It’s still the holiday season and I’m still on vacation!
This is the time of the year that we all make plans for what we want to accomplish in the upcoming year. This time around, take your time and give some thought to what you can do to make this your best year ever…!
Here’s hoping that you’ll have peace, love, happiness, and success in the upcoming year. The blog will be back next week…
- Dr. Jim Anderson
No budget, no special training, and yet you are expected to do more with less. How can you go about fixing what’s wrong with your IT team during tight economic times? It turns out that there is a simple way for you to identify where you are having issues and how you can fix them. All you need to do is to learn a about a new management tool called social-network analysis…
These day’s we’re reading so much about social networks that when we hear the phrase, we automatically think of web sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, or MySpace. Well, we’re not talking about those, but there are similarities.
Instead, what social-network mapping is all about is finding out who your team talks with in order to solve problems and get information. This is the type of information that everyone always knows, but never spends much time thinking about — it’s basically invisible.
Once you’ve collected this information from your team, you will then be able to create a social-network map that shows the communication gaps, related information bottlenecks, and team members that are not being fully utilized.
The immediate payoff for you as an IT Leader is that you’ll be able to improve collaboration within your team as well as perhaps uncovering some star performers that you simply didn’t know about.
This kind of management tool just begs for an example, so let’s take a look at one. Let us pretend that you are an IT manager who is in charge of a team of 16 workers as shown in the following figure:
Example: You Are In Charge Of A Team Of 16 IT Workers
You create a questionnaire for your team that has only one question: “Whom do you go to in order to get answers to your technical questions?”. When you get the survey forms back, you lock the door to your office and get busy creating a social-network analysis map. Let’s say that you come up with something that looks like this:
The Result Of Your Social-Network Analysis
Now you have to interpret what you’ve discovered. Clearly worker A is one of your star problem solvers — did you know that? It also looks like you have a hidden problem with worker H, they don’t seem to be seeking help to solve problems and nobody is asking them for help. Additionally, with only a couple of exceptions, your department seems to be divided into two groups that really aren’t talking with each other. Once again, did you know this?
For IT Leaders who are managing a team that is spread over multiple sites, this kind of social analysis can be even more valuable. If we sent our questionnaire out to all four sites that our team is located at, we might get the following results back.
Social-Network Analysis Of Workers At Multiple Sites
What this is showing us is that although there appears to be information flowing within each of the four sites, there is very little information that flows between sites. A little more digging might reveal that the only people on your team who are talking to each other are the managers. If so, then you’ve got a problem that needs to be addressed.
In order to get the most value out of doing a social-network analysis, you are going to have to carefully pick the questions that you ask your team. One great question to include is to ask how interacting with a given team member affects the responder’s energy level. This can be a good way to uncover the energy vampires on your team.
The result of making the effort to map the social structure of your IT team should product tangible real-world payoffs. The most valuable of these is that once you know who has the most valuable information, then you can work to make sure that everyone has easier access to that information. This should result in a decrease in the number of steps that are required to solve issues.
Ultimately understanding the flow of communications within your team and then taking steps to improve and facilitate it will boost your team’s ability to innovate. Now that’s something that we all would like to have more of!
What Do You Think The Most Important Question To Ask In A Social-Network Analysis questionnaire would be?
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There is probably no way that you’re going to be getting more funding or headcount in the immediate future. Yet at the same time your senior management keeps talking about the need for the IT department to start showing some innovation. Sounds like you’ve gotten yourself into yet another bind. How about if we take a look at how you can exceed your expectations using what you already have…
Life is hard for IT Leaders and it’s not going to be getting any easier anytime soon. With everything that you need to be doing, it sure seems like having to put up with team members who have personal issues that take away from their ability to do their jobs can only hurt performance. For that matter, those “touchy-feely” workplaces that places like Google and Apple have sure seem to be missing the mark — work is for work or have these companies forgotten that?
Those of us who come from a technical background know how the world should be run. There should be a set of rules and everybody should know what the rules are and everybody should work according to the rules. If a business was run this way, an IT Leader’s job would be so much easier — you would only have to deal with the deviations from the rules.
However, we’ve tried doing this — it was called the 1950′s through the 1980′s. Remember the classic “IBM Man”? It turns out that the rigid workplace did work and you could get a great deal of productivity out of people; however, then the world changed.
What happened is that everything started moving much faster. Global competition showed up with a vengeance. Then the Internet arrived and things started moving even faster. All of those rigidly structured companies with their rigidly structured IT departments hit a brick wall. IBM felt it especially hard and there for awhile in the early 1990′s was teetering on the edge of failure.
If you miss the old days, you’re not going to like this part. After a lot of trial and error, we now know what it takes to make a modern company successful. The first step is to take the time to realize that the people working for the company are not “assets“, they really are people. These people have a life and potentially a family outside of work and the boundaries between the two have never been fixed.
