Anyone following my posts would know the importance that I put on people in the IT equation. Rarely is a failure of an IT project due to the technology itself. In fact, whenever I hear people complain about an IT solution I immediately look to issues related to the organization and resourcing to determine the problem and not the technology. More often than not, a system’s failure to deliver is related to the commitment the organization has to aspects such as training and resource availability or the lack thereof. Given the importance of people, it continues to amaze me how its this aspect of system development that suffers.
The People Factor
People within any organization are impacted by IT change and whether it’s a new system or upgrade to an existing one, there are implications to people that must be considered. These implications include:
- Workflow changes – presumably we are implementing a technological solution to become more efficient. Efficiency means doing things differently and when you do things differently it means that people are doing things differently. Simply put . . . what you did before the system was implemented will be different than what you do after and you have to build in this change into your implementation.
- Staff training – There is no great surprise here . . . if you change workflow and introduce new systems you need to train staff. There are two aspects to training; initial and on-going. It’s easy to build in initial training into your implementation but much more difficult to incorporate on-going training. One is “one-off” while the other requires continual monitoring (and budgeting!) and consequently is the one most often dropped. On-going training is, however, just as important if not more so unless of course you are in an organization that has no staff turnover. If you have no staff turnover then forget on-going training!
- Additional resources – There is a myth or, more accurately, an assumption made about information technology; it saves resources…i.e., you can get rid of people. Although this might be true in sectors that traditionally employed great numbers of people to get the job done it doesn’t apply in local government. More often than not, the organization was under-resourced in the beginning. Adding a new IT solution generally means that existing workflows can be done more efficiently but really what it means is that you can do more with less. That doesn’t mean you can stop hiring. What it means is if you needed three people to do the job before IT then you might be able to get away with one additional resource rather than three to do the same job. Note I said “one” and not “none”!
Within all of this is an embedded fear of change that must be acknowledged as part of a successful implementation and you can only ease the pain of fear by taking a people-approach (more on this in another post).
People-Technology
I believe that IT has matured to the point where any given solution is high quality and the steps to implement are well laid out and straight forward. Given this, we should be able to focus less on making sure the software and hardware works and more on how the people will work. Let’s start thinking about IT projects as PT projects. . . people-technology projects.
By focusing on people rather than technology an amazing thing happens. Almost by magic, the technology we implement will work no matter what option we happen to choose. In fact, the organization will have vested so much of itself in the success of the implementation it will be next to impossible to fail even if the technology itself is lacking. No solution is perfect and the sooner we realize that it’s people that make the difference the better.
