The JCI Way #3

The IT group at JCI has three kinds of work related to helping the business: projects, customer service requests (CSRs), and help desk issues.

Help desk issues are problems people have that can be handled relatively quickly -- usually in a few days. The issues are mainly how-to-use the system, bugs, data corruption, training, etc. JCI has a dedicated staff of people that handle these kinds of issues. If they can't fix the problem, they may get help from Business Analysts, Programmers or other experts.

CSRs are changes to a system that can be done in less then 20 hours. The IT department has a budget to perform CSR work. Once the budget is spent for the fiscal year, only emergency CSRs will be done. CSR requests are sent to IT by business customers. They fill out a form and send it in. All requests go to a steering committee made up of "subject matter experts" from the business and IT people. The steering committee reviews all requests, decides which ones are worthy of working on and then assigns a priority to each request. IT then works on CSRs in order of priority until the money runs out. The reality of the business is that we rarely finish all priority one requests. We keep priority two and below requests on the list but everyone knows they will probably never get done.

Projects are just what they sound like. Each year during budget planning, IT gets a list of projects from each area of the business. We write up mini statements of work that estimate what it will take to meet the business objectives, what it will cost, and what resources are required. All dollars and resource hours (by person) are put into a spreadsheet and organized. This lets us know how much money and people are needed to meet the business needs.

At that point, we start sorting projects by priority and negotiating with the business. The money to pay for each project has to come from somewhere. IT does have a budget for projects but each department in the business needs to get capital dollars for projects as well. The goal is to know what we will be working on next fiscal year and make sure that we have the resources lined up ahead of time. JCI will use consultants in the form of programmers, business analysts and project managers to complete entire projects if internal resources are unavailable. However, the requesting department has to come up with the money.

This appears to be a good way to help plan and to give IT the opportunity to have the resources needed to help the business. A company that never outsourced resources could still use this method to "budget" internal resources. It takes effort to plan on both the business and IT side. The good thing is that the business will see that IT does not have unlimited resources. Making a list of 20 projects and realizing that the business can only afford to do 5 can be an eye-opening experience.