Strategic Planning for Information Systems (SPIS) — Case Study
What is and what you can learn about it?
In the final of 2016, I was starting in the co:lab team. The team was composed majority by designers and just one developer — that changed to coordinator position when I arrived.
This team was — and yet is — responsible for a large number of projects inside of the company, which some parts of them are divided by the development and maintenance of style guides, systems, sites and components.
But, unfortunately, the team didn’t have the necessary workforce and infrastructure to maintain a good work in this areas. So, in 2017, I started my MBA in IT Management and a teacher showed the Strategic Planning for Information Systems — and where it the things started to change.
In early 2018, I profoundly analyzed the situation of my team and made some proposes with the help of the tool to the team.
What is?
An information technology (IT) strategic plan is a document that details the comprehensive technology-enabled business management processes an organization uses to guide operations. It serves as a guide to IT-related decision making, with IT tasks prioritized and implemented using the plan as a framework.
Source: https://searchcio.techtarget.com/definition/IT-strategic-plan-information-technology-strategic-plan
In the co:lab's context, the main objective with the document was:
- Align and horizontalize the team of existing structures;
- “Humanize” the integration/development of technical projects;
- Provide an infrastructure that supports technical/business needs.
The co:lab "non technical" problems…
The major issues from co:lab was divided in two parts:
Workforce
The mindset of the team was almost ever, try to solve the problems getting a step back from the actual problem, and trying to make profoundly researches and dynamics to build a final solution. In practice, an entire work to delivery a solid solution— the Design Thinking.
This is not wrong, instead, is a good way to solve the major problems in IT. The problem is because with this thinking, they doesn't understand the other rand: when the things needs to be builded and what are the technical needs to build that thing. Because of this, they didn't invest in infrastructure (servers, repositories, DevOps…) and in workforce — contracting new persons to help.
and multiple projects
As a team that take care about a lot of projects, in the pass of the years, they doesn't have time to give a the necessary time to solve and to thinking about technical problems.
SWOT Analyses
In a way to show to the members witch are the issues and opportunities to be treated, the SWOT can help it. The SWOT show us the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats from a analyzed situation as below:
The most dangerous problem in that time was the only one person to take care about technical things and the not maintenance of the legacy and new projects.
To try to solve these topics, the SPIS tell us to try to define some measurable goals to achieve. We can see some of them as follow.
Goals
- Technical alignment by stakeholders: this was the main objective with the introduction of the SPIS to the members;
- Implementation of new POC’s with ease: the team had a lot of ideas to build things that could help them, but in almost times, never worked well because of another dependencies, like infrastructure;
- Decentralization of implementation: only one person to take care about all technical things is really dangerous. If something occurs whit this person, you can lost all knowledge of them and can provoke some issues in the currents projects. Was necessary to avoid this;
- Less infrastructure dependency (DevOps): as a team non technical, all technical projects, in it almost times, it was necessary to get help from another areas to be done. Have less dependency from this areas was one most important goal to achieve by the team;
- More spaces for workshops/training: the team always had space to try and to apply workshops and trainings, but in that time, needed to grow up. So, teach something technical to another members could help in future times in the projects.
To mensure if the goals were working, the SPIS tell us to define some system of progress mensure, for example, the use of OKR's. We can see how was these OKR's as bellow.
Progress measurement
OKR’s are an alternative to provide a general way to measure the progress of something. The method aims for clarify and simplicity, goals in a shorter period of time and the data drive culture. With this, is possible to make analyses within 3 or 6 months, for example.
2020: How are the things?
Until the date of this article, co:lab has 5 documents of SPIS and we continue to make meetings to review and create new ones. The document now it's part of the main projects from the team. A lot of changes occurred and we can talk better bellow.
What worked?
- Better technical autonomy: we get support of a DevOps area from the company to move two projects to get advantage of newest and easiest technologies — use of Docker and React.js, for example;
- One more technical person: we had one more person to help with the technical things. We could divided the work and resolve in a better way and discuss about the possibilities;
- Increase in the number of training applications: we applied seven trainings just in the 2019 year, instead of three in 2018;
The most importance with all process was: to get relevance! All members now knows about the importance of to take care about these topics and with this, we get more stronger and aligned to found and to solve the issues.
What didn’t work?
- It’s necessary more technical people: unfortunately, after we get another person to help, this person left from the company. With all projects growing up and with less time to solve the main technical topics, this person preferred to get other job to be more focused in a newsiest technology;
- It's necessary more time: to make the things work 100%, we need more time to solve and to migrate the technical projects. The team changed at least 2 times of area, with different objectives.
- Managers tried to promote positions without success: we had a lot of improvements in the team and helped a large number of people with our jobs and unfortunately, RH doesn't helped. We stay in the same positions as before. This create a resistance to continue working for the better of the company.
Conclusion
A SPIS can be used to orient the way of the technical/non-technical things can work to getter to get better results. It’s necessary a profoundly analysis about the context of team, which are the main problems and try to think in consistent actions to solve them.
In co:lab, we already get amazing results and we are still doing the working for increase that. It’s necessary more actions, persons and time to get the 100%-what is important is the persistence!
So, did you ever tried something like that? Try and give us your feedback in the commentaries section. Have a good luck!
If you liked what you read, have a question or are going through something similar, feel free to leave your comment;)
Say hello at: my Linkedin.
