It is often said that the customer is right. Yet Dave Ramsey has described mission statements as the boundaries of what an organization or group will do. If the project or request is outside the mission statement, Dave Ramsey would say no, regardless of the opportunity or request or promised payment.
Moving outside the mission statement may be profitable or what the customer wants, but this takes focus and resources away from the core purpose. IT departments can get caught up in a related catch 22 situation. It is their job to serve the customer, whether internal or external. Yet they may have limits on their ability to say no, regardless of the department’s mission statement.
If the IT department knows when to say no and has the backing to do so, many difficult problems can be solved before they start.
* A user requests a report slightly different from a standard one. Then the same report is requested with a minor variation from someone else. Is the system administrator allowed to say “No, use this existing report and consolidate your own information using this other report?” Or do they waste time and effort creating variations on a theme, instead of critical maintenance? If IT can say no at the request, the configuration management process isn’t even started, must less the customer’s time wasted by submitting a request only to be rejected. What happens if this same user states, “I need a guide on how to clear browse cache.” Instead of taking hours to build something up, tell them no and to search online.
* The reports or data pulls are completed and provided to the user. The user comes back and requests a comparison of the two data dumps. Can the IT department say no, this is a configuration management job? Or are they required to do the work, since the customer has requested it?
* A terrible pop song once warbled, “Oops, I did it again.” In the case of IT, managers, configuration managers and super-users often receive system access as part of their jobs. When someone consistently makes mistakes or problems, do they have the right to suspend access until the person is adequately trained? Or do they correct the mistakes as best they can and hope the person learns? Your company can get rid of these problems altogether by giving IT staff the ability to say no, you are no longer allowed to do this.
* “Wouldn’t it be great if these two systems shared data / sent me a summary / automatically notified these other people?” Adding more IT system connections increases complexity that may not be value added. Can the IT department say no to the request and refer the issue to management as a software architecture / software requirements matter? Or does the scope of the software expand because a user has requested it? Many of the problems in IT departments are solved by knowing when something is out of bounds, too far out of scope, not cost effective or negatively affects other customers. Know the boundaries of “no” in your organization. When can IT refuse tasks and work outside of their scope or against the best interests of the organization? When IT knows when it can say “no”, they can focus on their core areas of reliability, security and data integrity.