Archive for March, 2010

Tomorrow, Tomorrow, You’ll Always Have Tomorrow – But Are You Ready?

Thursday, March 25th, 2010
Image Credit Sure You Want To Get To The End Of The Rainbow, But What’s There?

Sure You Want To Get To The End Of The Rainbow, But What’s There?

If you’ve been reading the papers or watching the news on TV, you’ve probably started to see stories that are daring to hint at a global recovery. Now that’s all fine and good and I’ll believe it when it shows up. However, smart IT Leaders know that now is the time to act. Are you getting your team ready for the madness that will hit your firm when things really start moving once again?

Six Things That You Need To Be Doing

The thing that you’ve got to realize is that both you and the rest of the business have been in a hunker down, just keep the lights on, mode for quite some time. The good thing about this is that everyone else in your industry has been doing the same thing. However, one-by-one everyone is going to be waking up soon and you don’t want your team to get caught unaware.

Since you may still have a little bit of down time on your hands, now is the time to make the most of it. Here are six things that you need to be having your team work on now before they become too busy to think straight:

  • Simplify, Simplify, Simplify: When we are moving at 100 mph, we have a nasty habit of creating redundant systems and duplicating processes. We do this because we don’t have the time to research how things are being done right now – we just solve the same problem once again. Use this time to comb through the applications and processes that your team supports and uses and find / eliminate the duplicates.
  • Level Set: how many user licenses are you paying for? How many of those are you using? For that matter, how well utilized are the servers and storage systems that you team uses every day? Now is the time to sort all of this out. Get rid of the licenses that you don’t need anymore and make sure that you are maximizing the value from each one of your hardware resources.
  • Call In The Governance: When things start to pick up, everybody and their mother’s Uncle are going to be coming to your team and asking you to do work for them. Now is the time to lay down the law on how you’ll be approving what projects you’ll be working on.
  • Inventory Skill Sets: If you look out into the future 12 months or so, what skills will your team need to be able to bring to the table to do the work that will be asked of them? Now is the time to bring in people who have the needed skills or to send your team off to get some training.
  • What’s Your Value?: This is something that you should have done a long time ago; however, if you haven’t then you need to do it now. You need to sit down with your team and make sure that everyone has a clear understanding of how your team supports the rest of the business.
  • Learn To Live With Uncertainty: As IT professionals we love it when things are cut & dried; however, that’s not the way that life works. It’s great to start out with a plan but the reality is that things will happen and the plan will need to be changed. How it gets changed and how the new plan gets communicated will be key to your team’s success going forward.

What All Of This Means For You

The Chinese curse says “May you live in interesting times” – and we certainly are. However, as busy as we are today, it’s starting to look like we are going to be getting a lot busier as the global economy starts to pick up.

Sharp IT Leaders realize that this is the time that we need to be working with our team to work through those issues that we can get put right before we get busy. Time invested now will pay dividends later.

The difference between being an IT manager and an IT Leader is that you take the time to look into the future and you prepare for it before it happens. Do this and you’ll be able to show your team the way to go…

Question For You: what do you think is the most important thing that your team can do now to prepare for the future?

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental IT Leader Blog is updated.

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

All too often we do a really bad job of looking for our next job. I’m not talking about poorly formatted resumes or even answering questions incorrectly during a job interview. My point is that it’s all the other actions that we take during a job search that really end up shooting ourselves in the foot. Still confused? Maybe I should explain myself…

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It’s Good To Know What The Big Boys Want You To Do

Thursday, March 18th, 2010
Image Credit It’s Always Best To Work From The Top Down

It’s Always Best To Work From The Top Down

Why Bother Listening To Senior Management

In order to be successful as an IT Leader (no matter where you are at in the company’s management hierarchy), you’re going to have to do what you are told. Well, wait a minute, maybe I should phrase that differently. How about something like this: you are going to have to find out what they want you to do and then you are going to have to do it?

If we were all working on an assembly line, life would be simpler. We’d have a clearly defined job to do and we’d be supplied with the parts and tools with which to do it. Well, with a little luck you get paid more than an assembly line worker and the reason is that being an IT Leader is a lot tougher – your job is ill-defined and keeps changing. Finding out what you are supposed to be doing is half the battle.

You’re Going To Need A Questionnaire

There are probably no shortage of people who are telling you what to do. However, the big question is: are they the right people who should be telling you what to do? At the end of the day, the only people who really count are the ones who are running the company. What do they want you to be doing?

Yes, the information that the upper levels keep sending you in emails, podcasts, and other such communication channels are a good high-level indicator of what direction they are trying to take the company. However, these forms of communication are probably too generic. You are still facing a number of different things that you could be directing your team to spend their time on and it’s not clear which way you should go. Time for some interviews.

Senior management can be busy, but they also realize that it’s really part of their job to provide direction and it that’s what you go looking for, they’ll find the time to talk with you. Keep in mind that you don’t want to be just talking with IT’s senior management, you want to talk to the management of the rest of the company – really IT’s customers.

