Is Trust in the IT business like Truth in Politics?
Writing 1000 words about Trust in business – especially the IT business – is a tough ask. Trust is about keeping promises and delivering on expectations. And, let’s face it, the history of IT has been about over-promising and under- delivering.
But precisely because trust has been such a scarce commodity, I would argue that its value and importance in our industry has never been higher.
Trust is unspoken - since claiming it or asking for it suggests its absence rather than its presence. “Trust me I know what I’m doing”. “You’ll just have to trust me”.
Trust is an emotion. And we are all trained to minimise risk in business by adopting a Vulcan-like process of rational decision making devoid of emotional content.
We need to get over that. Emotions play a huge role in any decision making process.
Partly as a consequence of the history of the IT industry in failing to live up to its promises, IT projects have, arguably, become even more driven by emotion, not less.
Fear of failure, fear of project cost overruns have driven excessively complex RFP processes and cumbersome project management methodologies, adding cost and time to the execution of IT projects regardless of their size.
As an industry we need to first of all acknowledge the importance of emotions our business, particularly in the successful management of complex projects - and then we need to adopt a more sophisticated attitude to harnessing the non-rational.
Consider a stunningly simple piece of research carried out recently at Harvard University. Research participants were ‘accidentally’ engaged in a lift on their way to what they thought was a research interview on a higher floor. Between floors they were asked to hold a cup by a fellow passenger as the fellow passenger fumbled with his clip board. Half the sample were handed a warm cup of coffee, the other half were handed an iced cup of soda. At the end of the subsequent research interview the subject was asked about the person in the lift with the cup. Was that person suitable for team leader management position? More than 75 percent of those handed a warm cup said the person was suitable. Fewer than 25 percent of those handed the cold cup said the person was suitable. This demonstrates how our judgment is influenced by our emotions – and even more interesting – how our emotions are affected by seemingly unrelated factors such as heat and cold.
Does this mean we should guard against emotions in making decisions?
I don’t think so. I think we have to recognise that we are not Vulcans. We are Humans. We are emotional beings and emotions are an important factor in the way we interact and the way we do business.
But we do need to be aware of the importance of emotions in affecting our rational thought processes. We should not allow negative emotions such as fear to play too great a role. Equally, we should not be naive in giving trust too easily.
In the SAP world, there is typically a relationship triangle between the customer, SAP and the outsourcing or project implementation partner.
Whether this relationship works for all parties is fundamentally affected by the level of trust.
The relationship triangle has been through a Darwinian evolutionary process. In the beginning trust was lost as complex projects took longer, cost more and delivered less than promised. As a consequence, each party sought to protect their interests by increasing the sophistication of RFP processes, project scoping and budgeting, project implementation methodologies – and of course improving the skills of the people as well as the software itself. But perhaps the most significant evolution has been in the mature realisation that projects work because people work together – and people can only work together effectively when they do so in an environment of mutual trust. Hand in hand with this has come the realisation that projects don’t often fail because the software doesn’t work, but because of the human factors involved in managing the process of change.
Each party in the relationship triangle devolves trust to their team representatives. The customer puts their trust in their own people to deliver the outcomes the business requires. SAP puts its trust in its people and its implementation partners to achieve the desired customer outcome while also achieving a satisfactory return on investment. The implementation partner trusts its people to do the same.
We at Oxygen have learned that the single most important requirement in bringing a project in on time, on budget, to specification, is for our team to integrate with the customers’ team to create a single team. That, of course, means people working together. It means, in a word, Trust.
That doesn’t mean that technology and project management technical skills and experience are not important. Of course they are. What is does mean is that nobody should believe that a rigorous RFP process, tightly-managed scoping and implementation methodologies, and punitive performance contract clauses are enough to ensure project success. This crude, carrot and stick approach is based on negative emotions, such as fear. This is not useful for anyone.
The warm blooded mammals of the SAP world are fuelled by positive emotions. They acknowledge that trust is the most powerful ingredient in the complex emotional chemistry which powers successful projects.
They know that trust is hard earned and easily lost. They know that trust in teams is forged by sharing a mutual objective, and providing mutual support within the team to achieve those objectives. .....and they know not to serve iced drinks when pitching for new business.
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