Technology Strategy

This is a reference resource intended to be linked to in order to provide just a little more insight in an easily digestible format. This is not intended to introduce the concept as a standalone article.

Who is this for?

A CTO
A direct report of a CTO
A senior technical person, but a bit overwhelmed at the idea of devising a Strategy

This is for VFS Clients.

What does it cover?

What its purpose is
What it should include
How to make it actually useful
Things to consider

If anything sparks your interest, ask your VFS Consultant about it.

Let's keep it SIMPLE

A strategy needs to get you from where you are today to where you want to be in the future. So you need to have a good understanding of yourself, your team and your organisation, both strengths and weaknesses. There are two main scenarios when you'll be writing a Technology Strategy.

1) A Business-Wide Review

The first is when your business is revisiting its ambitions and goals, and as such your strategy is a fundamental piece of the solution. The process of creating your strategy will require you to clarify and challenge the thinking of your peers and seniors. In this situation you need to have access to a Business Strategy that can actually help you make decisions of what your strategy needs to help the company achieve. Your input, clarifying questions and challenges (just as your peers will) are all part of shaping and refining the business strategy.

You need to start with a clear understanding of your company’s strategic goals and objectives because they will set the tone and direction for all supporting strategies, including the Technology Strategy.

2) A Department Reset / Transformation

The second scenario is where the business strategy is either well established or non-existent. "But how can these two extremes be considered the same scenario?" I hear you ask. Well, obviously they're not. But for the purpose of focussing this content on helping to trigger ideas, this simplification suffices. Either way, you're not contributing to the formation of the business strategy, but trying to set up your people to be as effective as possible for the betterment of the company.

Ideally you start with a clear understanding of your company’s strategic goals and objectives because they will set the tone and direction for all supporting strategies, including the Technology Strategy. If this is missing, you need to be able to provide a shared vision, alignment and purpose. We explore this in the T.E.E.M framework below.

But what should it include?

Well, apart from a description of the current state and the future state, it needs to inform high level investment decisions and clearly explain how it is aligned to the Business Strategy. Ensure that you have a sufficiently balanced approach across People, Process & Technology...and of course the financials for each.

Somewhere in your strategy should be information about your competitors and from different industries. You should consider trends, uncertainties, opportunities & threats. We don't prescribe how you include this, only that it informs your strategy.

Set goals. A goal not set is never achieved. We encourage defining clear, observable outcomes.

You may find it helpful to clarify the position of your department within the business, who it collaborates with, serves and is dependent on.

Describing the ideal working environment and culture is also desirable. This encourages planning and taking action to achieve this but also helps you to be mindful that it will be people, their behaviour and their efforts that will secure your collective success.

And to this point, be clear on what resources and competencies you will need over the near and more distant time horizons.

If you're devising a strategy, you're probably in a senior leadership role.

A Leader's Tool

As a leader you are many things but it's often said that there are Three Roles of Leadership - envisioning, aligning people to your vision, and ensuring execution.

A good strategy will help you do this. This strategy needs to be useful. Whilst you'll need to capture your Tech Strategy in a document or two, remember that its "a plan of action designed to achieve a long-term or overall aim".

“Good strategy isn’t a detailed plan. It’s a framework that helps you make decisions.”

― Melissa Perri

How to approach your Technology Strategy

If you search online, you'll find an abundance of advice, lists and templates. It can be difficult to know where to start. At VFS, we have written and executed numerous Technology Strategies. Whilst all are different, we have identified a few common concepts and structures that have helped to create, communicate and successfully execute Technology Strategies.

A strategy may need to be focussed on growth and thus investment, others on change and improvements within tight constraints. Another common theme is increasing speed and adaptability. If your company already posses this ability, it needs to be maintained. If it doesn't have it, it is likely to be a significant undertaking that requires the wider business to contribute towards it. We have extensive experience increasing business agility.

Our Competitive Business Agility model is a company-wide, or Business Unit-wide model. But it can be useful for considering what to include in your Technology Strategy.

A Holistic Framework

The T.E.E.M Concept

Our Technology and Engineering Excellence Model acts as the backbone for our Tech Strategy in both large and small companies where there isn't necessarily a business strategy or an absence of executive leadership. We use it more as a stand alone tech strategy framework .

It's an amalgamation of several well tested ideas with some unique VFS ingredients from the world of individual and collective 'identity philosophy'. It provides a framework that encourages a holistic approach.

