IT - It’s Your Time Down Here.

We all remember The Goonies.

(If you don’t, stop reading and go and watch it immediately, trust me, it’s what you need right now and I know you have time.)

A tribe of self proclaimed passionate rebels go in search of answers, adventure and a way to save their way of life while making it better.

Sound familiar tech folks?

At one point an opportunity to ditch the treacherous, unknown journey and head home presents itself and Mikey makes his famous rallying speech:

“Our parents, they want the best of stuff for us. But right now, they got to do what's right for them. Because it's their time. Their time! Up there! Down here, it's our time. It's our time down here.”

We see disparity all the time in our tech consulting work.

Often leadership, the board, investors set the direction doing: “what’s right for the business” while change makers in the tech team and their vendors innovate as much as they can within the guidelines they are given.

There can be a feeling of “us and them”, technology is necessary but within reason and (understandably) calculated risk.

Research the marketplace, set a strategic plan, design a product or service and tell the tech team and vendors (often late in the process) to support carefully planned initiatives, while more revolutionary ideas are kept on hold.

How’s that strategic plan looking right now?

Over the past month, everything has changed and we are living in the Upside Down. (If you don’t get that reference either then I’ve taken care of at least 2 weekends of quarantine Netflix for you, you’re welcome.)

Projects that were a “one day maybe” and “when the times right” like a secure, mobile, cloud enabled workforce or communication platforms with no physical boundaries are suddenly being thrown into production in days instead of weeks or months.

IT teams and their vendors are stepping up and showing their value and the impact that rapidly deployed technology can have on the people that use that technology internally and externally.

Human needs have trumped business needs and technology is coming to the rescue.

It’s IT's time down here.

It’s very rare that we as people and organizations have an opportunity to figure things out in real time.. To test, fail fast, learn and improve.

Learning is a key point here, rolling out a technology platform quickly provides a chance for a whole organization to learn together. Going on the journey with each other and the IT team and their vendors implementing it.

This breeds a wonderful bi-product of this moment in time - empathy. The knowledge that nothing is perfect for any of us right now is liberating and it’s a terrific collective team feeling finding out:

“You know what, this works and it’s better than what we had, why didn’t we do this years ago?!”

<insert “I told you so” eye-rolls from the IT Team”>

The Goonies journey was full of risk and danger however with the right attitude, willingness to say “what if?” and knowledge that what they were doing was right they came out the other side as the hero’s we’ll never forget.

So, keep going IT folks! I see you and thank you for working through the long hours and complex problems.

To those leading and working with them, embrace and champion your Goonies - listen, gather feedback, weigh risk but do it quickly and be ready to move on recommendations.

Finally, to everyone - question yourselves whether when this is all over will you simply “ride back up Troy’s bucket” to your old norms or will you operate in a whole different fashion pulling from the lessons you learned on the adventure to be more adventurous and nimble?