Why a Good Start is Critical to IT Transformation: a Conversation with Monte Nuckols

I'll give one example of this.

So this is... one of the large global ERP projects that I was responsible for from an IT perspective.

We had a great team.

We'd staffed the team with great business people.

We had staffed the team with great IT resources.

We had a good partner, implementation partner.

We had great support from the software vendor.

And then we had the one throat to choke that was that was stated by one of our top leaders in the company.

So that person became the ultimate decision maker in the steering committee meetings.

And then as decisions started getting made that was taking us off track, we eventually failed.

And then, so the person with the one throat to choke was executed, you know, and was removed.

And then, And then we had a new leader come in and reverse that and took ownership of it.

And we created the accountability from the top to the bottom.

And it was a broad set of, I mean, it was the whole team that was responsible.

So if the whole team failed, the project failed, it was the whole team that failed.

And we turned that project around and we were wildly successful.

And so it's just a good example of how the two contrast.

So if I'm reading

in here, we were going from an unhealthy to a healthy culture of accountability.

Correct.

So one of the things we discovered in the research is to connect accountability to personal growth.

So one of the programs we worked on together, a big long-term program, you tapped into people through a whole bunch of different ways and tools, thinking about aspirations and coming up with shared commitments.

What do you remember about that program?

Well, the program had to do with spinning off one of our largest division in the company and creating a new company out of that division.

And when we staffed the project, you know, both companies were up and running and they were, they were staffing their own organizations.