In the book, There’s No Such Thing as an IT Project: A Handbook for Intentional Business Change, Bob Lewis and co-author Dave Kaiser analyzed and discussed the new ways of thinking about IT and business management.

These are some of my takeaways from reading the book.

In the “The Seven Change Disciplines” chapter, Bob and Dave discuss the seven disciplines organizations need to master to make the intentional change both real and sustained.

Leadership: Leadership is the art of getting others to follow the leader’s vision.

Business Design: Business design is about creating a concrete answer that can realize the leader’s vision. The design should be complete enough to articulate the vision in the terms where everyone involved can understand both the change itself and their role in it.

Technical Architecture Management: Technical architecture establishes the design and engineering guidelines needed so that the collection of applications, data repositories, and underlying infrastructure assemble logically and efficiently. The goal of technical architecture is to support the organization’s processes and practices.

Application Development / Application Integration and Configuration: The key point to remember is this. When it comes to achieving intentional business changes, the goal of IT is to avoid being the bottleneck.

Organizational Change Management: It would be wrong to assume people naturally resist change – people naturally resist change they expect will be bad for them. As a leader of the organization and to the extent possible, the leader should design every business change, so it leaves employees better off than they were before the change happened.

Implementation Logistics: Start every business change implementation with a well-chosen pilot. The pilot affects relatively few people but otherwise includes most of the complexity of the actual rollout.

Project Management: Projects are how change happens, so a solid project management discipline must be part of any effort that manages an intentional business change.

To make it all work, Bob and Dave believed that mastery in isolation is not enough. The seven disciplines must come together as an integrated whole, whose practitioners actively collaborate to make intentional change happen.

So, what can be done to address “The Seven Change Disciplines” opportunities and challenges? Fortunately, Bob and Dave have some solid suggestions laid out at the end of Chapter Seven. I highly recommend the book.

In the book, There’s No Such Thing as an IT Project: A Handbook for Intentional Business Change, Bob Lewis and co-author Dave Kaiser analyzed and discussed the new ways of thinking about IT and business management.

These are some of my takeaways from reading the book.

In the “IT in the Lead” chapter, Bob and Dave discuss why it is important for IT to resume its leadership role and how it can contribute.

Before IT can play a strategic, leadership role in the enterprise, it must have earned the confidence from the business units. IT earns the confidence of its business unit partners by consistently delivering its promises.

The SWOT analysis—strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats—is a useful strategic planning framework, but we should be doing it backward. Until the organizational leaders recognize the external threats and opportunities facing the business, they have no context for evaluating the organization’s strengths and weaknesses.

Most external threats and opportunities are the result of innovations in information technology. As a result, IT is the logical home for analyzing those SWOT issues and planning what to do about them.

By playing the customer-supplier relationship, it makes it difficult for IT to be a collaborator in designing and achieving business change. It is time for IT to drive business changes because information technology has become a mandatory element of many digitization and transformation strategies.

Strategic implementation projects should be incorporated into the project master schedule and managed through the business-change governance process. As the CIO, it is critically important to know how to answer the CEO’s questions regarding IT-driven business threats and opportunities.

So, what can be done to address “IT in the Lead” opportunities and challenges? Fortunately, Bob and Dave have some solid suggestions laid out at the end of Chapter Six. I highly recommend the book.

In the book, There’s No Such Thing as an IT Project: A Handbook for Intentional Business Change, Bob Lewis and co-author Dave Kaiser analyzed and discussed the new ways of thinking about IT and business management.

These are some of my takeaways from reading the book.

In the “Business-Change Governance” chapter, Bob and Dave discuss the importance of establishing a business-change governance practice and process.

To be effective, the change governance body should be composed of people who see themselves as leaders of the whole organization and not just representatives of one of its silos. In other words, the governance body members should see their mission to be promoting the “great good,” rather than simply defending their organization’s territories.

Investments in business change should benefit one of the “four goods.” These are the four business improvements that matter: increased revenue, decreased costs, better risk management, and improvements in accomplishing the organization’s mission.

The business-change governance body should be devoted to helping good ideas succeed. It is still important to screen out ideas that are not worthwhile, but that is a much more secondary goal.

Business-change governance reviews should have only two possible outcomes. Project proposals should be either scheduled or rejected. If a project is not important enough to be placed on the master schedule, it should be considered rejected.

The Do-It-Yourself business-change efforts via information technology (or Shadow IT) used to be preventable but not anymore. With the advent of cloud and SaaS, shadow IT is an indication that the organization needs a business-change governance process. If a shadow IT effort was needed for good business reasons, the governance body should facilitate those efforts. Effective governance can turn shadow IT into “illuminated IT,” thus greatly increasing the organization’s change bandwidth.

So, what can be done to address “Business-Change Governance” opportunities and challenges? Fortunately, Bob and Dave have some solid suggestions laid out at the end of Chapter Five. I highly recommend the book.