How do you approach transparent communication with your teams?

Traditionally, every time we do our annual operating plan, whatever we put in our next year's budget is centrally managed. This time around, I wanted to give a bit more transparency to our next line of leaders. So we did an exercise that laid out the total IT cost structure so that if any of them grow into a CIO role, they would know how the budgets are built and the workings of IT from a management perspective. It was a good exercise and we went into the demand planning process in terms of what the various projects are that we would potentially see as a demand in our coming quarters. Everyone was very excited to come up with their pipeline, cost out how much of it is CapEx or OpEx, etc. 

But they lost the context that these budgets are all indicator numbers for the next year, because you don't know what will happen. As you enter the new quarter, things may change and new initiatives may come in. So you have to juggle those yet still be within the approved envelope.

When Q1 started and I got all these escalations: it looks like all the projects that the business is coming up with are being rejected because it's not part of our budget. They said, "You have a demand planning that was done last year for the current calendar year. Some of these new requests are not approved, therefore, your team doesn't want to execute on those." Most of my team members had taken the demand planning process literally, thinking that whatever they identify as our initiatives is what they’ll execute going forward. But they needed the context that we try to come up with a budget, get allocated for it, and then we reprioritize based on the scenario that happens every quarter.

When I have any type of messaging, there's a level of context necessary when you have folks that are earlier in their career or new to the role versus folks who are seasoned. I've learned that the folks that are definitely early in their career, they need as much context on the why and how it affects both upstream and downstream. Why are we doing this and why is it important? Because sometimes they get so stuck on wondering, “Does what I'm doing even matter? Why can't I do it my own way?” And they don't understand the repercussions, which they are graded against and should be micro-focused on.

That's their metric. Whereas their manager is seeing more and more of the bigger picture. And so I always feel like if I don't explain at least to my managers and their managers' managers so that they understand the goal of what we are doing, then by the time it gets downstream to a service desk person, they won’t understand why it matters. They will be like, "Well, my KPI is how many calls I closed." So my advice is always read your audience. And just spend a bit more of that upfront effort anywhere on the chain, but definitely on the folks that are just beginning their career.