Reorganizing for success
So, you’ve figured out your hybrid “why”, you’ve “started small” to help answer some questions and determine the general direction for your hybrid cloud strategy, and now you’re ready to “build it”. While it would be super enticing to dive right in and get started, you’d be remiss if you weren’t asking yourself the following question first:
“Do I have the right people in the right places to actually make this happen?”
Many IT organization leaders inherit structure, operational procedures, and the overall results of previous decisions. Adopting a hybrid cloud strategy isn’t just a change to your infrastructure and architecture, it’s a perfect opportunity to make sure you’re organized for success. You’re likely going to have a lot of people learning several new things on this journey. It’s imperative that you have a structure that supports working both horizontally and vertically, as well as a framework that supports ongoing skill development and learning throughout the process.
Here’s a few things that we did within our organization to support this hybrid cloud journey.
Divide and conquer — together
In previous articles, we’ve mentioned using an agile mindset — foster collaboration and encourage trial and error through experimentation. We really value this way of working and wanted to formulate our organizational structure in such a way where we could continue to do this and also focus on developing long-term strategies for key functional areas. This is what I call working horizontally and vertically. Team collaboration throughout implementation and enhancement will almost always be required if you pick the right functional areas. But, you’ll also find that your functional teams will continue to focus on their own areas as they develop and contribute to the overall strategy.
For us, we believed our key functional areas were the following:
- Compute Infrastructure
- Storage Infrastructure
- OpenShift Platform Team
- Monitoring & Event Management
- IT Service Management
- Hybrid Cloud Center of Excellence (COE -Adoption)
- Hybrid Business Management (Financials & TBM)
- IT Operations
Each of these areas would need to focus attention on developing their short and long term strategies, but would undoubtedly need to work together to make sure the implementation could actually come to fruition. For example, our hybrid cloud is built on Red Hat OpenShift, but the hybrid cloud development team must collaborate with the Compute, Storage, Monitoring & Event Management, and IT Operations teams to make things work end-to-end. For our IT service management strategy to work, the IT Service Management team needs to collaborate with the Monitoring & Event Management team. Finally, the Hybrid Cloud COE and Hybrid Business Management teams must work with all of our teams, including our customers, to get most of the information they need to employ their strategies.
Ensure everyone fully understands how they are connected to the mission and vision
About a year and a half ago, the IBM CIO decided to adopt OKRs for goal setting and progress measurement. You can check out why OKRs work, but for us it was about alignment and motivation. Knowing that the work you’re doing is important and understanding how it connects to the strategy to help drive the business forward is exactly what we wanted for our team.
We began implementing OKRs, one layer at a time. Each layer of OKRs rolled up to the one above it to ensure we were all working towards the greater strategy for hybrid cloud and the CIO organization. Our OKR layered structure looked like this:
- Layer 1 (top level): CIO organization
- Layer 2: Hybrid cloud organization
- Layer 3: Hybrid cloud functional area
- Layer 4: Hybrid cloud managed teams within functional areas
We’ve gotten great feedback about this method, and our teams really appreciate knowing exactly how the work they’re doing each day connects to the overall strategy.
Re-skill and up-skill your people
Your strategy will change as technology changes. When technology changes, you’re likely to encounter skill gaps in various parts of your organization. Knowing that skill gaps are inevitable is half the battle; being prepared for it when it happens is the key. As you adopt and employ new technologies, you must have a learning and development structure in place so your employees are encouraged to learn new skills and advance their existing skills. This not only helps your employees feel supported in their career journey and professional development, but it also allows them to transform with the organization.
To create this learning and development structure, we defined strategic roles within our organization and then created learning and development paths for those roles. We also ensured that these new strategic roles were found within the current job marketplace — after all we’re not in the business of hoarding talent, we want to develop it. The learning and development path for each role included a current skills assessment and recommended education to gain the necessary skills that we believed were needed for each role. We’ve developed the paths in such a way that we can add skill levels into the roles, as well as add, remove, or change the recommended learning over time.
It’s always difficult to roll out organizational structure changes, but we believe it has been positive in the following ways:
- We have the ability to focus on key areas when needed.
- We encourage collaboration and experimentation.
- Our employees know and fully understand how their work is connected to the strategy and mission.
- We value our employees’ learning and development and want them to feel supported when they need to learn new skills.
The best news is that we know we’ll need to continue to evolve this over time, but for now it’s working for us. This may not be exactly what you need within your organization, but hopefully it’s a helpful framework to start thinking about the changes you might need to make as you embark on your hybrid cloud journey. There will never be a better time to mix it up!
Brianna Mundy is Chief of Staff & Strategy to Vice President of CIO Hybrid Cloud Platforms at IBM based in RTP, North Carolina. The above article is personal and does not necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.
