Forging Partnerships

Computerworld - The most fundamental challenge we in IT face today is the poor state of our relationships with business partners in the units we support. Although ROI seems to be the current industry buzz, we fail to realize that no single factor guarantees a bigger return for IT than having a strong working relationship with the business units that depend on us to help them drive innovation.

IT projects often fall short of expectations or are delivered late because of poor communication, a lack of teamwork or a breakdown in processes, all of which are needed to keep us on the same page with business units.

Yet we continue to devote most of our energy to process management, collaboration, improving our ranking under the Software Engineering Institute's Capability Maturity Model and other things that are often worthwhile but definitely not more important than establishing and maintaining good relationships with our business partners. When it comes to overlooking the obvious, we're no better than the homeowner who spends a lot of time cleaning up for guests while ignoring the eccentric aunt in the coat closet who's screaming to get out.

At FedEx, my team has heard the cries of our business partners, even though we already enjoy relatively strong relationships with them by most standards. Even so, there's room for improvement for FedEx IT and in the IT industry as a whole.
To that end, I've challenged my team to adopt some basic skills that I think are essential for IT to be a trusted partner of the business units it supports. To help get the message across, we've integrated trusted partnership tenets into more than a dozen IT employee and management training courses, including our critical thinking, project management basics and IT business orientation courses. We've also distributed thousands of posters to remind everyone in FedEx IT of the importance of being a trusted partner.

One of the most important things I expect my team to learn is that we must educate our business partners on the complexities and challenges of information technology. All too often, IT professionals are guilty of condescendingly telling business partners that they don't need to understand the technical aspects of a project.
Let's face it: Our business partners are learning more and more about technology because of the increasingly high-tech world we live in. We need to give them credit for what they know, as well as fill in the blanks about the things they don't know. It's important for us to realize that misunderstandings are