Rejecting the dubious suggestions of business colleagues won’t win you any friends
Many years ago, as an analyst programmer, I remember being taught to differentiate between user wants and needs. The latter were to be addressed, but the former were to receive a polite rejection. But as I have grown older and wiser, and thanks to my training in psychology, I now understand that wants have an emotional element, and if they are not addressed they can lead to grumpy and adversarial customers.
In my experience, business people are great at presuming solutions to business problems and when these solutions involve technology they are inevitably ill-conceived. IT people react to this in one of two ways: either they say that something can’t be done, reinforcing the stereotype that IT people have a “can’t do” mentality; or they do their very best to comply, even if the request is of a dubious nature. Either way, the IT people end up being seen as the bad guys constraining the business, dictating what it can or can’t have and delivering inappropriate solutions.
So what should IT people do? I believe the solution lies in the development of two key skills: questioning to uncover and address the crux of the matter, and imagination to come up with alternative ways of addressing the real problem. At the same time, giving users a choice of solutions enables them to own the outcome rather than being told what it should be.
So how does this work? I can best explain this by way of an example. In a past life, I was the IT director of a retail bank, and one day I was asked to extend our services to a 24/7 operation. This was neither practical nor feasible, but instead of rejecting the idea or giving an exorbitant estimate of the costs involved, I asked the business why it wanted to go for 24/7. My users explained that we had been the first telephone bank, and for a couple of years this had been our unique selling proposition (USP), however, many other banks had subsequently followed suit. We now needed a new USP, and switching to a 24/7 operation was seen as providing this.
I agreed with the idea, but I then asked the users if they wanted to offer a full service throughout the night, what volumes they were anticipating and whether the data need to be up to the minute. Armed with the answers to these questions, I was able to suggest an alternative approach: downloading the data at 6 pm each evening on to a large PC and running a basic enquiry service overnight until the main systems came back on line at 8 am the following morning. They thought this was perfectly adequate and were truly amazed at the speed and low cost of the solution. We ran this solution on a trial basis for a period of three months, monitoring the volume and type of activity. We then did the job properly, offering a full service between the hours of 7 am and 9 pm, seven days per week.
So I became the heroine rather than the villain. I had satisfied the desire for something new whilst at the same time avoiding the trap of the “no-win” scenario. In addition, I had succeeded in maintaining and potentially enhancing working relationships.
So, next time you are asked to deliver something you can’t, don’t say “no” but ask why they want it and what are they trying to achieve, and use your imagination to come up with those alternatives. In essence become a “can do” person.
Reproduced by kind permission of SPG Media Publications, as published in IT Leadership issue 2, 2005
