Stop Practicing “Badgile” – Evolve your IT Management Principles

It's time to evolve your IT practices and finish that Agile IT transformation

Stop Practicing “Badgile” – Evolve your IT Management Principles

By Karuana Gatimu

Date: February 8, 2025

I hope we can all agree that leadership is part art, part skill and part experience. To me, the idea of a “natural born leader” is outdated. You might have natural leadership abilities, but a true leader is crafted by experience, honed by the wisdom acquired through those experiences and operationally talented enough to deliver results and team morale. On an average day it’s a tall order.

In IT and in the tech sector in general it’s been a hard road to embrace empathetic leadership styles. It hasn’t been our nature to embrace our emotional intelligence as it has in other industries. We’ve had seasons of inclusion, diversity, empathetic leadership etc. but in my personal experience the individual who truly embraces those things as part of their leadership principles vs having them as convenient talking points has been rare. We seem to idolize the techbro – some sort of swaggering and often toxic masculine stereotype, which leaves little room for the innovators I have come to know. It’s silly and counterproductive to the long-term health of your core competitive differentiation: your employees.

That has to change. Not because of some squishy discussion about employee health & wellness. Nope, because of clear, cold bottom-line issues. Employee turnover, burnout and discord are a threat to your bottom line. Cultivating a leadership culture that empowers employees to do their best work and deliver results is in your best interests. Why? Because exceptional IT leadership can be a differentiator to the entire company. There are tactical changes you can make to bring this about.

It’s about the money – Enable clear revenue objectives.

Too often we discuss IT in the context of security, threat management and risk. This makes IT perceived as an expense of the business rather than viewed as a revenue generating function. I’m not referring to your placement on the profit & loss statement. I’m referring to the perception of IT by other functional business leaders and your boss. This narrative that we are expensive and only useful for help desk and threat management needs to change. I write this during the initial years of widely available AI capabilities, but it has always been true. If you are not discussing how your IT solutions and services are driving revenue growth, you are missing a clear opportunity to protect your people and budget.

That means delving into how you are supporting your sales and marketing groups to better, more effectively do their jobs. Focusing on supporting them, engaging with customers more deeply, understanding customer insights and objectives and resolving issues with more speed and clarity. This type of work can also be deeply meaningful to your staff and provide new and exciting career opportunities, unearthing little used talents of your people.

Stop being the “Department of No.” – modernize IT engagement practices

To do the above – frankly to be invited into the room – it is essential that you modernize your methods of engaging with business leaders. Not only to change how you discuss your wins, progress, and issues but how you discuss the work itself. Many years ago, as we were modernizing Microsoft IT, we embraced the idea of Business Program Managers that specialized in various functional areas. These were individuals who had deep knowledge of HR, marketing and sales systems and the business acumen to engage with leaders in those areas. They were not typical IT folks who talked about features and risks, earning the “Department of No” moniker which yes, was a real thing people called us. Often with backgrounds in consulting, these individuals were focused on business outcomes and treated those functional leaders as if they were customers of IT, not just people asking for difficult things.

That change in staffing and approach yielded deeper results, better relationships, and less shadow IT. A win for everyone. The practice has continued to evolve in Microsoft IT and in other modern IT departments I’ve encountered around the world. It’s time to double down on this method.

Kill your “Badgile” Practices – Finish the Transition to Agile IT

I’m not sure if I coined the term “badgile” or not but I’ve certainly seen the situation multiple times and came to use this term in my presentations. It is the poor application of Agile practices. Again, pulling on my experience in corporate IT, it is when an IT organization ditches the long and unwieldy waterfall method of project management for a faster iterative approach but fails to finish the implementation. What gets ditched about mid-way in the transition is arguable the most important parts of Agile IT management: feature specifications validated by stakeholders, ongoing business engagement and employee feedback. This leads to a bunch of stuff getting delivered that doesn’t make anyone truly satisfied.

Many of us know that managing an ongoing backlog of feature requests is at the heart of Agile and has the potential to lead to true continuous improvement & delivery for IT. This was the hope of leaving waterfall behind – the ability to deliver incremental improvements at the speed of business instead of scoping long projects – moving toward continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) methods that software companies had long embraced. Without stakeholder engagement in the setting of these priorities and even in your daily standups you are not building the deeper relationships that will transform the view of your function. Many business leaders have no idea what is involved in “deploying a simple form” etc. They don’t need tactical details, however having them at the table in each monthly prioritization meeting is critical to your success, driving a sense of shared accountability for the outcomes you are investing in.

Further, once deployed true feedback from the employees who use the features, not just their managers or leaders, is essential to providing deeper insights on overall process improvement. TALK to these people – don’t just send them a survey about their satisfaction. There is literally no replacement for this process.

Your Wall of Text Comms are Terrible – Improving IT Communications

“An e-mail is not a communications campaign.” I do not know how many times I’ve said this when consulting with organizations about why their employee engagement and product adoption programs are not delivering results. A degree in computer science does not prepare you to communicate, or motivate, humans. Consequently, it is imperative in your quest to transform your IT department to engage professional communications people in your product roll outs and feature release plans.

IT must embrace human-centric communications about IT changes and deliveries. This means you will have meaningful and often fun communications campaigns that do not lead with detailed steps about how to do things. You will not bury the lead in your story about the amazing features and products that are available to help people with long wall of text emails. Nope, not today. You will have graphics, slogans, and bullet points! That is the way.

To deliver value, at the pace of business, in the era of AI and beyond we must complete this transition to Agile IT. Talent diversity will enable successful teams that can sit alongside their business stakeholders to achieve and surpass the goals they’ve set forth. Connecting IT service management to business objectives, and embracing different sorts of skills in IT has the potential to make work more meaningful and valuable to everyone involved. It’s a process, but the outcome is worth the effort.