Dear Bob ... I'm CIO of an IT department that employes about 150 IT professionals. For the past year and a half I've been trying to move us from a process maturity level of around one (in my own estimation, at least) to a targeted level of three. So far, I don't think the needle has so much as flickered. To say I'm getting frustrated would be a severe understatement. I just can't get things moving. I preach Dear Bob …I’m CIO of an IT department that employes about 150 IT professionals. For the past year and a half I’ve been trying to move us from a process maturity level of around one (in my own estimation, at least) to a targeted level of three.So far, I don’t think the needle has so much as flickered. To say I’m getting frustrated would be a severe understatement. I just can’t get things moving. I preach the process gospel at staff meetings. I preach the gospel at senior staff meetings. I’ve brought in outside consultants to teach the IT staff how to document their processes, and how to design better ones, too, but as soon as the consultants leave it’s back to every analyst doing things as they’re accustomed to doing it.Any thoughts on how I can get things moving?– At wits end Dear Wit-ender …If it makes you feel any better, you’re far from alone. Most IT organizations … heck, most companies, for that matter … that have tried to institute stronger processes have had their process improvement initiatives bounce off the impervious wall of employee apathy with nary a process improvement implemented in the building.The reason is simple: Pushing process on employees who don’t want it is like trying to play pool with a rope. You just aren’t going to move the ball very far. The secret to instituting strong process is to stop worrying about process and start thinking about why you want strong processes. Preach the goal, not the technique, and start to create a process culture.There are two common goals for strong processes: Improved quality and a move from reactivity to prevention. In IT, the connection between “improved quality” and process is hard to get a handle on, at least at first, so I recommend focusing on a move from reactivity to prevention.To do so, stop preaching altogether and start asking a question, over and over again: Every time there’s an incident, ask whoever is responsible for that area, “What is it about how we do things that allowed this situation to arise in the first place?” It doesn’t matter what the incident is. If a server crashes, insist that the server team diagnose the reason and figure out what they could have done to prevent it. Beyond any shadow of a doubt, they’ll first point at an automated systems management tool of some kind; once you point out that the tool by itself can’t do anything useful they’ll arrive at some process they could follow to detect errors before they turn into incidents.Once you have the conversation once with a team, they’ll get the point. Have the conversation several times and they’ll start to buy into the point. Once they push back: “We don’t have time to do that!” You have them: Ask how much time they spent fixing the problem and compare that to the time they’d have spent avoiding it.No, it isn’t really that simple. But if you and the rest of your management team start to consider every call to the Help Desk as a symptom of some deeper root cause, and insist that everyone in IT is in the business of fixing root causes and not just responding to incidents as they happen, you’ll at least get things moving in the right direction. – Bob ——– Technology Industry