Identifying champions within the organization can make a big difference in motivating the staff to want to participate in the process.

Ideal characteristics of your champion

• Person skills
• IT skills
• Project management skills
• training skills (or potential)
• Value alignment with org goals
• Buy-in and support from leadership
• Decision making authority

Challenge: all the above may not be present in ONE person, Local IT support and Process Leading is needed (unless org is tech savvy and has high buy-in). 

What does an IT champion look like?

• Local to organization
• has trust of org
• Either is able to drive the process (or has buy-in and process support available)
• has skills  (IT skills)
• Has person skills
• Ability to self-learn

What does a process leader champion look like?

• Has person skills
• Either has IT skills or org has trusted IT support available
• Has authority to make changes (make decisions), or buy-in and comm-line with leadership
• good project management skills

Challenges you should expect to run into

• IT champion leaving the organisation for another (better) job or will not support the organization any more
• frequent burn out of the champion
• Incompetence 
• corruption / unethical behavior 
• IT examples:
• Stealing resources (for personal benefit)
• Unnecessary product/services recommendations (for personal profit)
• Holding information hostage (for ransom)
• laziness
• values are not aligned
• overconfidence, not willing to listen to criticism
• infiltration

Mitigation strategies for addressing these challenges

• Vetting process for selection or assignment of champions
• Role redundancy
• Good decision making process - vetting decisions
• Put contingency plans in place in case of removal/exit of champion
• Role description (prerogatives and boundaries thereof)
• Monitoring and supervision (by leadership)
• Good mapping of the organisation's resources and challanges

Resources

• Mentorship
• Support community, pool of local champions linked together

In this page: