Unpredictability is the new norm. The frequency and force of unexpected events hitting us is unprecedented. Technology managers using TBM enjoy an advantage of being able to navigate these events with a better chance of success.

Think about catastrophic “natural” events increasing in intensity, geographies impacted, frequency, but also political triggered events, with implications into business models, not to mention business organic events originating from new technologies, new market actors, mergers and acquisition, new business opportunities. Etc.

For IT managers, one way to proactively prepare for the unexpected is to adopt TBM. Short of predicting the future, TBM does create conditions that promote agility, collaboration, accountability, strategic business outcomes and a bias towards results oriented decisions. All very helpful during high pressure times. 

Once crisis hits, agility to make risky decisions can define the difference between survival or extinction. These are the moments when the TBM governance framework, TBM aggregated data and enabled federation of decisions using curated information will be the key factor to survive another day.

A real-life example was experienced during the early hours of the Covid pandemia. While the whole world was locking down, organizations that had adopted TBM did have visibility into their complete IT portfolios and were able to make informed difficult decisions to react to such monumental challenge. Moving funds overnight into remote working enablement solutions.

These TBM programs did not have a use case in production for crisis management enablement. But the TBM offices were able to pivot the program, adapting it to the new, unpredictable, strategic priorities for the organization. This is an important concept to highlight. The TBM discipline, the data, the dashboards, these are all amazing practical tools, ingredients to formulate a solution, but in the end people in the TBM universe act, using those tools, and delivering results, this is what makes the difference. It is possible those same people would have acted without TBM, there was no other option but to act. The decisions they took were better by using the insights provided by their TBM practice.  

Once the initial reaction to the crisis is taken care of, then we need to figure out how to manage that resulting situation. You cannot just let it run and forget about it. Governance and reporting structures need to be put in place to keep costs in check, to account for changing conditions, and to introduce efficiencies that were not important during the initial response. Instead of creating ad-hoc processes, TBM does provide the structure to manage IT services or products and the discipline to do it in line with the rest of your offerings.

During the crisis, in addition to figuring out how to survive it, it's the best time to visualize the post crisis opportunities that will emerge and how to prepare for those. As Winston Churchill once said, "never let a good crisis go to waste".

Going back to the covid example. Once we learned to live and work isolated from our co-workers, some organizations thought about the new normal that would eventually emerge after covid. Being able to redirect your investments to build the platforms and services that will be relevant in that new normal. The time to invest in those activities is during the crisis, to enjoy the first to market advantage.

Easy to say but much more difficult to implement if you do not have the visibility enabled by TBM.

The best practice of TBM governance needs to include participation from the risk management stakeholder group. They will provide the needed feedback on how the TBM program fits into the risk management policies. The TBM manager will benefit from their expertise in positioning the TBM program properly in the risk management framework.

Instead of debating when to deploy TBM to be ready for the next crisis, it would be more productive to decide to start the TBM journey now and adopt these behaviors as part of the regular operating model now or as soon as possible. Why do you investigate your investment portfolio only during a crisis? wouldn’t it be appropriate to examine all the components of your IT portfolio all the time and assess the alignment to current strategic priorities?

The TBM framework, and the included taxonomy, capabilities and value conversations will transform the operating model of any organization once the TBM office takes charge and shows the way for the rest of the enterprise. Maybe we can use the argument of crisis preparedness as one of the arguments to get people behind this TBM adoption idea now.