A CTO can only control a few things.
He usually can’t control his agenda, nor its teams – even if he thinks so to reduce stress.
Nevertheless, stakeholders expect him to deliver a fulfilling vision like he is in control.
That comes through a systemic approach.
The CTO has to understand the unique challenges of the company to draw a trajectory that can leverage the forces of the ecosystem.
And that’s where a systemic CTO makes the difference by taking control of few – yet structuring referential – to use through the entire transformation process.
People referential
The CTO fails without the right people.
Actors are at the center of software production, actually solving the unique challenges with the right level of expertise, skills and behavior.
Yet, the initial state is usually not aligned. The CTO has to develop the ecosystem of talent prioritizing his efforts in incremental steps.
And for that, he must build the as-is referential of people.
Structuring a central people referential enables the CTO to:
- Know the exact number of people flowing in the organization
- Leverage key ratios on domains, compensation, management
- Optimize organizational decision-making through data.
The CTO has to put more attention to details depending on the context. A global organization requires to ensure that all locations and types of staff are considered (contractor, interns, …).
It is useful to collect historical data of evolution (turnover, promotions, FTEs) to confront assumptions and identify opportunities.
From there, the CTO can leverage the referential to support its initial diagnosis and alignment with the vision.
His next challenge will be to maintain this people referential up-to-date with a clear ownership and processes to capture all changes – from entries to exits and change of teams.
Technology assets
We can improve what we can measure.
While organizations tend to be aligned with that theory, they have a hard time answering simple questions related to their technology assets.
One test is “How many applications do you have in the landscape?”
Partial technology inventories are an issue for organizations that want to optimize their software production performance. Each team reinvents the wheel wasting money, and opportunities are missed not having up-to-date information.
Taking control of technology assets enable the CTO to:
- Provides a single source of truth for technology inventory
- Align teams on the definition, granularity and assets available
- Track changes that will require alignment in the design authority.
The CTO have a key role in structuring the referential to link assets from business to infrastructure layers, and leverage automation for data quality checks.
He is also accountable for having a governance setup to support the filling and update of the inventory aligned with changes in the landscape.
Change initiatives
There is always more to do than what’s possible.
That’s a natural way to filter priorities to focus on what matters, putting aside or for later topics of lower value.
But achieving that focus is hard in organizations.
People compete for resources to achieve their objectives without a natural incentive to arbitrate altogether on what matters.
Mature organizations are efficient in governance. Others just pile up parallel change initiatives that reduce the overall speed and effectiveness of investments.
The CTO have to take control of change initiatives to gauge the level by:
- Centralizing the view of major on-going and planned change initiatives
- Defining the categorisation and key metadata to assess them
- Assess gaps between planning and execution in time, costs and quality.
Useful metrics in that assessment are the time-to-value, cost (at least workload) per initiative and the cost of delay.
The CTO will have to cut on the bandwidth depending on the challenges to solve and the organizational maturity.
He also have to ensure regular review of the portfolio, being responsible for optimizing the company investments to balance incremental value delivery with long-term requirements.
Become a Systemic CTO
People, technology and changes.
Taking control of these referential enables the CTO to perform a strong analysis of the as-is that will reflect in the quality of the vision and its subsequent execution.
By structuring them early, he also provides a way to catch changes that do not contribute to the business objectives or fit with new ways of working.
He also avoids making wrong assumptions in his diagnosis and vision definition, which can be costly when discovered during the execution.
By implementing a systemic process, the CTO also makes the difference by building up for the next steps.
He can use people analysis to prioritize evolution. He can leverage the application inventory to support the design authority.
He can project the roadmap to achieve the business outcomes.
Thrive becoming a systemic CTO.