Question: How can one reduce
behaviors that are wasteful of IT resources?
Our advice:
Companies have cut their operations over the past several years to reduce
costs. Few companies, however, have attempted the disagreeable task of
eradicating wasteful internal behaviors, even though the potential cost savings
are substantial, particularly in IT.
A few counter-productive behaviors account for the majority of waste. Companies
that concentrate on eliminating these can reap significant cost savings:
"Under the Table" Work (UTW)
UTW is a widespread phenomenon, in which users bypass official channels and
personally contact developers to slip in changes the next time a system
undergoes maintenance. These requests never get prioritized against competing
proposals, and often have dubious business value. At one client, the volume of
UTW accounted for 50% of programmer effort. IT organizations can cut those
requests by formal request management, and by rotating personnel to disrupt
personal relationships that foster UTW.
Duplicate Activities In large enterprises, it's common to have multiple
projects that overlap, or even work at cross-purposes. Eliminating duplicate
efforts can produce substantial budget savings. Regular communication can
unearth duplicate projects and spot opportunities to merge or coordinate
projects. Management discipline is essential to force consolidation and
terminate unnecessary efforts across lines of business.
Personal Preferences Even official requests can rob productivity when
they're motivated by personal preferences. Moving fields around on a Web page
may satisfy an individual's preference, but is it returning value? To ensure
that business value is driving IT work requests, managers must assess each
change request for its value to the enterprise. Some type of charge-back
mechanism, no matter how rudimentary, enables business managers to evaluate how
their subordinates are consuming IT services, and discourages frivolous
requests.
Feature Proliferation Software developers also are guilty of wasteful
behaviors when it comes to adding unnecessary features to software. Unnecessary
software features greatly increase code complexity and drive up maintenance
costs while adding little business value. Studies of code-control flow have
shown that only a small portion of an average system is ever executed, while
the extraneous code only complicates diagnostic and enhancement efforts. IT
organizations must avoid adding "nice to have" features whose costs exceed
their value.
Symptom-fixing Most production software will inevitably suffer failures.
While this is to be expected, enterprises shouldn't accept having the same
problems recur. Shortsightedness, combined with an unwillingness to expend
effort, leads many IT organizations to apply patches that fix the symptoms, but
not the underlying problem. Repeatedly fixing the same problems is pure waste.
By investing in tools for root-cause analysis, and by instilling a "fix it
once" attitude, IT organizations can avoid the repeat costs of software
failures.
-- Ian Hayes
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