The pressure points of Cloud Adoption

The values and benefits of cloud adoption is increasingly clear and well known. Not to be carried away with these values and benefits, it is important to identify and be aware of the pressure points that the Cloud Adoption brings in as called out by ISACA in its white paper titled as ‘Guiding Principles for Cloud Computing Adoption and Use. Essentially the differences in technology itself and its use impacts the way IT is governed and managed and the management’s reaction to these impacts brings on the pressure points as well, which need to be managed.

Differences such as change in cost allocation from capital to operational may have consequences that may not apparent at the beginning. For instance, contracting for a cloud based software would be an operational spend and may have a lower cost of entry and thus, such decisions may fall outside the review and approval process. While in most cases, the pressure points are to be managed as risks, these are not necessarily risks.

Speed and Agility

The time-to-market is a driver for cloud adoption as solutions to meet market needs would be available more quicker at lesser cost though there could be gaps in meeting the exact requirements. This agile exploitation in a reduced time frame puts greater pressure on enterprise, in which culture, process, and human factors related to technology have been developed to support longer development cycles and long term technology use. This pressure when not handled appropriately could result in increased risk level in the following areas:

• An unbalanced prioritisation of value over trust in technology solution choices
• Missed opportunities when other alternatives are not considered
• Recovery mishaps because fallback positions are not fully exploited
• Missing functionality if full requirements are not identified
• Increased long-term costs due to reliance on multiple short-lived solutions
• Reduced performance when enterprises are hesitant to introduce new solutions because of existing technology investments

Changing Boundaries

The reliance on cloud providers calls for change in the roles and responsibilities within the enterprise and transfer certain responsibilities to outside parties. Contracts and SLAs with service providers attempt to assign accountabilities, but governance dictates that the enterprises themselves, their board and management remain accountable. With this, the locus of decision making changes from governance functions to business line leaders. This change in the organizational boundaries can put greater pressure on enterprises. The risk outcomes out of this pressure point could be:

• Role confusion when accountabilities and responsibilities are not clearly defined
• Diminished effectiveness when decisions are made without engaging in a wider consideration of trust and value before cloud acquisition
• Failure to satisfy constituent and end-user expectations for protection and privacy
• Project delay and increased costs due to the need for personnel with governance responsibilities to revisit cloud plans
• Unclear specifications of provider responsibilities and accountabilities in SLAs
• Incomplete information being provided to board members and senior management

New Technologies and Technology Expectations

Cloud follows a sequence of disruptions in how technology is viewed, integrated into organizational strategy and managed and in how IT risks are identified and managed. Areas of high pressure can result when strategy and enterprise architecture do not consider the unique qualities of cloud computing and when enterprise processes and procedures do not easily adapt to changes made possible by cloud computing. The following risks could be the outcome of this pressure point:

• Missed opportunities to extract value from the integration of cloud and internal systems
• Increased vulnerability from incompatibilities and inconsistencies between cloud and internal systems
• Less than expected results when human factors are not considered in the design and integration of cloud services and infrastructures
• Levels of organizational performance that do not meet expectations because cloud solutions do not fully support organizational processes
• Levels of technical performance that do not meet expectations because processes do not take full advantage of cloud capabilities

Level Playing Field

Cloud computing removes the advantage that large enterprises have traditionally had in terms of availability of technology specialists and technical sophistication. Smaller enterprises now have the ability to leverage the cloud services and use technology sophistication that large enterprise used to enjoy. This brings the small and medium enterprises on an equal position with much larger enterprises. This level playing field can have an impact on the strategy and its implementation. Ignoring this impact can result in increase of risk levels in the following areas:

• New entrants claiming a segment of traditional market dominance
• Strategies that do not address competitor capabilities
• Less-than-expected benefits received from technology-dependent solutions

Utility Services and Service Supply Chains

With cloud computing, where computing is viewed as a utility, focus is shifting to the value and benefits obtained from such utilities. Agile enterprises benefits from solutions that can be used as needed and discarded when they no longer provide value. This view of computing as a utility and the delivery of solutions supply chain of information systems solutions puts greater pressure on enterprises that contain a culture that is not accepting of utility solutions, a structure that does not facilitate cooperative planning and processes that cannot take advantage of computing solutions provided as supply chain of utilities. Ignoring this could result in the following risk outcomes:

• Over-investment of resources in planning and building internally developed information system solutions
• Less-than-optimal results when value-producing cloud utilities are missing from the total solution
• Duplication of effort when specialist services available through cloud providers are not integrated as part of system management
• Less-than-expected results when utility components are not integrated into and managed as an information system capability supply chain

In the white paper, ISACA suggests that enterprises follow a six guiding principles that can help illuminate the path for cloud adoption. Click here to download the complete white paper which is available for registered (free registration) users.

