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TBM is about evolving the operating model of organizations to reach aggressive business goals. Having those business outcomes present at all times is critical for the success of the TBM program and the Enterprise.

Small Medium Enterprise (SME) are vital for the economy from the job creation, and innovation perspectives. They are often more agile than larger businesses, which allows them to respond quickly to market changes. But they need to deal with large challenges like limited resources, scalability constraints, operations rightsizing. These enterprises often struggle too with scaling their TBM programs.

In this document I will look at reasons and alternatives to enable healthy TBM programs as a tool to help alleviate or resolve all together some of the other limitations they may face.

In casual conversations with colleagues, it was pointed out one of the main reasons for failing TBM programs is not having a vision beyond the original implementation. There may be multiple factors preventing a medium to long term roadmap for the program, the project team might be narrowly focused on specific deliverables (on time, on scope, on budget), executive sponsor bandwidth constraints, competing short term priorities, rushed planning cycles, imperfect sales processes, just to name a few.

Technology keeps playing a more important role in the world, and the trend is to continue gaining importance as a tool that enables life as we know it. Growing crops, driving cars, developing new materials, enabling customer service, recovering from catastrophic events, securing environments, … you name it, technology is an integral part of what we do and how we do it. Enterprises of all sizes rely on technology as business enablers and business driver. And it requires dedicated management attention to maximize the return from it.

Management has a choice to make. Are we going to improvise and re-invent the wheel to actively manage our technology footprint and needs or should we learn from others and apply proven disciplines. This can make for a very entertaining discussion over dinner but intuitively our management self knows the second choice is the best one, and it is called TBM.

We all can remember a monster project, one of those that never gets completed, no one wants to touch, it never delivers solutions and is in a permanent fire drill mode. I’ve seen it happen many times, for all kinds of projects, and sometimes with TBM deployment projects. Avoiding that situation is as “simple” as keeping a clear view of the business outcomes.

TBM onboarding projects need to have a clearly defined set of business outcomes and associated capabilities:

In addition to the list of business outcomes and capabilities, the team needs to document who and how are these new capabilities going to be deployed. In other words, change management. The approach of let’s build it and they will come does not work. We’re evolving the operating model for the enterprise, and adopting that new model requires a champion that will help the organization embrace change.

Early TBM program wins will energize the enterprise for more ambitious successive wins.

Someone in the organization at a management level needs to be designated as the TBM manager, without any other major job responsibilities (VP, SVP, Director, …) and this person will among other things keep an eye constantly on the business outcomes of the program. Sure, it is important to look at the new dashboards, look at the data sources, stay on top of the budget. But the most important role for this person is to keep track of the business outcomes of the TBM program, are these being delivered on a regular basis (Monthly, quarterly) and are these relevant for the executives.

Managing technology is critical for the future success of all organizations, and it is complex and difficult. While TBM is not a magic solution, it is a proven tool that will increase the chances of success for your organization.