You’ll have the same set of questions that you’ll want to be asking over and over again so it’s probably a good idea to create a questionnaire to help you do this. I’m not suggesting that when you start your discussions that you whip out a long form and start reading from it, but rather that you collect your thoughts before any discussion so that you don’t forget to cover any topics.

You should be asking questions that cover a lot of ground – make the most of your time with this member of the management team. Ask questions like what they are hoping to accomplish this year, what is preventing them from being as successful as they would like to be, and most importantly what is their view of the IT department – good, bad, or ugly.

It’s All About The Customer

The ultimate goal of finding out what is being expected of you as an IT Leader is to balance what people want you to do with all of the things that you know need to be done. Yes, we live in the real world and there’s a good chance that these two lists may not match up!

In the end, your customer (maybe internal departments) are always right. Note that I didn’t say “rational”, just right. Your senior management may not be able to express their goals in terms that directly relate to the role of IT within a company (“boost profits”), but you’ll need to be looking for ways that your team can help the IT department help others.

What All Of This Means For You

Nobody ever said that being an IT Leader was going to be an easy thing. One thing that you need to make sure that you have a good understanding of is to know just exactly what your senior management wants you and your team to be doing.

This is going to require you to develop some interviewing skills. You’re going to have to go up the mountain and ask your firm’s senior management what they are trying to accomplish and how it’s going.

Ultimately it comes down to how you and your team are going to serve your customer. If you can figure this out, then congratulations – you are going to be successful.

Question For You: Do you think that your senior IT management is going to approve of you talking with other departments?

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental IT Leader Blog is updated.

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

If you’ve been reading the papers or watching the news on TV, you’ve probably started to see stories that are daring to hint at a global recovery. Now that’s all fine and good and I’ll believe it when it shows up. However, smart IT Leaders know that now is the time to act. Are you getting your team ready for the madness that will hit your firm when things really start moving once again?

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Posted in career development | 1 Comment »

IT Leader Start-Up Issues: What Have You Gotten Yourself Into?

Thursday, March 11th, 2010
Image Credit
IT Leaders In New Positions Need To Take The Time To Do An Assessment

IT Leaders In New Positions Need To Take The Time To Do An Assessment

Every IT Shop Is Different

In the life of an IT Leader, there will come the day that you find yourself in a new position. You might be working for the same company and just be in a different role or you might be starting a new job – no matter, the challenge is the same. Where do you start? It turns out that doing nothing right off the bat might be the right idea…

Doing An Assessment Of Your Team

When you find yourself in a new IT Leader position, you might be tempted to do what many of us have done in the past – make some noise. We’ve all see others do this before: almost immediately upon assuming a new position, they do a reorganization or some such action just to show that they are going to “shake things up”. That’s all fine and good, but it really doesn’t accomplish anything.

Instead, your time would be better spent doing an assessment of the IT team that you’ve just inherited. To use the popular terminology of the day, this needs to be a 360-degree assessment of both those people who will be on your team as well as the people that you will now be working for.

What you’re going to be looking for is to develop a good understanding of how things are right now. You might be overflowing with things that you want to accomplish (or you might have been told what you will have to accomplish), but now is not the time to be making changes before you know what is going on.

You’re not going to find what you need written down anywhere, instead you’ve got a lot of talking to do. Your situational assessment needs to cover a lot of ground. Specifically you’re going to want to know about the following four areas:

  1. The IT ecosystem (hardware, network, communications, endpoints, etc.)
  2. Applications (business and support)
  3. Corporate organization and hierarchy
  4. Processes and procedures for common IT tasks

Results Of An IT Team Assessment

As you can probably guess by now, an IT assessment is not something that you can do overnight. It’s going to take some focused effort to uncover the information that you’re going to need.

What you should be looking to assemble out of all of this data collection are a set of key indicators that will tell you where you need to be spending your time. Each one of the areas that you’ve collected information on can probably by now be broken down into an additional level of detail: specific hardware systems (e.g. storage), specific applications, etc. Each of these IT components will have their own status.

This status in its simplest form can be thought of as being a traffic light: red, yellow, or green. The green status areas can safely be ignored for now – they are under control. Things get more interesting when you start to take a look at the yellow and red areas.

Clearly the red areas need immediate attention. However, it’s the yellow areas that will provide you with the greatest value for having done the whole assessment task. These are the areas that while they may be under control for now, have the potential to “go red” and quickly turn into a problem that could consume your hours, days, or even weeks.

What All Of This Means For You

When an IT leader is placed into a new position, his or her first actions can often set the stage for their long term success. Starting things off by taking actions just to look like you are doing something won’t help – it may do more harm than good.

Instead what you need to do is to take the time to do an assessment of your new IT environment. This will require you to look both up and down the company hierarchy. You’ll be trying to understand how all of the components of the IT department fit together (or don’t!)

A well done IT assessment will provide you with a clear roadmap on where you need to be spending your time. The areas that are either not doing well or just getting by are where you’ll need to be spending your time. Focus your time and talents here and you’ll be able to shine in your position.