Inform Daily Decisions

The TOPP Agility Model

Along with being 'Executable' (see below), our strategies aim to be effective at helping better decisions to be made.

Within Product & Technology-centric companies, many decisions are made each day from priority calls to deciding from a range of architecture options, between speed versus costs and so on.

It's crucial for a strategy to actually inform and influence the workforce and this is what we aim to do.

Executable

Goals, Outcomes & Principles

A strategy should ideally lay out how the work will be done and how people will be organised in order to achieve the ambitions of your strategy.

For example, how will people come together to break down and undertake the activities? Is it their main job or is it something that has to be done as well as their business as usual (BAU) tasks?

If you're part of a typical Digital Product Development company where most of the technologists' work is driven by product backlogs, how do the tech-led initiatives get prioritised? How can technical backlog items be expressed in terms of business value?

Your strategy needs to help an engineer clearly explain that the thing they are proposing, or championing, is not for them but just as much for the business as those things Product or Commercial are proposing.

Your strategy needs to help ensure that large tech-led initiatives are decomposed into small enough increments so they can be 'interleaved' into other work to make priority calls easier (MVF & MVP thinking in Tech).

Informs Investment

Planning horizons and types of Business Value

Any Technology Strategy needs to contribute to the investment decisions of the board.

People, Process and Technology are the common pillars. We cover some of this in the TOPP Agility model.

Your strategy should lay out Short, Medium & Long term horizons, what costs to expect and what expenses you expect to incur in these horizons in order to successfully achieve your departments contributions towards the business achieving its goals. This may be best laid out in an Opportunities & Threats format.

Consider Investment in Time (such as prioritising Technical debt, Tooling or Infrastructure improvements) and monetary investment.

Defining certain Non-Functional Requirements of the Product, SaaS or Services you offer - alongside the other Business needs that are the responsibility of the Technology Function - is one way of using your strategy to shine a spotlight on ambiguities or assumptions and thus help reach agreement on costs, resources and SLAs before your strategy is agreed.

It's also worth considering in what type of work your strategy needs to support.

Spoiler Alert: "...successful companies had learned to execute activities in all four quadrants, all the time, and had robust processes for managing the transition of an activity from one quadrant to the other."

Talk to your VFS Consultant about our Executive Framework for managing Technology Estates consisting of numerous software services and tooling. It's based on our Service Map approach.

. Credits: Josef Oehmen (lse.ac.uk/businessreview)

One final thought

It's also worth considering what type of organisational paradigm is most dominant and how you want to lead and ensure execution. In today’s dominant management paradigm (Orange), leaders are supposed to define a winning strategy and then marshal the organisation to execute it, like the human programmer of a machine who controls what it will do. But is this really how you can best align, support and collaborate with your workforce?

Checklist

This is a list of the key points discussed in this article.

As a Senior Leader...

Will it help get you from where you are today to where you want to be in the future?
Does it help you decide where to prioritise your resources?
Does it help you request financial investment?
- Maybe this is reaching agreement on an increased opex or capex budget, on time delays and investments of workforce effort, or even on agreed 'lost opportunity costs'.
Does it help paint a picture of the future? The Culture, the working environment, the achievements?
Will it help mobilise people, change their day to day behaviours and focus their efforts?
Will it actually help you to make good decisions? Even in times of stress and pressure?

As an employee in this department...

Does it help them make better decisions on a daily basis?
Does it inspire them? Give them a clearer sense of purpose and increase their ability to use their initiative?
Does it help provide them with the right tools and conditions to thrive?
And as a Technologist, does it help them to easily make a business case for prioritising their idea or concern?

What have you missed? How can your strategy improve one of these points even more?

“It will be people, their behaviour and their efforts that will secure your collective success. Your strategy must guide and enable them.”

― Scott Potter

You may want to checkout:

The Concept of Interleaving - Product features versus technology investments.
The VFS 4A Framework - A simple Framework for Senior Leaders, for creating a High Performing workforce.
Principles of High Performing Teams - Vital Behaviours; Environmental Enablers; The Pressure-Performance Curve; Team Charters and more.
The Competitive Business Agility Framework - an article on transforming companies, on our main website.
Beyond Microservices - written over a decade ago, this article on our main website is as relevant today as it was the day it was written.