Entries Tagged 'Upper Management' ↓

Tailoring your message is an essential project management tool that for some comes natural, but can prove to be a difficult task for others. We’ve all been in ‘business meetings’ that have been hijacked by an IT person who goes way too in depth on programming logic, database design, and architecture plans. On the flip side, I’m sure many of us have also been in ‘IT meetings’ where a business stake holder goes way to in depth on financial trending, changes in legislation, and marketing initiatives.
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Projects and Programs fail for a variety of reasons.  Data Governance is a particularly tough program, and I’d like to see as many programs succeed as possible.  Below are the top reasons I’ve seen that have caused Data Governance programs to fail.

1. No Success Shown
A good way to kill your program is to show no success out of the gate. Very quickly people will become disinterested, restless, and you’ll notice participate will wane. To prevent this, get a quick win that really excites upper management as well as the stewards. Fix a pain point for them or clean up something that everyone knows is a problem. Whatever you do, get a quick win.

2. Loss of Executive Buy-in
This can happen for a lot of reasons, including the other 7 listed here, so the key to this is to keep your executive sponsors up-to-date and engaged. You can do this through traditional status reporting as well as drop-in meetings and updates when you have success. Have a communication plan that keeps your executive sponsor and interested upper management engaged and updated.

3. Not Having a Proper Foundation
A recent article that I blogged on stated that 80% of Data Governance projects fail. Now, I’m not knocking the authors or anything, but the conclusions that were drawn were pretty obvious. If you start Data Governance before you have the proper foundation you are going to fail. A proper foundation includes proper data management for your organization, data models, metadata, etc. Basically, you need to at least have the basic foundation for what Data Governance will indeed govern. If you don’t have metadata, for instance, wouldn’t you first start a Metadata project to build up your data dictionary before starting your Data Governance Program? I would.
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It is important that your Data Governance program stay visible throughout the organization. This means getting out there and doing presentations, getting your talking points in whenever the opportunity presents itself, volunteering to speak at all-hands meetings and business team meetings, etc. A few posts back I talked about the much needed ‘Elevator Speech‘ and I can’t emphasize enough how important it is to have those ready at a moments notice. Additionally though, you’ll need talking points and presentations that last 15-30 minutes and longer for meetings with other IT and Business units, high level executive presentation, mid-level business teams, and any other audience where Data Governance can bring value.
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I had a topic in the hopper that I wanted to talk about soon, something along the lines of…”Want SOA at your organization? You better have Data Governance. Well, Neil Hepburn beat me to the punch, sorta, with his article titled SOA without IT Governance = Goodluck, which I might add is a great title.

Neil has a compelling discussion that boils down to the fact that to implement a SOA strategy, without managed data and metadata is, “like boarding a ship with an incompetent navigator. Will you get to your destination? Sure, but it’ll take you a lot longer, and cost you a lot more.”

Ed Tittel has a great article about SOA and Data Governance. While Data Governance and IT Governance are distinctly different, they are both essential to successful SOA. SOA involves the highest level of reusability for any services performed in an organization. In order for this to be truly reusable, you absolutely must have your data governed…. because yes, the services are systems talking to one another, that is the infrastructure. But what is being passed between the services? Data. Continue reading →

There will come a time when you’ll step into the elevator with a VP, CIO, CEO, or some other executive and they’ll inevitable say, “So how is everything going?” While you can always tell them about your son’s tee-ball practice or daughter’s ballet recital, wouldn’t it be better if you immediately could say, “We’re working on the principle loan amount with the Data Governance Council to ensure that it is being calculated consistently across all systems. When we’re done, we can be absolutely sure this field is correct”.

Its extremely important that you have a couple of good ten second elevator speeches ready for cases just like this. You’ll want Data Governance elevator speeches such as: Continue reading →

This can be a tough one, and there is no one guaranteed way to succeed at this, but there are a number of techniques you can use that will help.

Getting Executive Buy-in

1. Get a quick win
2. Fix a Pain point
3. Demonstrate the value using metrics (ie. if this field were 88% accurate instead of 87% accurate, when used in a marketing campaign we could expect a return $315,000 more in sales)

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