasis is on doing "better pre-work" - defining the situation and the "success criteria," enabling consideration of the range of options for achieving better results. You can simulate the processes and identify the constraints, robustness, modularity, scalability, costs, requirements, stability, and everything else you would need for optimization. Knowing these before the development will drastically increase the probability of success with an optimized solution.

The business has three fundamental pillars: People, Process, and Technology. IT-driven digital transformation is the journey of continuous delivery and improvement. Practice the art of great IT management to make sure the culture/vehicle of the IT team is to recognize the critical role of raising and addressing impediments plays in any delivery. So the modern CIO can truly become a business conductor to orchestrate a digital symphony.

Posted in: CIO Leadership,CIO Master