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Reaching Out to the Business
Often, low morale stems from the IT department's inability to communicate with the rest of the company. Tatum's Huber sees this often. He's currently working with a CIO who was frustrated when his staff fell behind schedule on an important project.
At first the CIO thought the problem was a lack of manpower. But Huber's team eventually realized that the real issue was wasted work, which was the result of poor communication with the client. Some members of the IT staff were logging 100-hour weeks to deliver what they thought the client wanted, only to learn they hadn't met the client's specifications. In fact, they never truly understood what those specifications were. "You could start with the CIO and work down to the people who were developing the system. No one had an overall view of what they were promising to the client," Huber says.
Vague specifications led to scope creep, which led to software patches, which introduced glitches that required more patches, more testing and so on. Despite heroic efforts to keep the project on track, "they were so inefficient," says Huber. "They were putting out faulty product and having to go back and patch and glue it back together just to get it all operational. Quality control was lacking. Testing was lacking. It took everything they had just to keep things held together."
Instead of throwing manpower at the problem, Huber got the CIO and his staff to reconsider their approach to projects in general. "We asked fundamental questions like, 'What is a successful project? How do you measure success?' and worked our way backward from there," he says.
That process led them back to the drawing board with the customer, to get an exact idea of what was needed. Then the IT staff took time to carefully design the project. "That took a lot of discipline, because that meant that things were going to be even further delayed," Huber says. But it paid off. Once the project was released, "it didn't take around-the-clock coverage to support it. So we went from 100-hour weeks to 50- to 60-hour weeks." That, in turn, boosted morale.
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