How to govern with people-centric planning

In recent years, technology has changed pretty much everything. From the way we pay our bills to the way we communicate, shop, and even get our driver’s license renewed, not much looks like it did 10 or even five years ago.

Why then do enterprise teams manage technology planning and funding like they did when client/server was all the rage? While it seems hard to believe, it’s true: In many organizations, technology planning and funding are run the same way they have been for decades. These legacy, project-based approaches are inefficient and wasteful and are fundamentally misaligned with modern technologies and realities.

That’s why teams need to take a new approach: people-centric planning. With this approach, teams are given persistent, long-term funding. Teams are organized around products and value streams, rather than in the siloed departments of the past.

There are three key principles that enable teams to successfully deploy people-centric planning: governing innovation, aligning technology with the business, and empowering teams. In this post, I’ll look at governing innovation.

In years past, teams pursuing a traditional project approach would typically have some form of documentation that details what will be delivered and what it will cost. When you start funding people, how do you ensure you’re getting value for the money being spent?

Previously, technology teams were effectively only tracking IT metrics, reporting on whether they delivered on time and on budget. The reality is that these metrics didn’t align with business metrics, such as sales, revenues, or profit margin. Take the analogy of a factory. The assembly team can elect to gauge their success solely on the number of widgets delivered. However, this metric may not have any bearing on the manufacturer’s business fortunes. Whether the factory delivered 5 or 5,000 widgets a day may be academic if none of the widgets produced meet the required specifications or quality standards.

To succeed with people-centric planning, leaders need to take a different approach to governance. Instead of focusing on work and granular requirements, leaders need to give people key metrics and offer them the autonomy to determine the best way to achieve those metrics.

In support of this approach, it is vital to establish visibility into what people are doing and how it affects the business. Leaders need to be able to track value in real time, using one set of metrics—business metrics. These metrics can take different forms, but most critically they’ll provide a gauge in terms of business and customer value. All that ultimately matters is that business metrics are moving in the right direction and that the technology is perceived as contributing to that. This approach creates directional alignment.

A lot has changed. Why does technology funding look the same as ever? In today’s digitally transformed world, your organization can’t afford to rely on decades-old technology funding models. By employing people-centric planning approaches to governance, your organization can gain improved visibility, improve trust throughout the organization, and minimize business risk.

To learn more, please visit our People-Centric Planning page.

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