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If you are much beyond one or two years into your three- to five-year IT strategic plan, chances are it’s no longer in sync with the business. It may be time to rethink your planning approach.

Long-term strategic planning is beginning to sound like something from the dark ages. These days, companies need to take in near real-time information, analyze it, and continually adjust their plans. Adding to the challenge, technology plays an increasingly important role in most strategic plans, yet it is changing so fast, it’s hard for even the most progressive IT departments to keep up. Was it only a year ago that we were marveling about the business opportunities in the public cloud? Now, with prices dropping quickly, cloud computing is virtually a commodity.

Perhaps business and IT strategic planning functions can learn from the highly popular movement toward Agile software development and the related practice of DevOps. Instead of developing software in isolation with annual updates and a general guess of what users want, now developers are delivering new features monthly or weekly, with the latest user needs and changing technical requirements in mind. There’s an expectation that software will be regularly improved to meet new goals.

The same logic holds true for planning. Why spend six months creating a plan that is almost irrelevant by the time executives rubber-stamp it? It’s time for CIOs to reconsider their approaches to IT planning, with a heavy nod toward collaboration between business and IT, frequent feedback, and adaptation along the way.

Why Change?

Companies have been following the traditional IT strategic planning approach for decades, because it has often worked quite well. The common approach involves a few important steps, including conducting a current state assessment of applications and infrastructure, defining a future state vision for IT to match the defined business strategy, identifying gaps and prioritizing initiatives, and then, finally, creating an IT strategic road map outlining execution over a three- to five-year period.

This highly structured, long-term approach sometimes falls short, however. Business strategies may not be clear or have the proper buy-in, for one. This is primarily due to the fact that in some companies and sectors, dramatic change due to regulation, technology disruption, and/or the competitive landscape makes it nearly impossible to plan out beyond one or two years. In other cases, a company may simply be growing too quickly to obtain a clear future vision. In these scenarios, a more rapid and flexible approach tends to work much better—morphing with the business, instead of holding back progress.

A Case Example

Consider the case of a Fortune 1000 company that was struggling to set its technology direction amid flux on both the technology and business fronts. Creating a three- to five-year plan was becoming a foggy endeavor, as the company was trying to gauge the impact of overwhelming technological changes related to how it ran marketing, customer service, and operations. Efforts to look into the future from a technology perspective were also hampered by the fact that the business didn’t have a clear three-year vision itself.

Instead of embarking on several months of assessment and planning that could possibly backfire, the company conducted a tighter, eight-week planning exercise. Through strong upfront alignment between business and IT leaders, it put together an 18-month road map. Along the way, changes in projects and priorities occurred as expected, yet those changes were viewed as a normal part of the process. One year later, the organization had completed many of the projects it had initially identified along with adjustments that came back from marketplace feedback.

The Agile IT planning approach starts by recognizing that speed is more important than precision and collaborative buy-in from important influencers is critical to success. This effort requires that business and IT stakeholders craft a consistent shared vision at the very beginning—a vision that everyone understands may change on the fly, if market conditions dictate. While there may be extra risk that comes with faster implementation of IT initiatives, companies that follow this path will typically realize far richer business benefits from new technology.

Building Blocks for Agile IT Planning

Agile IT planning works best for companies that face volatile change in the business environment or see a higher potential business impact from IT. It also tends to work at companies with low to moderate operational complexity; large multinational companies with multiple business lines and complicated logistics may struggle to adopt this streamlined process.

The foundational elements of Agile IT strategy development mirror those of Agile software development and include:

Speed and collaboration: Meet frequently with business leaders to clarify business and IT direction and identify the technology levers that will drive value.

Iteration: Think in time frames of 12 to 24 months and revisit the plan every six to 12 months.

Business ownership: It’s an old adage, but with Agile planning, business owners must be involved from day one and own portions of the strategy, working in tandem with IT, which owns execution.

Baby steps: Start implementation with projects that will likely deliver real business value quickly. In other words, go for the low-hanging fruit first to gain traction with your stakeholders.

Making it Stick

Successful Agile IT planning projects share some common traits: intense engagement with senior business leaders; avoidance of “analysis paralysis”; an ability to make hypotheses quickly; a laser focus on “what really matters now to the business’” and clear linkage of business changes with specific technology initiatives. Note that with Agile IT planning, business and IT stakeholder alignment must occur at the beginning, not the end of the exercise.

A more conservative or highly-structured culture might struggle to make the transformation to Agile IT planning. Yet even a conservative corporate culture can adopt aspects of it. Creating shorter time frames for planning and implementation can deliver myriad benefits to a company, including faster rollout of the latest productivity-driving technologies and a culture that’s more focused on customers and current marketplace realities.

—by Scott Rosenberger, principal, Deloitte Consulting LLP, and Shomic Saha, specialist leader, Deloitte Consulting LLP