How's Your Rain Dancing?

This past week I saw an interesting quote on corporate strategic planning.  It is spot on in it's description of the typical approach to corporate strategic planning.

"A good deal of the corporate planning I have observed is like a ritual rain dance; it has no effect on the weather that follows, but those who engage in it think it does. " - J. Brian Quinn

As much as I liked that quote it was the second sentence that really hit home.

"Moreover, it seems to me that much of the advice and instruction related to corporate planning is directed at improving the dancing, not the weather."

After thinking about this a little more I did a little inward looking and was shocked that it wasn't just the corporate strategic planning process that focuses more on the dancing than on the weather.  We in IT are just as guilty.

How often do we put more effort into Help Desk / Incident tracking systems than we do in to actually solving the problems?  That is not to say we shouldn't use these systems but we do need to keep in mind tracking progress is not the same as making progress.

Here's a quick reality check - a user asks you about the status of a particular problem that he has submitted to your incident system.  Do you talk about how your efforts to improve the system so you'll be able to get that information easier or do you talk more about the actual problem.  "We're about to implement a new tracking system that will let us monitor our projects,  it will be so nice for everyone when it's complete" -- sound familiar.

Hopefully, this will make me more aware of the situation and help me focus on the right issue.  How do you make sure you focus more on the weather than on the dancing?

"Chippfolk - rain dancers" photo by mryddrr

If this topic was of interest, you might also like these:

The CIO as Salesman

• Standardizing for Efficiency - The Question is "More Efficient for Whom?"
• IT Needs To Become More Like "Shadow IT"
• Or the posts in the "Strategy & Management" category