Question For You: What do you think the most important thing that you can do is when you are just starting a new IT position?

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental IT Leader Blog is updated.

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

In order to be successful as an IT Leader (no matter where you are at in the company’s management hierarchy), you’re going to have to do what you are told. Well, wait a minute, maybe I should phrase that differently. How about something like this: you are going to have to find out what they want you to do and then you are going to have to do it?

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Posted in management | No Comments »

AccIT Life Just Got Better For iPhone/Andriod/BB Users

Saturday, March 6th, 2010

Loyal Readers,

It has been brought to my attention that the AccIT blog’s appearance on touch-based smart phones was, shall we say, poor at best.

I think that I may have found a way to solve this problem. I’ve installed some new software that should change the AccIT into an iPhone application “looking” site, complete with Ajax loading articles and effects, when viewed from an iPhone, iPod touch, Android or BlackBerry touch mobile device.

As with all great experiments, we’re going to have to see how this goes. If you’ve got one of these devices do me a favor and check the site out and then post a comment to let me know how it looks — you should be able to switch between the old (“mobile unfriendly”) look & feel and the new (“mobile friendly”) look & feel.

Thanks for all of you help in making the AccIT better!

- Dr. Jim Anderson

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How Do You Prevent A Staffing Disaster Before It Happens?

Thursday, March 4th, 2010
Image Credit If You Are Prepared, Then You’ll Be Able To Prevent An Accident

If You Are Prepared, Then You’ll Be Able To Prevent An Accident

The Coming Disaster In Your IT Department

What do you think the mood of your IT team is right now? Poor? Downright bad? If your workplace is like most businesses out there right now, your team is still reeling from all of the layoffs, hiring freezes, pay cuts, etc. If nothing else, there has been a lingering sense of dread that has been in the air for the better part of two years. What do you need to be doing?

The Scope Of The Problem

There’s nothing physically wrong with your team, they are just really, really stressed out. What this means is that their creativity and productivity are probably at all time lows. You’re going to need to step in and do something about this situation.

I can almost hear you now: “I just don’t have time to do this right now.” Well guess what, you had better start to find the time. Otherwise you are going to find yourself buried in a wave of interviews as you try to fill all of the open positions in your department when everyone leaves.

The Conference Board has done a survey of 5,000 U.S. households (your team may not have been part of the survey, but the results probably still apply) and the results showed that only 45% were currently happy with their jobs. You’ve got a problem on you hands.

Steps You Can Take Now To Avoid Problems Later

You’ve got no budget, you’ve got no open req’s, what’s an IT manager to do when you need to cheer up your team? The good news is that there are a lot of low-cost, no-cost things that you can do that will save you much grief later on:

  • Job Titles: What are the titles of your staff? They are probably pretty boring. One thing that you can do that costs no money is to look into upgrading their titles – titles only, no promotions. Yes, you’d have to work with HR to do this, but the joy of going from “Systems Engineer IV” to “Senior Systems Engineer” can be absolutely amazing.
  • Work Time Options: Is your current team working a forced 9-5 work day? Loosing up on this can be a great no-cost way to pump some life back into the department. Yes, the work still needs to be done and yes, the company still needs to get value for the paycheck that it’s handing out; however, allowing your staff to determine when they work (including both nights and weekends) can go a long way to boosting morale and productivity. A nice side benefit of doing this is that it creates an almost entrepreneurial feeling and all of a sudden everyone becomes more willing to help each other out.
  • Bonuses: Remember when people used to get raises that were more than the cost of living? Well even though those days seem to long gone, one thing that you can do is to talk with HR and get your hands on some bonus money. Once you’ve got it, set up a bonus incentive program and just watch how everyone suddenly becomes motivated.
  • 1-on-1 Meetings: This may be the simplest of all the things that you could do – start taking the time to listen. Set up a time once a week where you’ll turn off the phone and the Instant Messaging and just talk with each staff member individually. This is a great chance for them to blow off steam, share their great new idea, or just have a chat with you. It doesn’t have to be too long – 15 minutes will do just fine.

What All Of This Means For You

As the global economy starts to improve, you as an IT Leader are going to have to start taking steps to make your beaten down staff feel special once again. If you don’t do this, then when the job market picks up, they are going to leave you.

Many of the most effective things that you can do involve low-cost or no-cost actions. Things like changing job titles, becoming more flexible with work times, or even just taking the time to listen better would all have positive results.

No matter what you decide to do, make sure that you do something. There is nothing more important for you to be spending your time on than making sure that your talented and experienced staff stay on board with you.

Question For You: In your company, what would the easiest thing be for you to do in order to boost your team’s morale?

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental IT Leader Blog is updated.

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

In the life of an IT Leader, there will come the day that you find yourself in a new position. You might be working for the same company and just be in a different role or you might be starting a new job – no matter, the challenge is the same. Where do you start? It turns out that doing nothing right off the bat might be the right idea…

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in staffing | 4 Comments »