IT Success!: Towards a New Model for Information Technology

9.4. How to start – from checklist to action plan

Once you've decided where to start – or events have made the decision for you – you have to decide on two or three components of the new model to implement, with the objective of institutionalizing them inside of a year. The overall guiding principle should be to institutionalize every year at least one or two of the model components in part of the organization (realistically, you won't be able to do it company-wide). Examples could be demand management, iterative development or time entry. At the end of each year, you should be able to answer the question 'What have I institutionalized this year?'.

Here is a high-level checklist of the end-to-end essentials you would need to implement for the new model. If you were to 'slam-dunk' it into your organization, this is more or less the order in which you would do it. In the next section though, we'll see how you could actually do this in the real world, step by step.

1. CLIENT MANAGEMENT: assign IT client managers to be the single points of contact for your internal clients at the level of department, application or major functional area.

2. APPLICATION MANAGERS: get the business to assign application managers to be the single points of contact for your IT client managers (above).

3. ITERATIVE METHODS: start training or recruiting project managers to be able to run interactive workshops for process modelling, and business analysts and developers to design and develop new systems based on a prototyping ...