A brief Friday reminder that we have to concentrate on what is critical, despite all the day by day complexities and difficulties of technologies!…
All much too generally I see projects failing not mainly because the technologies aren’t operating, but simply because not more than enough consideration has been compensated to the people today remaining displaced.
For instance, numerous several years in the past an government dashboard task was really approximately derailed by just one of the govt assistants. The dashboard was created to substitute and automate several several hours of manual get the job done that the assistant experienced been carrying out for decades.
The IT staff naively ignored the implications for the assistant herself. She was not thanked for all the challenging do the job that she had been executing, that was necessary for the managing of the company. Regardless of her deep know-how in what details was expected, what troubles there have been with the information resources, etcetera., she wasn’t integrated in the undertaking. Nobody manufactured any strategies for how she could use her skills in other places to assistance the organization.
Confronted with what amounted to a significant demotion, she resisted the task. Presented her abilities, she was capable to position out the means that the undertaking would supply less beneficial details than her very-tailored guide procedure, and experienced the guidance of the executives who previously had what they needed.
Finally somebody arrived to their senses, assisted her changeover to a function extra adapted to her details capabilities, and made sure that the IT crew worked closely with her to produce an even better final result for the executives.
This sort of “culture blindness” is normally at the coronary heart of failed technology tasks. To marginally misquote Upton Sinclair: “It is tricky to get someone to fully grasp a little something, when their income relies upon on them not understanding it.” In this case, it applies to the assistant, but also to the IT personnel that, most likely unconsciously, underinvested in all that “human stuff” — this kind of as reaching out to the people performing it currently — due to the fact it would “get in the way” of delivering the project…