Brunel University's Business Class: How to stick to long-term goals

It may be 'bleeding obvious' but according to Brunel's Professor Robert Macredie and Dr Mark Lycett too many good teams lose sight of what they're really trying to achieve. So how do you make sure the business gets the most out of IT again and again?

The Daily Mail journalist and Private Eye contributor, Keith Waterhouse, has a particular bugbear, which often dominates his columns: those who state what he describes as ‘the bleeding obvious’. It’s a fair point - there’s nothing that annoys more.

However, sometimes the ‘bleeding obvious’ can get forgotten. For instance, the fundamental task of IT is to support business objectives. We all know that. It’s bleeding obvious. However, finding the key to ensuring that this is translated across all aspects of development is like the quest for the source of the Nile.

It is recognised wisdom that communication is at least part of the key. As discussed in a previous article, to ensure IT meets the needs of business, the business element of the organisation must provide software developers with a context for the development. This context – of how the software will be used within the business – will enable a programmer to understand the reasons for the work and to investigate what could be done differently in order to make the system better.

At all stages of this discussion process, everyone needs to constantly ask the question ‘Why?’ so that each decision fits in with the bigger picture. Otherwise that picture either won’t be fully understood - or risks being lost.

The good news is that this kind of communication, which can help span the IT/business gap, is now being put into practice across the board. Statistics in a recent survey carried out at Brunel University found that around 80 per cent of the software developers polled meet with management teams at least once a week, if not once a day. These are impressive figures, suggesting a comprehensive level of communication between developers and management. Surely we should all be on the right track here? But delve deeper and cracks in the system start to appear.

Eighty-nine per cent of the developers surveyed are empowered to make decisions on work directly relating to them. This is great news in many ways as it allows them to be agile and flexible. But it does raise the question of who is coordinating these changes and who ensures they are in line with the overall strategy.

What’s more, when asked about the level of documentation required during project development, 18 per cent said that it was ‘insufficient’. So, almost a fifth of the software development teams haven’t got a proper system for checking and balancing decisions that are made – largely autonomously – by the developers.

This system is vital. Its task is not to raise questions marks over the skills of developers – decisions taken by individual developers are likely to be absolutely right to solve their particular problem. However, when the outcome of the decision is viewed within the context of the project as a whole, it may create a series of spin-off problems. To come back to the ‘bleeding obvious’, if the development teams are not constantly questioning themselves on the ‘why’ of what they do, so that they adhere to the objectives of the business department, how can their work be of value? This may seem simple but how many of us question ourselves on why we do what we do each day? It’s easy to assume we’re on the right track.

Reaching consensus on decisions takes time – and in the field of software development, while speed is important, so is achieving the right objective. Effective software development must take the best of both autonomous and collaborative systems, allowing room for personal decision making, yet ensuring that this is within a framework, so that objectives aren’t lost.

The alternative – which almost a fifth of our workforce seems to be doing – is that IT developers attend meetings, agree with objectives but forget these when they return to the ‘workshop’.

What IT and business managers alike must work on is ensuring that developers see why what they do is so important. They’re building the backbone of UK Plc – isn’t it time we gave them a support framework for this, rather than just letting them get on with in? Now that, surely, is bleeding obvious.

Professor Robert Macredie and Dr Mark Lycett are leaders of ‘Fluid Business’, a groundbreaking research project within the Department of Information Systems and Computing at Brunel University. They will be writing for silicon.com on issues of technology and business over the coming months and can be contacted by emailing FluidBusinessTeam@fusepr.com. Or email us with your opinions at editorial@silicon.com.