Our clients typically see a 15-30% performance improvement within 18
months as measured by industry benchmarks and their stakeholders.
Choose a program to learn more about it:
Score—and improve—your IT organization’s performance on the metrics that really matter
Learn MorePosition your IT organization front-and-center as a key business function within your company
Learn MoreLead your IT organization with a compelling IT vision and strategy.
Learn More
What gets measured gets managed.
Most IT organizations quantify basic user satisfaction with their day-to-day services, and thus see a relatively clear path towards improving their performance within these activities.
However, few IT organizations quantify stakeholder satisfaction with their “big picture” dimensions—such as Vision & Strategy, Alignment Integration, and Communication—and thus many IT organizations struggle to improve their performance within these critical areas.
Now, CIOs and their functional leaders often develop an instinctual feel for how their project sponsors might answer questions like:
But these feelings can’t be measured, managed, or systematically improved.
To measurably improve your strategic performance, you must first ask your stakeholders—the enterprise leaders who directly influence your priorities and budgets—to set a hard data benchmark for your performance across your critical strategic dimensions.
When you do, you will:
To quantify the strategic dimensions your IT organization’s performance, we developed our proprietary stakeholder benchmarking tool: MeasureIT™.
How MeasureIT™ Quantifies Your Strategic Performance
MeasureIT™:
Practically speaking, most MeasureIT™ engagements follow these steps:
Why Does MeasureIT™ Deliver Results?
MeasureIT™ scores get to the heart of what matters in IT’s strategic performance and stakeholder relationships. It shines a bright light on what’s working, and what requires improvement. Your results will organically reveal a new strategic roadmap IT can follow to improve performance where it matters most to your stakeholders.
By repeating MeasureIT™ year-over-year, your IT organizations will see hard-data improvements in your target areas. These performance improvements are undeniable by business executives—as they are the ones who scored your group’s improved performance. Year-over-year score improvements typically result in increased credibility, standing, and compensation for both the IT organization and their leadership team.
Real-World MeasureIT™ Results
| Actual Client Baseline | Stakeholders | IT | Variance |
|---|---|---|---|
| IT delivers value to our company | 3.63 | 4.29 | 15% |
| IT delivers on-time, quality work on a day-to-day basis | 3.60 | 4.28 | 16% |
| IT designs and implements solutions with the end user in mind | 3.51 | 4.11 | 15% |
| IT streamlines business processess and makes work easier | 3.06 | 3.71 | 18% |
| IT provides me with the timesly, accurate, and complete data I need to make decisions | 3.01 | 3.72 | 19% |
| Technology is a differentiator at my company | 2.39 | 3.52 | 32% |
| Actual Client Baseline | Baseline | 24 Months Later | % Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| I understand the value of IT | 68% | 96% | 41% |
| IT is a respected function in the business | 67% | 88% | 31% |
| I trust the judgement of IT | 62% | 84% | 35% |
Many IT groups feel tense, chaotic, and focused on deploying ad-hoc solutions to the day’s burning problems. Their teams aren’t collaborating well (or communicating at all), and few people understand top-level directions, expectations, or decision-making processes.
Many IT leaders—and their stakeholders—accept this chaos as an unavoidable reality of IT’s internal operations. Yet after spending years fine-tuning top-performing IT organizations, we have come to see most internal chaos stems from a lack of structure to the organization’s day-to-day functions, operations, and communications.
We formalized our most effective IT management structures into the RunIT™ framework. Once applied, RunIT™ will give you a calm, ordered, process-driven IT organization.
The RunIT™ framework fits into any existing vision, strategy, or operating plan your group currently works within. When you ask Rain Partners to bring RunIT™ to your IT group, in relatively short and painless order we will create a stable, efficient IT organization.
This results in qualitative performance improvement across the board, and an IT organization that qualitatively feels better to you, your people, and your stakeholders.
RunIT™ offers more than measurable performance improvements. You will also experience:
Putting in place a structured, professional communications program signals:
And, most importantly: You are being taken seriously by your stakeholders.
Implementing a communications program is the first step to take when you’re ready to transition from being a pure service provider to acting as a true strategic partner within your business.
Every CommunicateIT™ engagement begins with an evaluation of your existing communication program’s current maturity level across four key areas of communication;
1 | System & Service Notices
2 | Internal IT Communications
3 | Stakeholder Engagement
4 | External Community Outreach
Examining each area, we will determine the level to which your communications program is:
Finally, after evaluating your current state of communications, we will work with you to fill any identified gaps, by:
Whether you’re just getting started on your path from the backroom to the boardroom, or if you already have a mature communications program that requires some fine-tuning, a CommunicateIT™ engagement ensures your IT group leverages a best-in-class communications program that positions you front-and-center as a key business function within your company.
Many IT Visions & Strategies exhibit one of two problems. They are either:
The result: Many IT groups either get stuck repeating impractical platitudes that have little practical implications, or they never aim higher than chasing day-to-day operational excellence.
From our experience, an effective IT Vision & Strategy sits between these two extremes. It provides a clear vision of what greater, concrete value IT will provide the business over the next 3-5 years, and it defines a highly operational strategic roadmap that includes, but is not limited to, the specific technologies that will drive IT’s greater value.
The Process: How We Build Effective IT Visions & Strategies
The “Too Fuzzy” and “Too Ground Level” can be traced back to the standard method many IT groups deploy to produce their Vision & Strategy— they contract a big firm to write it for them. The contracted firm then conducts all research, performs all business stakeholder interviews, and then hands IT a new Vision & Strategy that the group had little-to-no input into forming.
The result: Many IT Visions & Strategies feel both disconnected from IT’s day-to-day life, and rarely express the deepest shared concerns and aspirations of both IT and their stakeholders in the business.
To produce a living, breathing, and relevant IT Vision & Strategy, we work in a highly-collaborative manner with the IT groups we partner with:
Practically speaking, our Vision & Strategy engagements typically follow these steps:
The Output: What an Effective IT Vision & Strategy Looks Like
At the end of the process, we have worked hand-in hand with our clients to produce:
Here’s what that looks like in the real world:
Developing Your Effective IT Vision & Strategy
We work with a wide variety of IT groups to help them develop their effective IT Vision & Strategy. Some have an existing IT Vision & Strategy they are looking to refresh. Others have no formal documentation of where IT is going and how to get there. Many IT groups sit somewhere between these two extremes.
Contact us today to discuss how we might work hand-in-hand to develop your new, effective IT Vision & Strategy.
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