The pandemic-driven pivot to remote work Opens a new window has been global, and swift. Operating remotely at scale without compromising essential services has been a difficult challenge for companies to meet – but vital in order to avoid being left behind. Fortunately, deploying a major company change like remote operations is a challenge not new to IT teamsOpens a new window , for whom adapting to massive change has been a constant; whether it be the adoption of online operations, global office communications, or cloud migrationOpens a new window .
The challenge for businesses is such that these changes rarely happen all at once, and it’s difficult to keep up the pace at scale across a mix of new and legacy IT infrastructureOpens a new window . Parts of a company could be bounding ahead with automation, mobile applications, and cloud services. Meanwhile, other areas manage legacy systemsOpens a new window that are still essential to the business, but incompatible with new technologies.
This amalgam of old and new means changes—a new feature rollout, security update, or system addition— must deploy differently across different systems and is fraught with risk.
Learn More: Risks & Best Practices for Project Collaboration ToolsOpens a new window
Operational resilience—an organization’s ability to manage risk and continue to provide business services in the face of adversity—is a corporate mandate.
However, many companies still struggle to achieve strong operational resilience while grappling with increasing change in volume and complexity.
Here are four issues that have made failure more likely for necessary change initiatives, and what is needed to achieve success.
1. The Way We Work Has Changed
Executing change is still heavily dependent on people. As little as a decade ago, most large IT initiativesOpens a new window (moving to a new data center, for example, or upgrading a critical system), were managed by an internal team often working in the same building.
Even before COVID-19, many of today’s IT teams were collaborating remotely acrossOpens a new window different time zones, complicating day-to-day communications, contribution dynamics, and deadlines. This is practically ubiquitous now as companies have been forced to move day-to-day operations almost entirely online, making the move to real-time systems management critical.
Old ideas of “managing†teams and projects have grown obsolete, and companies need to adapt to modern “work orchestration†practices to keep up with the new remote standard.
The concept of orchestrationOpens a new window —automated configuration, management, and coordination of actions, systems, applications, and processes—is familiar with IT. Many tools exist that orchestrate IT functions. The problem is that they fail to include human activities. Although modern organizations rightly want to ensure that manual ‘human’ tasks are removed from orchestration to increase repeatability, there still are times when it’s necessary to include them to enable visibility of the automated work – and step in if something goes wrong. Humans are still a very important part of the equation.
With this in mind, work orchestration and observability is a new model of working that orchestrates humans and machine automationOpens a new window . It empowers teams to plan, orchestrate, and analyze complex work faster, smarter, and with greater visibility.
Learn More: 6 Ways CIOs Can Show Proactive Leadership in a CrisisOpens a new window
2. Existing Tools No Longer Get the Job Done
Executing an IT change initiative can involve thousands of tasks. Within this environment, understanding how various projects overlap and interact, as well as how resources are utilized, is critical to controlling risk. Today it can be even more challenging to plan and execute change across remote teams, which can involve the calibration of both human and machine tasks happening in sequence around the globe, across time zones, and with a need to abide by physical distancing directives – all in real time.
Unfortunately, spreadsheets, emails, and conference calls Opens a new window are still standard for handling highly complex change events.
Success using these archaic toolsets relies heavily on an all-knowing Project Manager’s competence to manage tasks and predict issues well before they turn into problems. This dependence on a solitary “hero†figure subjects projects to human error and avoidable delays. With remote work as the new standard, it also is unrealistic to depend on just one person at the center of a project to coordinate work across multiple remote teams often spanning the globe.
To reduce reliance on overburdened key individuals, some organizations use tools for development and deployment, such as Jira, ServiceNow, or Jenkins. However, these tools generally do not coordinate human activity, machine functions, and business processes in harmony with end-to-end visibility.
As much as organizations want to automate tasks and processes, adding disparate point solution tools adds complexity that slows the process and does little to reduce risk.
Learn More: Reliable UC&C Infrastructure Can Help Soothe Remote Work Challenges Opens a new window
3. Communication Has Gotten Complicated
During any IT initiative, stakeholders expect real-time communications. One could argue that email, messaging, and conference calls fit the bill. But for IT teams, a single project can produce a daily barrage of updates, reminders, requests, and questions from multiple sources that drain attention, cause delay, and can put the initiative at risk.
Teams need the ability to communicate and collaborate easily, and ideally within the same platform that they use to plan, execute, and track change activity. Even when utilizing preferred communication tools (Slack, Skype, email, etc.), an ideal platform would connect them all so they work in harmony rather than operate as disparate channels. The result is live collaboration and full visibility for stakeholders into what has happened and what activities are next.
4. More Data, But Little Insight
Strategic decision making is difficult when key data is hidden in the dark matter of spreadsheets, emails, phone calls, provisioning tools, and build and deployment pipelines. Gathering and analyzing this data typically requires manual effort, which is costly and inefficient.
What’s needed is observability—a real-time picture of every aspect of the change process as it develops, enabling teams to quickly identify and eliminate potential risks while also surfacing insight for leadership into resource utilization, goal performance, and accuracy. Achieving this level of visibility into all the events and changes in an organization that could be relevant to a project is critical, but not possible with standard toolsets. It must be provided at the platform level.
Learn More: Automation Solutions Are IT’s Best Friend During the CrisisOpens a new window
Simplifying the World of Work
Increasingly faster IT rollouts without compromise to essential services and security equate to operational resilience. Today, a company’s operational resiliency is being put to the test like never before: the ability to operate remotely Opens a new window at scale without putting essential services at risk can make or break a business. To meet that demand, it is vital that companies enable teams to easily coordinate multiple tasks, synchronize human and machine automation, and streamline communication – all in real-time. By sweeping away antiquated data silos, spreadsheets, and laborious communications systems, businesses can radically compress timelines. Change is constant—and quick. Work Orchestration and Observability will help companies keep pace, no matter the challenge.
Let us know if you liked this article on LinkedInOpens a new window , TwitterOpens a new window , or FacebookOpens a new window . We would love to hear from you!