Interim CIO: Turning an IT Assessment Into an Operating Rhythm

Situation: The Findings Were Clear. The Follow-Through Wasn't.

The assessment gave the company an overall IT grade of C. The business couldn't see what IT was working on, requests arrived by hallway conversation and help desk ticket, and a three-year eCommerce project had consumed most of the team's time. The small IT team was technically strong but had little management experience, and there was no project intake, enhancement process or budgeting discipline.

A report alone wouldn't change any of that. The company needed someone to run IT while the new way of working took hold.

Challenge: Change How IT Works Without Stopping the Work

The interim CIO role had to do three things at once:

• Keep daily operations, ERP upgrades and the eCommerce launch moving.
• Replace ad hoc requests with a process the business would actually use.
• Coach the IT team to work with the business, until a permanent IT leader was in place.

Action: One List, Named Owners and a Weekly Plan

Budgeting with the business. Before the assessment was even final, Don ran budget sessions with each department (sales, marketing, production control, quality and IT) so the next year's IT spending started from the company's goals instead of last year's numbers.

One prioritized list. Every request from every department, about 90 in all, went into a single list. Each was rated using four priority levels the leadership team agreed on:

Items that weren't ready were held in a backlog until they had requirements and an owner. Some were closed because they turned out to be training needs, not projects.

An initiative tracker with business owners. The 30 active initiatives across nine business areas each had a named business owner, an IT resource, a status and target dates on a 12-month view. Each one was also tagged as support, enhancement or a strategic initiative tied to the company's annual goals.

A weekly resource plan. Each IT team member's hours were planned week by week through year end, with operational support set aside first. That showed leadership, for the first time, what IT could take on and what had to wait.

A reporting rhythm. Weekly IT status reports, regular board updates and a monthly plan made progress visible to the people who had been asking for it.

Delivery throughout. While the process changed, the work kept shipping:

• Two ERP upgrades completed, from January to April and again in June 2023.
• The shop floor network was segmented from the office network.
• Print servers were consolidated into the cloud as part of a cloud-first move.
• Accounts payable automation and new sales reporting moved forward with business owners in the lead.
• The eCommerce code base was taken under company control, with DevOps and separate development, staging and production environments in Azure. See the eCommerce recovery case study.

Coaching the team. Don set goals with the IT team, coached them on working with the business, and helped define the IT Director role the assessment had recommended.

Result: IT the Business Could See and Plan Around

• Department heads could see every request, its priority and when it would be done.
• Priorities were set by the leadership team's goals, not by whoever asked loudest.
• Leadership could see IT's capacity before committing to new work.
• The company kept upgrading its ERP and moving to the cloud without pausing the business.
• The company was ready to hand a working operating model to a permanent IT leader.

Why it matters: Most assessments fail after the readout. The findings are right, but nobody owns them. An interim or fractional CIO who stays through the first months turns recommendations into habits.