The Naked CIO: Animal farm

IT projects should be prioritised according to business benefits. That's fine in principle, says the Naked CIO. But this must happen without ignorance, hierarchy and petty rivalries.

It amazes me how Orwellian our jobs are. We spend years and boundless effort trying to create processes that treat everyone as equals and that evaluate proposals in a business context. Our goal is to stop company politics interfering with decisions.

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Some organisations succeed. They set up systems that honestly assess and prioritise projects. But others become entangled in a bureaucratic nightmare that further isolates the IT department from engaging properly with the business.

Over the past few months I have devoted considerable time to a system that weighs up development requests and priorities.

It was surprisingly hard to get everyone sold on the idea that priority should depend on a proposal's benefits to the business.

That sounds imminently logical to me but the concept left me in no doubt that the IT department knows the business better than many in the organisation.

I was also struck by the lack of business knowledge of some of my colleagues - and the lack of empathy some of them possess for each other.

Empathy is a funny term - the ability to put yourself in the place of others. I sometimes wonder if there is any place for it in a modern organisation that prides itself on competition between executives and relies on Darwinism - the survival of the fittest - for long-term success.

I have long viewed my IT department as an important service centre that needs to pride itself on customer satisfaction. My team too, after considerable debate, now believes in this philosophy.

I have begun more rigorous costing and evaluation of development benefits. I have also created an elastic pipeline that lets teams using agile methodology apply capacity to high-priority items without affecting lower priority ones. I am extremely pleased with the results.

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Greater visibility of development projects, evaluation and measurement of estimates, as well as very clearly stated expectations.

All in all it has been a success. The business still does not understand the issue of prioritisation. Some people always somehow think they are more important than everyone else.

When this happens I simply explain to them how we measure and evaluate business impact in prioritising their request.

I must stop writing now because I have just had an email from our CEO instructing me to start work immediately on a program that has no value to the business.

It will cost a lot, will never really be used, take months that could be used servicing the business more effectively and is both ill-conceived and poorly defined.

If I don't develop it right now and displace everything currently in progress I could lose my job.

In my business all people are equal - it's just that some are more equal than others.