Governance

My Friday Thought: Governance can be important, but not necessarily the way it has been implemented. In order to change it to be more driven towards the value it intends to deliver over the typical blocks it can provide, you need to embrace it first.

Having spent significant time trying to make small steps to reduce unneeded documentation and gatekeeping steps to empower teams to make more decisions and be able to do the right thing one thing is clear: You need to understand the why before you try to change the how.

Often governance and gatekeeping steps are (often) rightly seen as unnecessary. They cause teams to become blocked and hinder the purpose people believe they were placed in to help. Organisational transformations often try to come in and shake this all up, without understanding the reasons they were put in or more importantly (in my view) gaining the trust and support of those who implemented them and are empowered to change them.

IT isn't a technological business - it's a people one. Tech is the tool that can often deliver us the value, but the people are the ones who deliver the objectives. Knowing this, for me, means I need to gain trust and win the minds of hearts of people so they want to collaborate on improvement. When you do this the silos of 'enterprise architecture', 'design authority', 'security approval' and so much more is broken down and you can make safe aligned change.