Key risk areas that can impact the project success

Till recently and to some extent, even now, some of us don’t want our insurance advisor talk about our own risk of life. It has been the belief for some not to think or talk about the risk of losing life. However, things are changing and most of us today are managing personal risks well by atleast transferring the risk to the insurer for financial protection. Risk management is not just financial protection and there is more to it, even though finance makes the core part in most cases. The same way, if we look at managing software projects, the project manager and sponsors had to deal with so many issues every now and then, before it was felt that preventing such issues coming along the way is better than dealing with such issues, which is what is risk management.

The risk managers or risk experts always think of a what if scenario for every action / decision so that all possible risks are identified early on and this in the past was thought to be creating ‘negative vibes’ and did not receive much support from the project sponsors. Because, when much of the risks are identified upfront, it might be so that the project may have to be shelved at the start itself. Here again, things have changed and most CxOs are accepting ‘failing fast’ a better option than failing at the end. Failing at start is an even better option. Refer my own blog on ‘failing at start’.

Given that most of the project sponsors and project managers have realized that risk management is better than its only alternative crisis management and are believing that risk management is a key area of project management, let us explore the key risk areas in a broader context that need a close watch which if not could impact the success of an end to end software project.

User Expectations

Even though a well written functional specifications exist, and the development team developing to that requirement, there is a potential risk of end users when they look at the final product go back and say that “this is not working in a way we want’, and pushing back the product for rework. This is mainly due to the fact that everything around the business is changing with time. The more time the development team take in involving the end users, the chances are very much likely that the expectation would have changed. Agile is the solution to address this risk area, where by the end users are participating in the development and small chunks of the product are delivered every now and then for user feedback.

There are more to it, most projects do not have the non functional requirements documented and much of the user expectations go around such software capabilities, for instance application performance is a key non functional requirement, which the development team is expected to take care of as part of. While the solution for this lies with the solution architect, the project manager and the stakeholders should not lose sight of this important area and should be managing the user expectations all through the project execution.

If one can identify or spot the potential risks around the user expectation and manage it well, the chances of the project successfully reaching the milestone is very high.

Technology Shocks

This is a broader risk area and could be broken down into many sub areas. Many projects hit a road block when it get closer to production deployment, by when the infrastructure team may find heavy investment in terms of hardware and software tools required to support the product in production. Some projects even faces issues in the early stages as well, as the development team may find some tools or technology not suitable for the given solution.

A well done pre-project risk assessment can help address this risk as the architects involves in such assessments can anticipate and call out such road blocks, which might help the project sponsors to take a call. Development teams in most cases would want to jump on to the project and start building everything themselves without considering re-usable off the shelf components being available for most capabilities. This tendency can add to the schedule risk, as the project may take longer due to technical issues that the team may face.

Managing risks in this area early on is very important as certain choices might be very difficult to reverse in the middle of the project. It could also be a case where implementing certain requirements with a given technology platform or tools could be much more complex than with certain other tools. Much of this responsibility lies with the Architects, who should do a good job to take the project pass through this risk area.

Skill gaps

While this item is to some extent related to technology shock, there is more to skill than the technology itself and that made me to call this out as a separate risk area itself. Soft skills play a key role in taking the project on the success path. Staff attrition is inevitable in software projects and as such managing the dependency on people is very important. The resources holding key roles should have the right attitude of hand holding the teams, willing to share the knowledge, quick and effective in on-boarding new members to the team.

Such skills of key resources holding the lead role even influence staff leaving the team or even the organization and it could be some of the best resources of the project team exiting for such reasons. The Project Sponsors should play an important role here in getting to know of such risk items and manage them well so as to keep the morale of the team high and get the best of the team.

Every member of the project should contribute towards the success of the project, keeping in mind the project goals and objectives. It is not uncommon that some key members of the project make certain decisions in such a way that is beneficial to him or them and in turn putting the success of the project at risk. This is a sort of political behaviour by some members within the project. Here again, the sponsors should involve more into the project and look for such risks spotted early on, so that control measures can be put in place by changing the team composition or by imparting necessary training or counselling to the needy members.

This third risk, when identified and managed well will ensure the team members collaborate and communicate well and deliver their best which eventually will contribute towards project success.

Lack of Risk awareness

Finally, lack of risk awareness by the project stakeholders is the biggest risk. This calls for a proper risk strategy and objectives at the organization level and at every project level and letting every member of the project to actively participate in risk identification and management.

While most project managers do mandate risk management as part of the project charter and do maintain a risk register, they fail to apply the risk management principles consistently, which eventually lead to incorrect risk prioritization. Not to be stressed, the controls and tasks identified to reduce the risk level also need to be monitored on par with other project tasks for timely actions. It is also a common mistake that the project managers do by missing out to estimate the efforts for risk management and not making it part of the project schedule.

Another important aspect of risk management, which is normally ignored is the communication and continuous monitoring. Risks need continuous monitoring and need different levels of communication or escalation depending on the risk level. Most projects have a stale risk register, where the risks are just identified and no monitoring or follow ups being done on them. Use of an appropriate risk management tool is recommended as it will ensure the visibility of the risks to all concerned with automatic alerts and escalations and also will facilitate consolidation of risks across multiple projects, there by facilitating managing risks at enterprise level.