Interview Story - Accomplishment
At Farm Bureau Insurance, I was hired as a senior project manager. They brought me on to take some long-overdue projects across the finish line. Immediately, when I started, I wanted to understand the status of these projects, and also the entirety of the IT organization. I quickly discovered why so many projects were stalled and way over budget.
When I was hired, I had the most senior IT position at the organization, and I wasn’t actually hired into the IT department. Previously, IT had been considered an internal help desk. The department was created to help with managing phones, computers and then maintaining their insurance data mainframes. Then, business management started to recognize and launch high-value IT projects without any changes to their internal IT function.
These projects were started on an ad hoc basis. Management hired independent consultants for each initiative. Internal IT wasn’t consulted. In short, there were a lot of projects, little oversight, and a lot of frustrations as a result. And it was my job to get everything back on course.
I realized that to fix this we would have to make a fundamental shift in the perception of IT and technology functions. And this had to start at the top with the buy-in of the CEO/business founder. Based on previous conversations, I knew he was a visual learner. I developed a series of slides with visuals describing the work.
On one of the slides, I listed several of the issues he'd heard about, scattered randomly all over the page. On the next page was the same version of the slide with the words "THERE IS NO IT STRATEGY" in bold, black print.
Exactly 60 days after I started, I sat down to a one-on-one meeting with the CEO to explain my findings. We talked through the presentation together. As we went through the rest of the deck, he kept looking back at that slide. I think it really got his attention. As we were wrapping up, I told him we had a lot of opportunities to turn things around because IT was "the tail wagging the dog" at that point.
He gave me his full support to put their work in order. Over the course of the next year, I rescued key initiatives they had that were over budget by $5 million-plus and behind schedule by an average of 6 months and got them into production.
- Led an Agile transformation which created so much transparency and collaboration
- Created a new IT Governance process; put the business in the driver seat; helped pave the path for aligning IT with business
- Established a new Data Management practice in IT
- Kicked off the first major digital transformation initiative
As a result, I was able to develop IT into an independent functional department and established myself as a trusted business partner and strategic advisor. And, I knew I could do more. I was then promoted to CIO in September 2018, I facilitated a process with my leadership team during a series of offsite meetings to create a 3-Year IT Strategic Plan that formally aligned IT strategy with business strategy. It was the first time in company history that it had been done; since it was a living document, it became the source for our IT goals every year. But the coolest thing was after I presented it to the CEO for his review and approval, he smiled and said, "Looks like the tail isn't wagging the dog anymore!"