Copyright 2002 All Rights Reserved

Figure Out Where You Want to Go
(How to Do a Technology Plan In 10 Pages or Less)

Yoggi Berra, the now legendary Yankee catcher best known for his malapropisms, is alleged to have once said, “if you don’t know where you are going, you could end up someplace else.” This is probably the best advice ever offered to mankind on the subject of planning.

In the Digital Habitat, as in life, you need a plan to implement your business strategies with IT for them to be successful. The primary objective of a good IT plan should be to communicate the vision and action plans for getting things done in a manner that everyone can understand. What kind of plan? A dynamic business IT plan that is written down, focused on specific action plans for execution and very specific measurement goals for their accomplishment. Somebody once said that strategy is the art of denial. Your plan should be thin and action-oriented. It should be very, very thin and project-focused.

IT management consultants have made themselves rich for years by mystifying their clients by developing IT plans that are telephone-directory thick tomes with detailed narrative text, endless pictures and diagrams, including everything except fine English gold-stamped and engraved leather binding. These plans, known in most organizations as “shelfware,” sit on a shelf alongside all the other software and hardware packages that have suffered the identical fate of not being implemented in the organization. Why is that? There are several reasons.

Large plans have a number of defects. For starters, they take a long time to develop and involve many people in endless rounds of very boring and painful meetings. By the time they are completed they are obsolete either because the business, the organization or the technology has changed or the people involved in developing the plan have been downsized, promoted, retired or left to join a competitor. Most are written to be detailed technical tomes nobody understands except the technologists who will implement them without reading them anyway.

So what should a good business IT plan contain? For starters, it should be no longer than 10 pages.

The 1st. page should describe the business strategy in the broadest terms.

The 2nd. page should focus on the major implications the business strategy has for IT in the organization at a business initiative level over the next 12 to 24 months.

The 3rd. page should describe the major business initiatives in greater detail than those on the 2nd. page.

The 4th. page should describe how IT will serve each initiative.

The 5th. page should describe the building blocks of technology within the enterprise, the so-called architecture. This includes 1.) a description of the types of business processes being focused on, 2.) the IT applications software being employed to automate them, 3.) the overall data strategy that describes how enterprise data will be organized concerning customers, operations and the like, and 4.) the types of computer hardware and software that will be put in place to run the applications and a description of the networks involved. All of this should be shown as graphically as possible for two reasons: it saves on paper and makes it easier for any non-technical business person (i.e. mostly everyone!) to understand.

The 6th. page should show what major IT investments will be made by major project, based on the degree to which they deliver business payoff, as well as direct costs for network infrastructure and operations required to implement them.

The 7th. page should describe the business Return On Investment (ROI) that will be derived from implementing these projects.

The 8th. page should describe each project to be implemented, the person and organization responsible for implementing it, a very measurable definition of its outcome or “deliverable” and the dates for its accomplishment. This should include any programs for change that will need to be implemented as well such a retraining people, communicating project goals and the like.

You can use the 9th. page for project descriptions as well, if you must. Otherwise, get rid of it.

The 10th. page should describe how all projects will be managed and reviewed on a periodic basis and the management oversight each and all will receive.

Review the plan each month and generate a new one every three months. Be highly flexible and course correct constantly. But don’t move off accomplishing your objectives. Take no more than five business days to develop the plan with a team the first time you do it. Try to do it in three days or less. Shoot for a half-day review and revision of the plan every three months.

Communicate this plan obsessively throughout your organization so they everyone knows what is going on and only execute plans everybody agrees on. Those are the only ones that have a reasonable chance of success.

Make your daily and weekly project review meetings the place where you ruthlessly monitor execution and implementation. Do not kid yourself and move milestones and project deliverable when you miss dates. Don’t redefine the projects constantly because you are failing at delivering results. Make project management the key to implementing your plan. That is where the real action is.

That’s all there is to it. No mystery needed, just focus and execution.