Robert Sheesley, Chief Information Officer, Wrench Group
“We’ve taken several steps to address this. One is to move our initiatives tracking towards alignment with our strategic objectives.”
A big challenge with that lack of physical closeness is creating a sense of belonging and shared values in the organization. We’ve taken several steps to address this. One is to move our initiatives tracking toward alignment with our strategic objectives. In this way, we enable everyone to see the business value of the work they are doing. It also enriches those stakeholder discussions we have with the business units that our IT organization supports.
Another informed adjustment we’ve made is when we acquire an organization and begin the planning to integrate that company’s IT operations into our own. In the past, I or a senior member of my team would have flown to the new location and spent a week or two engaging with the stakeholder community to familiarize them with our methodology for certain implementations. With no-travel policies in place, however, we are forced to plan and carry out implementations and integrations
remotely. We now break the process down into smaller steps and slow the integration path. For instance, instead of a three-day in-person discovery process, with workshops that run for several hours, we break the process into a series of one-hour video meetings spread over several weeks. This change has forced us to be flexible about extracting the right topics in the right sequence and getting the right people in the meetings, and has presented some unique collaboration with our key SaaS partners relative to their approach to engaging with us to achieve the same exceptional results we have experienced in the past with them.
This is an excerpt from CIO Perspectives: Managing Data Risk While Remaining Productive in a Remote Workforce. The eBook was generously sponsored by Egnyte.