This means that as an IT Leader you need to take the time to get to know the people who are working on your team. If you are able to really engage with them, to make a connection, then the boost to the productivity of your team can be almost magical.
The operative word here is “flexibility“. If you place people in a rigid IT environment, then they will at best do exactly what you tell them to do when you tell them to do it. If instead you are flexible and focus more on what you want them to do and no so much on how you want them to do it, then this causes your team members to become much more satisfied with their jobs and they will end up doing much more. This job satisfaction shows up as your team members treat customers and other employees better which then results in more loyal customers and more productive business interactions with other departments.
Creating a rigid IT team that has lots of rules to follow is a great way to keep things under control. New IT Leaders often gravitate to this type of solution because it’s familiar territory — almost like programming an IT system. However, this has been shown to be the wrong way to go about doing things.
The right way to have the most productive IT team is for you as an IT Leader to take the time to connect on a personal level with your team members. This means getting to know them and sharing your personal side with them also.
Creating an IT workplace in which the focus is on getting the work done and being flexible in just how it gets done is critical. This is the type of environment that will bring out the best in your team. The results that your team will produce from this type of situation will be the rocket fuel that powers your career to the next level.
Do you think that IT managers need to worry about getting to know all of their team members on a personal level?
Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental IT Leader Blog is updated.
No budget, no special training, and yet you are expected to do more with less. How can you go about fixing what’s wrong with your IT team during tight economic times? It turns out that there is a simple way for you to identify where you are having issues and how you can fix them. All you need to do is to learn a about a new management tool called social-network analysis…
Isn’t it every IT Leader’s nightmare: you work long hours, pull of miraculous feats of IT project accomplishment in order to create one of the most complicated pieces of software ever, only to have all of your customers hate it?
That’s what it must have felt like to be working at Microsoft when Vista was rolled out. After getting rejected by their customers, what did Microsoft’s IT Leaders do differently the next time around?
After the debacle of Vista, Microsoft realized that they had lost their way. In the past they had successfully developed operating systems and suites of software successfully; however, something had clearly gone wrong with the Vista project.
Everyone agreed that Vista had two major flaws that doomed it almost from the beginning. The first fatal flaw was that it simply took way too long to develop: a total of five years. I think that we can all understand what must have happened there: scope creep. Add to this some fundamental team communication problems and all of a sudden you’ll keep overshooting your due dates.
The second flaw that did Vista in was that even when it finally rolled out the door, it really wasn’t done. All sorts of software drivers that were required in order to support customer’s various pieces of hardware including monitors, printers, mice, scanners, etc. just weren’t ready yet. Once again I think that we’ve all been there: after five years, somebody high up in the food chain said “just ship it”.
Their key insight was that they had, like so many other companies, allowed silos of developers to get created. This meant that they had highly skilled workers who were experts at one thing (e.g. GUI interface design) off working all by themselves. Plans, features, and interfaces were not being shared between teams.
When Vista rolled out the door these internal communications failings became obvious to all. Code that worked perfectly by itself all of a sudden didn’t seem to work very well when it had to play ball with other parts of the operating system.
Ok, so realizing that you’ve got a problem and then actually doing something about it are two different things. To their credit, Microsoft appears to have done a good job of tackling this problem.
The solution appears to have been implemented in two steps. First, the Microsoft IT managers changed their way of thinking. Instead of each IT team having their own unique development plan, there was a single development plan that was owned by all.
Secondly, Microsoft forced the development team to think beyond the Microsoft campus and insisted that they work closely with computer makers (HP and others) in order to identify potential problems early on and fix them before they became major issues.
Lots of people like to throw stones at Microsoft in part because they are so big and successful. The problems with the Vista product clearly showed that the issues that IT Leaders everywhere face are the same sorts of issues that Microsoft was facing and failing to deal with.
To their credit, they appear to have learned from their recent past mistakes. They’ve torn down the internal walls that had built up between development groups and they’ve become humble enough to reach out to computer makers to ask for their help in making sure that Microsoft’s software will work with the hardware that it’ll be running on.
The lessons for all of us are pretty straightforward: when we make mistakes, we need to evaluate what went wrong, change the way that we’re doing business, and reach out to others in order to create a solution that will work in the future. how let’s see how that new Windows 7 product turns out…
Do you think that Microsoft’s reputation as a solid IT shop can recover from the hit that it took from the Vista failure?
Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental IT Leader Blog is updated.
Life is hard for IT Leaders and it’s not going to be getting any easier anytime soon. Those “touchy-feely” workplaces that places like Google and Apple have sure seem to be missing the mark — work is for work or have these companies forgotten that?
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