Do You Believe In The Backlog Fairy?  By Michael Schrage
 
CIOs may think that backlogs are their biggest pain point. But the real cause of IT failure is mismanaged expectations.

The backlog of projects/requests is the number-one hurdle to effectiveness for CIOs, followed by inadequate budgets and a shortage of time for strategic thinking and planning. Unknown and unrealistic expectations from the business, if combined, would displace backlog as the top factor.

This is going to hurt: Who are we kidding? Where do CIOs think these backlogs come from? The backlog fairy? But wait, there's more! What do CIOs claim is their number-two hurdle? Inadequate budgets and a shortage of time for strategic thinking and planning.

Excuse me, but if you don't have enough time or money to plan, strategize or prioritize, just what the heck do you think will happen to all those project requests? My bet is that you'll get - yes! - a backlog. A big backlog. A messy backlog. The kind of backlog an unseasoned CIO might describe as the biggest hurdle to his effectiveness.

Backlogs are clearly symptoms, not causes of ineffectiveness. To wit: I'm in excruciating pain because my leg is broken. However, I still have a race to run. Believe it or not, my number-one hurdle to running fast isn't the excruciating pain, it's that my leg is broken! You would (rightly) think me a fool if I claimed I'd run marathons like an Olympic Kenyan if only I could tough it out or creatively sedate myself. Nonsense. CIOs have backlog pain because their budget and planning processes are broken. 

Maybe backlogs aren't just symptoms of paltry budgets and a poverty of time. Maybe - just maybe - the better explanation for our backlogs and our awful feelings of ineffectiveness is our unhappy perception that the businesspeople we work with either don't know what they want and need or have fantastical notions of what's genuinely possible. 
 
But this begs a truly profound question: Where do those unknown and unrealistic expectations come from? Do we not know what the business expects because we didn't ask? Or because we didn't understand the business issues well enough to understand what the request really entailed?

What's responsible for all those unrealistic expectations? Is it those vendors who've circumvented us? Those Business Week and Fortune cover stories celebrating infinitely free bandwidth and open source? Or might those unrealistic expectations come from "stretch goals" in project scheduling intended to spur productivity but that instead guarantee late delivery? Or maybe these unrealistic expectations come from the promise (made by vendors and CIOs) that outsourcing mission-critical software development overseas will yield savings of 60 cents on the dollar over in-house development?

CIOs don't just manage IT enterprise expectations, they lead them. CIOs who manage expectations don't have enterprise partners surprising them with unrealistic or unknown expectations too late in the project life cycle. Misleading and mismanaged expectations are guarantors of the backlogs that CIOs find so troubling.

On the other hand, some CIOs will say that backlogs are, indeed, how they manage and lead enterprise expectations. In other words, the backlog "bug" becomes a feature some of the more manipulative CIOs use to extract bigger budgets and greater resources from their firms. They have effectively trained their organizations to treat backlogs as causes - rather than symptoms - of the IT issues confronting the enterprise. If they can get greater support by defining backlogs as their number-one problem, why should anyone be surprised by that tactic? 

The pain and frustration of most CIOs comes from root causes that have little to do with money and resources and everything to do with rigor and relationships. When a profession blurs symptoms with causes - and exploits that confusion to gin up budgets and extra resources - then something is rotten in the field. A visit from the backlog fairy is really an opportunity to challenge ourselves about what our real barriers to effectiveness might be.