Human Performance has more impact on IT effectiveness than all other factors combined. The most critical drivers are:
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The only source of success you have are the people who work for you. Everything you do in the way of business alignment, technical architecture, and IT process maturity has one goal: To allow your staff to function as effectively for the business as possible. |
Leadership: Usually treated as an intangible matter of character, leadership includes a number of highly tangible subjects and teachable techniques. Among the more important components of leadership are goal-setting, delegation, and motivation. Most important of all, leadership is about how decisions are made and whether they're made at all.
Staffing and skills management: The single most important factor in any IT leader's success is the caliber of the people who work for them, yet many IT managers consider the process of recruiting to be a painful annoyance. Even worse, they consider recruiting to be finished the moment an employee is hired. Meanwhile, the process of deciding when and how to promote employees is often a tug of war between IT and human resources. Staffing and skills management cover the ability of IT leaders to make sure they have the right people with the right skills in the right roles at the right time.
Compensation and rewards: Many IT leaders consider compensation and rewards their primary tool for motivation and employee retention. For the most part, this can't work. The fact of the matter is that a bad compensation and rewards system will demotivate employees and drive them away. A good one? It makes sure employees have no financial incentive to leave. More significantly, it's a far more powerful communications channel for conveying your priorities than any mission or vision statement.
Structure:
The habit of many leaders is to fix performance problems by changing the
organizational chart. Since every employee knows beyond a shadow of a
doubt that reorganizations harm performance, it's an interesting habit.
Structure includes the organizational chart, which does sometimes need
adjustment so as to minimize the barriers faced by employees trying to
do their jobs. Organizational design should always be the last step in
any effectiveness enhancement effort, though. If it's the first, you're
acting like an engineer who thinks he can fix the Titanic with a roll
of duct tape.
Business Culture: The business culture is the way employees usually respond to common situations. It is tangible, definable, and, for smart leaders, definable. For most organizational change efforts, culture change is the difference between trying to "push the organization with a rope" and having the organization itself drive the change.