IT leaders need to know how to leverage and prioritize, and they must consider the business-relevant factors in order to close blind spots and create effective strategic planning.
IT management is complex and multifaceted, IT planning is an integral component of business strategic planning. To make planning effective and practical, IT leaders must ensure the organization has a clear vision, well-defined strategic goals, and gain the contextual understanding of the inter-connectivity of both visible and invisible business success factors.
However, in practice, the planning fallacy is common inside and outside of the organization at both strategic and operational management level. Here are some cause-effects of IT planning fallacy.
Planning made by the people who are not responsible for the execution (higher management): The disconnect between planning and implementation occurs when the wishful thinking at higher levels detaches from the reality at lower levels. IT planning fallacy and strategy management misalignment will further enlarge business-IT gaps. The planners need to evaluate whether they have a silo mentality or have a holistic perspective. Silos have individual or functional goals, but strategic goals need to be shared and common to ensure the whole is more optimal than the sum of pieces.
It’s important to encourage critical thinking and be skeptical about some traditional management routines. In business circumstances, if you have groups of people who will execute whatever comes down the pipeline, and those that have problems with tasks will ask questions and approach better ways to solve issues. How these questions are handled, more than anything else will tell you the health of the organization. Top leaders who are someone above the silo are supposed to connect all the individual puzzle pieces together and overcome IT planning fallacy.
The missing links to cross-functional communication: IT management is the business of the entire company. One of the causes of planning fallacy is miscommunication between varying shareholders, between top management and the rest of the organization, or between various business functions. Often, objectives are not actionable because they have not been communicated properly to the people who are responsible for their delivery. With the missing link to communication, there’s a missing link between the organizational objectives and individual objectives. It further creates gaps between planning and execution.
To avoid IT planning fallacy, it’s important to practice self-awareness and accept vulnerability. The plan is nothing but planning is everything for adapting to the "VUCA" business new normal. Top IT management not only needs to gain an in-depth understanding of the business and capture customer insight but also, you need to be vulnerable to hearing the ideas challenged from a viewpoint different from your own, improve cross-functional communications to anticipate potential problems and identify opportunities for solutions.
Unwillingness for the top of the hierarchy to delegate control: The overly rigid hierarchical structure causes functional silo and generates barriers to effective delegation. One of many things a leader can do is to build a good rapport with his/her subordinates. Empower them to deal with crucial issues at the earliest opportunity within their sphere of authority rather than letting it migrate vertical or horizontal through the chain of command points. There is a logical scenario to good delegation practice. The right people are able to adapt themselves and their organization through delegation and adaptation by defining WHAT you want and need.
Many IT organizations are run in silos, there is a shortage of understanding in the whole culture, so from the management perspective, it is possible to run things as programmers rather than managers. To overcome challenges and develop practical planning, it is important to get the bigger picture and be clear on what, who, when, and how to achieve business goals based on the financial value and available resources. There might be errors, mistakes, and failures in planning and implementing, hold the courage to delegate but not to overwhelm those they are delegating to is important,
Skill gaps make the planning just the stack of files put on the shelf: Capability-based strategic planning has a higher success rate. IT is complex, and the IT skill gap is reality. You need to first define the competencies required to achieve your organizational goals at a technical/functional level, behavioral and attitudinal, core competencies, and fill the skill gaps via exploring digital pipelines, encouraging effective recruiting, training/coach. Without a good talent management strategy, organizations do not have a solid foundation upon which to assess, evaluate, or decide who may be capable of performing successfully in their organization.
To deal with planning fallacy, the skills question is one that needs to permeate into all levels of the company. You can acquire talent based on skills, train existing employees on these needed skills, or perhaps do a little of both. It is vitally important if organizations are to see a return on investment of talent development including values, the generic and foundation skills/training that affect all employees, management, and leadership competencies.
Over-optimism leaves blind spots and causes planning fallacy: High mature business leaders as decision-makers need to be cautiously optimistic, but deal with egotism or over-optimism properly by asking: Did I overlook? What perspective am I taking that might blind me to other things I could have distinguished otherwise. That helps to balance out the biases from which the poor decisions are made.
Apprehensions take over-optimism, and we should learn to visualize the dark side of the issue. But also be positive and confident, as failure is part of success when the road is not smooth; be cautious, but not overly pessimistic either in good time or bad time. Only if we are open enough to listen, discern, and adjust, will we gain lessons learned, learn quickly, and make actionable planning in a proactive manner.
Nowadays due to the rapid change, strategic planning is a dynamic process. It’s important for the management to understand the business as a complex adaptive system with different functions, structures, layers, and teams. IT is the business inside the business. Planning well means that IT expertise has to come at every level though, not just technical, but also in business architecture and analysis, design & development, product management, project/portfolio management, quality assurance, and others as appropriate. IT leaders need to know how to leverage and prioritize, and they must consider the business-relevant factors in order to close blind spots and create effective strategic planning.
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