How to Align Non-Tech Teams with Your IT Strategy
Without Wasting Time
Hey, fellow Leader 🚀,
I am Artur, and welcome to my weekly newsletter. I am focusing on topics like IT Management, Innovation, and Leadership, with an Entrepreneurial mindset. My goal is to help you navigate the IT corporate landscape. Make better decisions, create awareness, and share real-world stories.
I always cherish the moments when I facilitate elaborate workshops to shape product or company strategy, resulting in agreed-upon and actionable outcomes.
However, working in non-technological companies, I already anticipate the hurdle of getting business or operations-oriented staff aligned with an action plan that is more than 50% technological.
One of the major challenges of working with non-technological teams is that IT and its strategy are rarely a true priority.
Today, with the rise of AI, we see every company demanding an increase in its usage, but deep down, we all know that Operational and Business teams are fundamentally not interested in IT.
Technology is viewed as a commodity. From the end-users perspectives, the main goal is simply that platforms work, and major transformational projects only happen if the company’s operating environment shifts immensely. When this happens, Ops and Business teams expect IT to quickly and agilely execute the transformation as fast as possible.
The overall message is clear: in practice, IT is not a priority. And it never will be.
This presents an additional challenge for IT teams trying to collaborate and truly help transform the company.
How can IT manage such a lack of engagement?
Bring IT Closer to Ops/Biz Teams
It is incredibly important to invest in the relationship between IT and Operational teams.
This can be achieved by running small, simple, and well-designed workshops with these teams to truly assess and understand their daily operational needs.
Be mindful that these teams are rarely interested in new features unless they have no choice.
For Ops and Business teams, changes in PROD mostly mean potential regressions, operational setbacks, and, in some extreme cases, massive manual workarounds while IT takes its sweet time to fix an issue.
Building a bridge of trust between these two critical areas of the company is key. While IT is mostly focused on the “new” (new features, new technologies, and new challenges) Ops is laser-focused on stability and getting their job done before the day is over.
Language also creates a massive gap. IT often uses highly technical terms that Ops has absolutely no interest in. The reverse happens too, but the onus is on IT to learn and incorporate operational language into their own dictionary.
This is where Business Analysts and Product Teams play a vital role. One of their primary missions is to keep the relationship between IT and Ops healthy, facilitate a smooth flow of information, and actively improve collaboration.
Is key to highlight the achievements in both formal and informal communications:
Show impacts on new features (in a measurable way: Time saved, fewer errors in PROD, etc).
Track KPIs and demonstrate the evolution of the product or application stability in PROD.
Time-to-market on key features.
Track overall user satisfaction: Is IT getting fewer complaints from the end-user? How is the VoC (Voice of the Client) captured and measured?
Highlight the most innovative approaches in internal ceremonies and/or in a simple coffee talk with businesses.
Find Common Goals
In order to have engagement on projects and initiatives, it is important to map what the current priorities and goals are between the different structures.
Companies (hopefully) have objectives for every department. Leveraging those objectives with dedicated IT perspectives may offer a way to facilitate the engagement of non-technical teams.
It is important to have a perspective on the company’s political landscape to figure out levers that can be useful to leverage IT initiatives. It is important to notice that Operational teams are focused on day-to-day business. IT, in its projectized fashion, is visualize wider periods for its strategy.
The key is to find and match IT-related objectives with business-oriented ones. Having feedback from end-users (built from the relationships mentioned in the previous point) is key.
For example, today, all companies have an AI-related objective. IT is very much focused on AI subjects currently. An “easy” way to align and work on common goals is to help non-technical teams leverage their tools with AI. This can be from a cost-cutting perspective, but also by focusing on ways to increase processes’ output quality and maybe produce new products, which can potentially create new revenue streams.
Avoid IT Hallucinations
If Product Teams have a healthy relationship with Ops and a deep understanding of the operations their product supports, it is crucial for the overall alignment of an IT department to defend certain operational constraints and visions within IT itself.
Depending on the size of the company, there may be internal IT teams that have little to no interaction with the operational layer.
Left in a bubble, these teams often design day-to-day processes and workflows that are completely incompatible with real-world operational requirements. This mismatch is a massive source of conflict.
For that reason, Product Teams must take a firm stance against internal IT processes that are completely out of touch or inherently inefficient for the business. Or help internal IT teams improve their processes to actually deliver value to end-users.
The most common symptom of this is bureaucracy: like when an isolated IT team creates a “beautiful” document filled with dense technical terms, yet expects non-IT staff to fill it out.
The severity of these cases depends heavily on the company’s structure and how distant these backend teams are from the real business activity. However, it is vital to call this out and ensure that internal IT processes do not become so detached from reality that they end up burning internal communication bridges and destroying trust.
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Cheers,
Artur