State of the CIO 2003 Best Practive #3: Involve User Representatives
Tue, April 01, 2003
CIO — When Tom Smith took over as the new senior vice president and CIO of Waste Management in 1999, the company’s users were divorced from IT. Charged with introducing a host of new systems to turn around the struggling $11.3 billion trash hauler, Smith knew he needed the company’s 53,000 end users on his side, or the massive modifications he had in mind would never take root. Users are "who you’re building the systems for, so they have to be involved. Most systems failures can be attributed to inadequate user involvement," Smith says. "We knew we had to start rolling people through our projects who had been working in the actual business and get them to participate with us?from setting requirements to QA testing to training."
In answering "The State of the CIO 2003" survey, 69 percent of best practices CIOs said user representatives from affected departments or functions should be involved in all stages of IT initiatives. Like Smith, many CIOs know that getting line users involved early can increase a project’s chances of success. But figuring out who to invite to the party and how to get them involved can be the real challenge, particularly in large or far-flung enterprises. Here’s how leading CIOs do it.
Find the Expert Users
Smith is located at Waste Management headquarters in Houston, but his users are spread out among 48 states and Canada. Getting them all involved in IT initiatives would be a logistical impossibility. So Smith has focused on getting the right end users engaged. His project leaders work with a core team of experts from the corporate and business levels, as well as a group of field representatives nominated by their local managers to join a geographically dispersed team for each major initiative. For example, when IT was building a new billing system, the project manager needed to talk to local office users in areas such as receivables, billing, and credit and collections. So he contacted senior managers in each functional area, asking them to nominate their best and brightest to help out. Once the hard work of locating the right users is done, convincing them to take part is relatively easy, according to Smith. "[These users] like to be actively engaged in what we’re doing, and they take pride in being aware of all the new things coming down the road," he says.
Typically, a project team will handle all of the planning for a new system and provide all the technical expertise. If necessary, team members conduct site visits to ensure that they understand the system requirements. With Waste Management’s biggest IT project to date?a PeopleSoft revenue management initiative that will roll 800 customer databases into one?the IT team has involved 120 users from the Phoenix field office in requirements planning and software selection. "They brought a knowledge base to the table that you never would have gotten through the traditional approach of defining requirements and matching up software to that," says Smith. "Without that [user involvement], this project would have a higher risk of failure." The revenue management pilot was implemented in Phoenix in February.
