It's funny what gets you thinking...

I was just clearing out my old email and came across a mailer from IT research company Forrester which contained the following:

"In a time when resources are scarce and expensive, the portfolio of business services constitutes a powerful framework for maximizing the business value of IT capabilities. This portfolio must display a holistic but sharp picture of how IT's capabilities and resources map to business needs as well as a holistic view of its spending patterns and priorities. But too many firms have incomplete portfolio management practices. To correct this, IT executives should design their services portfolio using Lean principles, focusing the IT organization on delivering aggregated services that business customers understand and appreciate and on eliminating waste from duplicated and nonsynchronized activities and resources."

Nope, I didn't understand it either.  I had to have a couple of goes to understand what it was saying.

And I had to turn to Wikipedia to double check what I thought  Lean means (which is shameful I admit!).

But actually there is something in here for IC managers to think about.

The point for me is that in the coming months everyone is going to be squeezed on budgets - you don't need much of a crystal ball to see that one coming.  But, how do you know what you should hold on to at all costs and what can you afford to let go?

I suspect that it is will be worth spending some time asking what exactly are we doing that adds value to our organisation at the moment - and what doesn't?

I remember some time ago reading something by Kristin Kelly about how Owens Corning used their process improvement model to redefine the role of IC.  Of course you can never find the article when you need it (despite the best efforts of Google) although I seem to recall that her point began by listening to the voice of her customers - senior leaders in the organisation.

I've been using the above model (inspired by Kristen) for some time now as a way of starting the conversation about what should be the role of a comms team and can strongly recommend it as the basis for a workshop activity.

The main thing is to have a clear idea of what is being done in the team and ask if it still makes sense to keep doing it.  Clearly, priorities have changed dramatically for most people recently - so why spend ages fighting to retain an activity which is no longer needed - or is simply not providing value? 

Instead, conducting a simple exercise to establish what is really needed is going to pay dividends isn't it?

I suppose the challenge is to make sure that your conclusions reflect the views of your senior stakeholders.  And perhaps the best way to ensure that is to run a series of conversations with them about the way forward....

... and all this rambling came because I was clearing out my email!...

Liam