Recycled Bullsh-IT

In most IT shops, dealings with sales execs are normally seen as a necessary evil that stand between you and the shiny new toys they bring around in their swag bags, with just a pesky price tag to overcome. Their silver-tongued charms are at best tolerated for as short a period as possible so that you can get on with the serious task of creating your cloud-based future state architecture.

 Most CIOs do not have a sales background and tend to pride themselves on their intelligence and honesty. Most vendors prefer cunning and poetic license as key skills, so tend to snicker behind their hands at the awkward innocents they sell to. Most CIOs will have picked up some political smarts in their climb up the greasy pole (see The Rough Guide to Becoming a CIO), but this tends to be for personal advantage (or the common good, depending on who you are talking to).  

 However, it has become increasing apparent that some of these suave sales skills are now almost mandatory for CIOs and senior IT executives if they are to successfully manage their sponsors and users. Not only have the business managers become more demanding, they are threatening to sidestep you and do IT themselves, because your suppliers’ sales folk have started selling their snake oil directly to the business. This is partly due to the push from major account management methodologies that most suppliers now use to indoctrinate their wolf packs, and partly due to the need to get around IT budget freezes and cuts by tapping the Line of Business budget owners.

 So how do you implement a more effective engagement and demand management strategy with the business? The key techniques revolve around three principles: Preparation, Engagement, and Tracking.

•  Preparation is about account planning and stakeholder mapping. Identify who your key sponsors are and what they need to achieve their business (i.e., bonus-related) goals. From this information define the IT value propositions for each stakeholder and create an overall demand management pipeline to measure and record IT-driven benefit. Uncovering embarrassing social media and juicy emails for each of them also allows you to have a backup blackmail route to success, if you don’t mind using the dark side of the force…
•  Engagement means developing and executing a relationship management plan between your leadership team and managers, and the key sponsors and influencers in the business. With each stakeholder group or business area make sure you actively canvas the demand on IT and communicate your options and plans to fulfil their needs. Your preparation will allow you to propose more radical and timely solutions that will be greatly appreciated (and funded) by the sponsors. Knowing their weaknesses and desires can also help shape a better bribery influencing strategy
•  Tracking means not resting on your laurels after agreement, or not foolishly believing that the business won’t change their minds the moment you leave the room. Active liaison with the stakeholders is required on an almost constant basis to maintain a low expectation gap between what they asked for and what they now want. Many IT departments fall down here and lose the goodwill built up by their earlier work. Tracking their performance against commitments made (in writing of course) will help to tame and control your more slippery stakeholders.

 If you can manage to instil and lead your team in this approach you will become more successful at PETting the (fat) cats who have traditionally made those unreasonable demands of you. And you can retain control of your ambitious suppliers. 

 Remember, you are not selling to the business, you are ‘facilitating their success through proactive engagement and delivery’, as Sir Humphrey might have said.

“The lion cannot protect himself from traps, and the fox cannot defend himself from wolves. One must therefore be a fox to recognize traps, and a lion to frighten wolves.”

John “Machiavelli” Moe