Turning Crisis Into Opportunity: How Government IT Teams Can Lead Through Uncertainty

As local governments have adopted their FY25/26 budgets, a great deal of uncertainty is built into them. The Federal and State Governments have yet to publish their budgets, and the economy remains anything but certain regarding how local revenues—from sales and property taxes—will be impacted.

These uncertainties have led some localities to freeze and/or eliminate vacant positions, put major projects on hold, and defer much-needed infrastructure refresh projects, which drives up tech debt. At the same time, some of our most seasoned staff are retiring, and we aren’t always able to replace them. This creates serious gaps in the skills needed just to keep the lights on. Many local government IT budgets are seeing a 5–to-8% reduction this cycle, eliminating all contingency funding that could address unexpected break/fix needs or innovation opportunities. While IT capacity is being reduced,  the City/County organizations’ employees need high-functioning IT systems and capabilities more than ever to meet current demands and service residents. All together, this can make it seem impossible to make lemonade out of lemons in this scenario.

I’ve always considered myself an optimist—a glass-half-full person, at least I like to think so. Looking beyond the immediate challenges, increased risks, and pain points, there are actually many opportunities. The saying goes that serious organizational change only occurs from crises or vision, and rarely is it from vision alone. These uncertainty cycles come and go, and we will come out the other side of the storm. Never let a good crisis go to waste—that’s a good perspective to have in these uncertain times.

The first thing to understand is that what your IT organization accomplished last year is not what you can do this year. You may now have less staff, less funding, and fewer capabilities, but you still have the same end-user support base, operational systems, and infrastructure to maintain and keep running. There are few options where you can simply turn off an operational business system to match your department’s reduced capacity—like 911 dispatch, for example. You understand this, but most of your customers may not, and something simply has to give. The bottom line is that things have to change. An organizational change process needs to take place. This requires proactive leadership to step up, identify the change that’s needed, make a plan, and then execute it.

A thoughtful and empathetic approach is critical—with your customers, their staff, and your team. While you see the challenges in the IT department with 100% clarity and urgency, your customers and their employees certainly don’t. They, too, are going through uncertainty and crises. They also have reduced funding, staffing gaps, and mandated service requirements to meet. The major IT projects scheduled to do for them could need to be delayed based on their staffing and workload changes. It’s critical that all parties understand each other’s positions and limitations and work together to find mutually beneficial solutions and outcomes.

Opportunities During These Uncertain Times Include:

• Increased Enterprise IT Governance Involvement - Customer alignment, Enhanced IT project prioritization, Customer ownership, Communications, Customer empowerment

• Building a Healthy Environment and Intentional Culture

• Maturing the IT Organization

Increased Enterprise IT Governance Involvement

Enterprise IT Governance is the forum where IT and customer departments work together to align resources, set priorities, and better understand one another. Shoring up, enhancing, and fully engaging all stakeholders through this forum for problem solving is key. It’s the best tool to assist in weathering the storm so that all parties feel heard, understood, and part of the solutions—with shared ownership. I like to call IT Governance the “Secret Sauce” for innovation and business value.

Through IT Governance, now is the time to work on expectation alignment and management—starting with your elected Board/Council, CEO/City Manager, CFO, and customer department heads and their fiscal staff. For example, say you lost positions on your service desk. This could result in response times to end-users doubling. Without expectation alignment, customers will become dissatisfied with the Service Desk operations and staff. Service Desk staff, being highly customer service oriented, will try to rise to the occasion through herculean efforts. While admirable, this situation is simply not sustainable, resulting in both unhappy customers and burned-out staff—a lose-lose situation. What if we could turn this around into a win-win?

For this example, enhancing how departments and their end-users can support themselves without having to call the Service Desk can be a win-win. We in IT love control—sometimes a little too much—and this can result in holding all the keys to the kingdom. With proper training, documentation, and guardrails, customers can do a lot of their own self-support. One solution includes empowering “Super Users” in each work unit with enhanced training and privileges to resolve common computer and printer problems. This both provides quicker problem resolutions for customers and relieves Service Desk workloads. This same scenario can be applied to other areas across our IT environment and application portfolios.

