Resources

One of the first tasks and a critical success factor is to find and allocate resources. There are two primary resources necessary to get started: people and computer systems.

The roles discussed in the previous section will be assigned to people within the organization. Customize the roles to work within your enterprise and create an organization chart for the IMA process that mirrors the roles found in Figure 14-2.

Next, determine the time commitment for each role. In a large organization, the IMA team, manager, and communicator roles will likely be full-time assignments. Smaller organizations might assign the manager as full-time and assign IMA participation as an additional duty for everyone else. Additionally, the number of IMA team members varies with the size of the organization. I recommend a team of three to seven people, depending on the size of the organization and whether they are full-time or not. Teams larger than seven people can be unwieldy to schedule and manage. At least one person on the IMA team will need to provide clerical and reporting support.

An important part of assigning IMA roles is to contract for time with the participant's supervisor. For full-time roles, this may be a formal HR process. For part-time roles, the contract should be a written acknowledgment by the supervisor of the person's roles and responsibilities within the IMA activity and the expected time commitment each week. Executive intervention may be necessary in this stage to get commitments for the key people.

Team members must be able to easily share their data and documents. Email can fill this need, but you may find that a more formal tool for this purpose is helpful. I strongly recommend the use of a content management system for sharing results, managing document versions, distributing reports, and communicating progress. The content management system needn't be expensive. Plone, an open source product, will work fine for many organizations. Also, free or low-cost weblog software can be used to communicate progress and important information.

You'll see, as we continue through the book, that there are survey and data collection aspects to the IMA process. Survey products are available online and should be sufficient for much of the required survey work, but the data will need to be pulled from the survey and manipulated. In many instances, spreadsheets will suffice, but there may be some sophisticated data reporting requirements that require database and web skills that go beyond the ability of a small team to self-support. IT resources for managing the database and wrapping it in data entry and query forms should be committed to the IMA team as necessary.