Simon Post, The Carphone Warehouse’s Chief Technology Officer, writes about the change programme he has been leading within IT, and offers his tips on leading a corporate IT function in a rapidly growing business.

Now the world’s largest mobile retailer, The Carphone Warehouse has experienced dramatic growth since its formation 18 years ago. The company has also succeeded at moving into new business areas and offering a range of new products. Five years ago, The Carphone Warehouse was not even in the broadband market - now it is one of the largest ISPs and telephony providers in the UK. Simon Post, Chief Technology Officer, The Carphone Warehouse

“When I arrived at The Carphone Warehouse, the IT department had been doubling in size, both in people and financial terms, every year for the past five years. The company was making the transition to becoming a large operation and was doing so at a rapid pace. As it would in any company, this put a strain on the IT department - the technology and the people.

We recognised that to maintain this level and pace of growth, operating at the scale the business had become, we had to be a lot more rigorous about the way IT was approached and delivered. When you are a large operation, IT issues can have serious repercussions. We needed to adopt a more planned and process-driven structure to IT development and delivery - we were simply becoming too big to risk doing otherwise.

However, we also recognised that in moving towards this more mature process environment we couldn’t compromise the entrepreneurial and fast-moving spirit of the company. We didn’t want to slow the company down or hold back rapid innovation but we needed to operate in a more thorough and rigorous way - with proper testing and trialling. There’s no doubt that achieving this balance was challenging.

A vitally important move was to increase the focus on our employee development and put in place a range of new HR procedures. When any company grows rapidly there is a tendency to overlook the employee development side and to think of people in terms of pure resource, as ‘arms and legs’ who can get things done, rather than considering performance and quality. One of my early priorities was to focus very strongly on performance to get the best from people and ensure that they felt supported. We now have a thorough objectives-setting procedure in place where people are rated not just on what they do but on their values - how they do things. The top two layers of IT management have all been on leadership courses and there are coaches available if people need them. Additionally, we have a good training and people development programme - even for people who stay with us only for a short period of time.

We also took a long hard look at the structure of the team, how IT interacted with the business and the people management processes we had in place. One important move we made early on was to shift all our business analysis and programme managers back into the business. Now we have a group of people operating inside the business who understand our systems’ life cycles and project management. They know and appreciate why we want to do things in a rigorous way and in certain sequences.

We also established a Business Change Function to provide a formal framework for managing projects of change. Simultaneously, we helped the business understand the benefit of running IT projects more effectively and sold them the benefits of, and need for, good levels of analysis and testing.
Simon Post’s five top tips on managing IT in a rapidly changing business

Don’t start with the technology: You have to have the right people in the right places before you start thinking about the technology. You can have the best processes and technology in the world but with poor people, over time, those great technologies and processes will evolve into poor ones because you haven’
t got the right people running them. Retaining good people, motivating them and finding the next generation of good people is my key priority.

Consider your starting point carefully: You need to be very sure of your management team before you start transforming the operations side of IT. At the beginning, we focused our efforts on only changing the areas of IT that would not fundamentally damage the business - such as stop the stores from opening - if things went wrong. We’re only now at the stage where we are transforming the operations side of IT.

Deal swiftly with those fighting the vision: I quickly learned that a clear, defined vision that everyone is bought into, is essential to ensure that you move at the necessary pace. If you are changing and growing rapidly everyone must have a clear idea of how and why you are going there - and buy into it. If there are people within the department who are fighting the vision you have to work with them as necessary because they will slow the process of change.

Never forget that IT is a people business: Focus all of your efforts into making sure that you have the right processes, the right HR team and the right management team in place. No one person can force through change of this scale so it’s vital that you have the people around you that you can trust. Also, don’t dodge the hard conversations. If someone isn’t performing you have to tell them - you have to be honest and frank and tell them what you expect.

Learn as you go: Learn from every problem or issue you come up against and take something from it. We learnt a lot from the introduction of TalkTalk and so did the senior executive team. It possibly brought home to many in the company how important the testing and trialling phase is with any IT project and deemed our plan to bring a more professional dimension into the IT department fundamental.