In his recent and persuasive book ‘Predictable Success’ Les McKeown models the organizational lifecycle; identifying typical  stages of growth and decay.

After emerging from ‘early struggle’ an organization will typically hit a ‘fun’ stage. In a fledgling business this is the stage where a market has been found, sales are the overriding order of the day and growth is relatively easy because the operation is starting from a relatively low base. This is the stage where the ‘myths and legends’ are formed. The organization is relatively unstructured and has the luxury of being agile due to its relatively small size. A ‘hero-culture’ can develop; accomplishments can be made through sheer force of will.

Does this sound familiar? It describes the growth history of many IT organizations. For IT, this ‘fun’ stage was when the technology was relatively new and was advancing at such a pace it was difficult to just keep up. Many IT shops  grew rapidly, often in an unpredictable fashion. Demand was high, the technology was constantly evolving and IT was constantly working on delivering the latest and greatest solutions. It was fun, and this level of organization works…

… until it doesn’t anymore.

In McKeown’s model, a growing organization emerges from ‘fun’ to ‘whitewater’ when the growth that is the result of the ‘fun’ phase adds a level of size and complexity to the operation. It does not happen all at once, but slowly the old organically developed ways of operating start to become stretched beyond their capacity to deliver. Examples might include late production runs, orders don’t ship, customer complaints increase. In IT, outages due to failed changes increase; projects are cancelled, or just never delivered.

Firefighting becomes a predominant mode of operations. The old ways of doing business no longer smoothly work, the organization is having trouble keeping track of what is going on. The experience is one of confusion, the feeling that things are slipping through the cracks The organizational ship can no longer be steered effectively – - hence the designation ‘whitewater.’

The answer, which is not always immediately obvious, is to add a bit of structure to the operation. Formalize some processes and modify the organizational chart to take account of the new more complex reality.

McKeown makes the recommendation that to emerge from ‘whitewater’ into the more mature form he terms ‘Predictable Success’ an organization is going to have to embed some structure and processes.  His advice is valuable, but it is a little short on defining the specifics of how to proceed to define this more formal organizational structure and accompanying business processes.

Fortunately, once  IT leaders recognize their organization’s transition to a ‘whitewater’ stage they are fortunate in having  a number of frameworks of best practices to guide them. ITIL would be an example of a framework that can be adopted to help re-structure an IT shop’s business processes and internal organization to help with the emergence from ‘whitewater’ to ‘Predictable Success.’

There is no magic formula of course, either in McKeown’s model or the ITIL framework. But, again, for IT it is helpful to have a readily available set of proven best practices that can be tailored to fit the unique challenges of your IT shop’s struggle with the rapids.

-Bill Cunningham

bill.cunningham@cppit.com