OPS03-BP01 Provide executive sponsorship
At the highest level, senior leadership acts as the executive sponsor to clearly set expectations and direction for the organization's outcomes, including evaluating its success. The sponsor advocates and drives adoption of best practices and evolution of the organization.
Desired outcome: Organizations that endeavor to adopt, transform, and optimize their cloud operations establish clear lines of leadership and accountability for desired outcomes. The organization understands each capability required by the organization to accomplish a new outcome and assigns ownership to functional teams for development. Leadership actively sets this direction, assigns ownership, takes accountability, and defines the work. As a result, individuals across the organization can mobilize, feel inspired, and actively work towards the desired objectives.
Common anti-patterns:
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There is a mandate for workload owners to migrate workloads to AWS without a clear sponsor and plan for cloud operations. This results in teams not consciously collaborating to improve and mature their operational capabilities. Lack of operational best practice standards overwhelm teams (such as operator-toil, on-calls, and technical debt), which constrains innovation.
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A new organization-wide goal has been set to adopt an emerging technology without providing leadership sponsor and strategy. Teams interpret goals differently, which causes confusion on where to focus efforts, why they matter, and how to measure impact. Consequently, the organization loses momentum in adopting the technology.
Benefits of establishing this best practice: When executive sponsorship clearly communicates and shares vision, direction, and goals, team members know what is expected of them. Individuals and teams begin to intensely focus effort in the same direction to accomplish defined objectives when leaders are actively engaged. As a result, the organization maximies the ability to succeed. When you evaluate success, you can better identify barriers to success so that they can be addressed through intervention by the executive sponsor.
Level of risk exposed if this best practice is not established: High
Implementation guidance
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At every phase of the cloud journey (migration, adoption, or optimization), success requires active involvement at the highest level of leadership with a designated executive sponsor. The executive sponsor aligns the team's mindset, skillsets, and ways of working to the defined strategy.
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Explain the why: Bring clarity and explain the reasoning behind the vision and strategy.
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Set expectations: Define and publish goals for your organizations, including how progress and success are measured.
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Track achievement of goals: Measure the incremental achievement of goals regularly (not just completion of tasks). Share the results so that appropriate action can be taken if outcomes are at risk.
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Provide the resources necessary to achieve your goals: Bring people and teams together to collaborate and build the right solutions that bring about the defined outcomes. This reduces or eliminates organizational friction.
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Advocate for your teams: Remain engaged with your teams so that you understand their perforamnce and whether there are external factors affecting them. Identify obstacles that are impeding your teams progress. Act on behalf of your teams to help address obstacles and remove unnecessary burdens. When your teams are impacted by external factors, reevaluate goals and adjust targets as appropriate.
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Drive adoption of best practices: Acknowledge best practices that provide quantifiable benefits, and recognize the creators and adopters. Encourage further adoption to magnify the benefits achieved.
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Encourage evolution of your teams: Create a culture of continual improvement, and proactively learn from progress made as well as failures. Encourage both personal and organizational growth and development. Use data and anecdotes to evolve the vision and strategy.
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Customer example
AnyCompany Retail is in the process of business transformation through rapidly reinvention of customer experiences, enhancement of productivity, and acceleration of growth through generative AI.
Implementation steps
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Establish single-threaded leadership, and assign a primary executive sponsor to lead and drive the transformation.
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Define clear business outcomes of your transformation, and assign ownership and accountability. Empower the primary executive with the authority to lead and make critical decisions.
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Verify that your transformational strategy is very clear and communicated widely by the executive sponsor to every level of the organization.
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Establish clearly defined business objectives for IT and cloud initiatives.
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Document key business metrics to drive IT and cloud transformation.
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Communicate the vision consistently to all teams and individuals responsible for parts of the strategy.
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Develop communication planning matrices that specify what message needs to be delivered to specified leaders, managers, and individual contributors. Specify the person or team that should deliver this message.
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Fulfill communications plans consistently and reliably.
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Set and manage expectations through in-person events on a regular basis.
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Accept feedback on the effectiveness of communications, and adjust the communications and plan accordingly.
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Schedule communication events to proactively understand challenges from teams, and establish a consistent feedback loop that allows for correcting course where necessary.
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Actively engage each initiative from a leadership perspective to verify that all impacted teams understand the outcomes they are accountable to achieve.
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At every status meeting, executive sponsors should look for blockers, inspect established metrics, anecdotes, or feedback from the teams, and measure progress towards objectives.
Level of effort for the implementation plan Medium
Resources
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