Communication breakdown

Are you sitting comfortably?

Once upon a time, there was a large manufacturing company in the UK that embarked on an ambitious just-in-time (JIT) manufacturing system project. The ugly sisters ­ the chief financial officer and chief operating officer ­ looked upon the Cinderella IT department with a good deal of suspicion and jealousy and decided between them that project management functions and anything more complicated would not involve any of that nasty technical stuff ­ large IT projects were just another business project as far as they were concerned.

The ugly sisters recruited a history graduate, fresh from university, and a quality control manager to head up this large and ambitious IT project. Armed with Gantt charts and spreadsheets they set about mapping the course the project would take leaving Cinderella (the technicians) out in the cold. And because the project managers could not agree on a project management package, they ran two. This meant two sets of timesheets for programmers, systems designers and other technical staff.

The technicians resented the lack of consultation and the constant requests for minute-by-minute details of how they were spending their time. Soon they started to create fictional tasks and greatly exaggerate others. The project fell behind and, eager to please the ugly sisters, the project managers demanded even more details from the technicians. They were presented with a complete fiction.

In the meantime, the technical staff started to work on a system for recording the form of racehorses. As the JIT project teetered on the edge of a black hole, the technicians suggested that overtime would allow them to catch up. It was granted, handing the perfect present to the racehorse fanciers. Not only were they building a very good system, but they would also have more money thanks to the overtime payments.

The project managers didn’t have a clue what was going on. Meanwhile, one of the ugly sisters issued a request that paper used in laser printers be printed on both sides. This saved the IT department perhaps £10 or £20 a week ­ the overtime was costing several thousand pounds a week.

The project failed, the company eventually went bust and the racing enthusiasts moved on. This is a true story ­ I witnessed it, although I left before the black hole of ignorance and fear pulled the whole firm into its inescapable grip.

The moral of the story is simple: there has to be a layer in the organisation that understands both the business and technical material. Without this communication bridge, things will go badly.

I can just hear senior managers saying that outsourcing or using external contractors would obviate such problems. Nothing could be further from the truth. There is nothing that technology and IT services suppliers like better than dealing with technology neophytes. It avoids all those dreary questions about whether the technology will actually work, and what happens if a project starts to go wrong. Spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations and Gantt charts are no substitute for in-depth understanding of the task.

You can bring technicians into the business fold, so they understand the significance of what they are doing, or immerse business managers in IT. However, don’t think that a couple of training courses and a few months mixing with technicians will educate a business manager so that she or he cannot have the wool pulled over their eyes. We are talking about years of exposure to the technical realities of making IT work.

To make this more attractive we could introduce a three letter acronym ­ the TBH (technology-business-hybrid) manager. Will it ever catch on or is that simply too far fetched?

Martin Butler is founder of Martin Butler Research