Feel like there is not enough IT to go around?

The good news is that Spring seems to have sprung for IT.   There are signs of activity in many areas, new job openings, technology sales and most importantly - new projects.   There appears to be a drive from the business to allow IT to execute on much of the demand that has been on hold for a couple of years.   The challenge is that IT has been on a significant diet for the same length of time.

Are you seeing any of these symptoms?

• Projects that were expected to start near the beginning of the year, are just being kicked off
• Even though development resources levels may be addressed, new projects may be constrained by infrastructure capacity that has resourcing issues and its own ramp up schedule
• New projects appear to be affecting each other because they may have been initiated simultaneously and draw on the same pool of resources
• You have a feeling that quality may be affected as IT pushes the envelope on risk to achieve delivery dates

If this is affecting your organization, what can you do as an IT leader?

• Ensure that the project portfolio maps well to the business strategy – this is not the time to be working on any projects that aren’t the highest business priority.
• Mitigate risk by recognizing the issues of resource constraints and interdependencies and focus on 100% execution through good planning – avoid the pressure for ready, fire, aim projects.
• Leverage variable capacity opportunities offered through consulting resources and the new secret sauce: public cloud – consider short-term ramp up of consulting for burst capacity, moving more infrastructure resources to outsourced managed services and consider a long term shift to leveraging cloud for infrastructure where your organization can live with concerns for data security.

Taking on these issues now could help you live with the result in 12 months.