One of IT Governance’s most useful functions is project prioritization and resource allocation. If your organization and your strategic plan previously laid out four major projects for the coming year, but now you can only accomplish two, then IT governance should select those two that will be worked on. Ultimately, the customer departments pay for all IT, either through direct charges or via systems like GASB cost allocations. As such, they need to be at the table to set priorities. The added benefit is that the IT department is not the bad guy telling customers that their project can’t be done, or which project is more important—it’s IT governance, which is made up of their peer customer department leaders. This ties into expectation alignment between IT and the business. It’s important that IT leadership determine the actual project capacity of the IT department and demonstrate that clearly and transparently to IT governance. Customer departments will better engage with and own their IT projects and systems if they are at the table with considerable influence over the decisions. IT governance provides that, as well as the forum for continuous two-way healthy communications.

Building a Healthy Environment and Intentional Culture

In times of uncertainty and crisis, people either hunker down and stay under the radar, or they step up and team together to meet the challenge. The latter is certainly the preferable route. This requires IT leaders to understand that every decision they make during a crisis is seen and scrutinized by their staff with heightened awareness. How leaders perform and act in difficult times is critical to setting the culture and tone across your organization. Decisions are weighted heavier now and have more impact on morale and employee engagement.

When demand for IT services is not properly managed, it can lead to a work environment where the team is perpetually overwhelmed. Constantly operating at or beyond capacity can diminish morale, increase stress, and result in high turnover rates. An overstretched team is more prone to errors, which can compromise system security and reliability. This “survival mode” culture prevents IT teams from being proactive, focusing instead on addressing only the most urgent issues as they arise.

Furthermore, a strained work environment can stifle creativity and innovation. IT staff members who are overwhelmed are less likely to propose new ideas, and there is little room for professional development. Over time, this can erode the agency’s overall ability to adapt and improve, affecting its long-term success.

Employees closest to the work know what needs to be fixed, improved, or eliminated to make it through the crisis. They need leaders to facilitate goal setting, then guide them and provide permission to make changes. Looking out for the best interest of your team at this moment builds lasting trust, loyalty, and engagement. Again, empathy is key to building a healthy environment where your team truly believes you have their backs. Absentee leadership in this moment erodes culture quickly and makes quality people leave or checkout.

During this period, taking care of your people is the top priority. You will come out the other side, and you need your people to come out healthy and engaged. Taking care of your people is also the best way to take care of your customers, as your people make it all happen. In the after wake of uncertain times, you can quickly get those deferred maintenance projects back on track, however it is much more difficult and infinitely longer to rebuild damaged people and culture.

Now is a great time for workforce development too. Fill gaps in staffing positions and capabilities with rising stars further down in the organizations. Use stretch assignments and temporary "acting as" promotions to test out new roles and provide opportunities. Don't let good intentioned "heros" keep all the keys, trying to save the day, but really being a bottleneck, single point of failure, and limiting growth. It is truly amazing how a team will rise to the occasion, but only if they feel safe and trust leadership. This is why building an intentional culture is so critical. You have a culture now whether or not you have proactively designed it to be what you want and need it to be. Just like a reputation. During crises is a great time to articulate the culture you want, then model the behaviors and put in place the components to make it shine.

Maturing the IT Organization

Closely related to building a healthy organization, organizational maturity puts in place the systems and processes that make the IT organization run smoothly and efficiently. These processes demonstrate to employees and customers what the top priorities are. For employees, improving processes such as onboarding, employee development plans, cross-training plans, roles and responsibilities, service and product management, one-on-one meetings, communications, expectations, and conducting annual performance reviews fairly and on time are all important. For customers, clearly setting service level agreements—such as service desk callback time, facilitating IT governance, regular communications, active business relationship management, a clear project onboarding process, and an understandable service directory and service cost structure —all send a clear signal that they matter. All these components can be implemented by the staff in place now. Engaging staff at all levels of the organization to do this work both assists with workforce development and building your intentional culture.

Losing your good people and damaging customer relationships is 100% completely avoidable with a proactive approach. This time of uncertainty is actually an opportunity to build more aligned and closer customer relationships, build a leaner, more focused, more capable and more engaged workforce, and to refine your culture into what you really want and need it to be. Doing all this simply requires intentional IT leadership to make a plan, manage demand, and execute the plan. Join me in seeing the glass as half full and make the most of this opportunity.

To dive deeper into these specific topics, read past Local GovTech Newsletter articles.

• Unlocking the Secret Sauce for Innovation and Business Value ~ Enterprise IT Governance

• To Innovate and Reduce IT Risk, Build a Solid Foundation First

• How unchecked IT demand creates a meat grinder environment

Have questions or want to talk about these topics in detail, reach out to me. I am actively assisting local governments with these challenges and would love to help you as well.