A highly effective technique to reduce work in an IT department is to allow business people free access to IT personnel.
This seems counterintuitive!
There are extraordinarily compelling reasons to allow business people access to IT personnel.
Reason 1: IT people have a better understanding of what resources a given task requires
I repeatedly experience business people changing their initial requests to something more challenging. The only reason is that they think the modified task is easier for IT.
It is typically easier to give business people precisely what they want instead of what business people think is easy for IT to deliver.
Reason 2: IT people need to learn to say no and have a proper approach to escalating to upper management
Some tasks are just insanely difficult and resource intensive:
- Two-way syncing of systems.
- Managing a new software vendor.
- Integrating a new business model before it is fully developed.
In those circumstances, it is best if business people go directly to IT, so IT can explain why a given task would be disruptive and then, together, form a plan to achieve the same business objective without destroying IT productivity.
And if that isn't possible, business people and IT should be able together to escalate a priority to upper management.
Reason 3: Give a much broader window when scoping a project
A harmful situation can transpire when a new project is being scoped:
Business people will ask for excessively many features. Often features that will never be used. Often features that the business knows that there is very little chance of actually being used.
People do this for one reason. They know if they don't ask for it now in the project scoping, they will never be able to get it in the future. So they over ask.
I've seen project ballooning with a factor of between 10 and 100* only due to business people's fear that they cannot change the scope later.
*yes, I do mean a 100-hour task can explode to a 1000-hour task to even a 10000-hour mammoth project, only due to requirements that are not strictly needed by the business.
If business people know they can always come back with more requests, they won't need to over-ask at the beginning of a project.
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