IT Project Organisation's Policy

Once upon a time, I had opportunity to work with Private Bank's IT department. IT Head was asked to finalise and submit policy for it's project organisation. He asked me to brainstorm the same at near coffee bar in Mumbai.

We discussed lot about challenges, opportunity and weakness of this IT Organisation. Resuffled the agenda for next one year on paper napkins... Coffee went pouring all evening and all ended with snip of dinner at 9 and PAPER NAPKIN with draft of policy.

1: IT Members (Insource or Outsourced) without project work for any measurable period are a waste of money and are not to be tolerated.
2: The organization's project load is determined by factors external to the IT organization and is allowed to exceed the throughput rate of the organization. (Beware IT Companies :>))
3: All active projects must be controllable becuase it can be measured with organisation wide published Metrics.

On car ride to home, he asked me about my view on future of IT Organisations within the bank and what the future lies for young leds who have joined. What can be done to keep them always ON? what the career prospectives and postions they can look upon?

It put me in quandary for moment but, then I decided to sum up before I close the long day with refeshing remark based on my experience.

1. Multi Tasking > Each IT deperatment member has been tuned to work in multi project enviornemnt. Some are in production with AMO (Applicaiton Maintenance and Operations) mode and others are in technial evaluation or sanction mode.

2. Full Cycle and Ownership >Each project starts with selection of technology and business case and ends with business sign off after successful testing by business users. What is advocated is the same to be managed and maintained... Let it be single Hardware box purchase to multi million software system development.

3. Continous Improvement and Feedback:Each IT guy is as close to IT user for feedback and improvement look like Supply chain model of interaction by both :>) ( They quarrel but keep the peace making process also going ON).

Other advantages like gain business domain expertise etc. are dividends one can look at.
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