Archive for July, 2010

Maximum Mentoring: How To Get The Most From The Relationship

Thursday, July 29th, 2010
Image Credit It Takes Work To Get The Most Out Of A Mentoring Relationship

It Takes Work To Get The Most Out Of A Mentoring Relationship

Finding a mentor can be a real challenge for any IT Leader – they seem to be few and far between these days. However, if you think that when you get someone to agree to show you the ropes that the hard part is over, you’ve got another thing coming…

Get A Backup (Mentor)

The one thing that none of us seem to have enough of these days is time. The same is going to be true of anyone that you find who is willing to act as a mentor for you.

Since you know going in to the relationship that they may not always have enough time to work with you, it makes sense that you’d pick out (or have them recommend) a backup mentor. Having multiple mentors means that the load on any one given mentor will be less and yet you’ll still get the guidance that you are looking to get out of the relationship.

Be Careful Who You Pick

Just to make sure that you get off on the right foot, you need to be careful who you pick to be your mentor. It’s a two-way street, but it needs to be a good thing for both of you.

One of the biggest pitfalls seems to be those situations where you “get assigned” a mentor. That’s never a good idea – you may not want them to be your mentor and they may not want to be your mentor. Whenever possible, make sure that both parties are willing to enter into the mentoring relationship of their own free will.

Lay Out Some Ground Rules

The key to any good relationship is for both sides to both agree to a set of ground rules. We’re not talking about a legal document that you have to sign, but rather a set of agreements that you can both live with. No lawyers need be involved.

Key agreements that you need to work out in the beginning include such things as what you are looking for, what your mentor has to offer, and such mundane things as how often you are going to meet.

It’s All About Feedback

The question that will keep coming up over and over again is “how am I doing?” Both the mentor and the person being mentored are going to be looking for answers to this question.

One important feedback channel needs to be from the mentor to the person being mentored’s boss. This type of communication allows any issues that show up to be identified early on and a solution created quickly.

What All Of This Means For You

A mentoring relationship could be the “secret sauce” that could move your career to the next level. However, once set up you can’t let your mentoring relationship run on autopilot.

In order to make your mentoring relationship successful, you need to know what you have to do. Make sure that you have a backup to your primary mentor, pick the right mentor in the first place, have ground rules, and create ways so that both of you can provide feedback.

A good mentoring relationship will save your career a great deal of time. Yes, you’ll have to make an effort to get the most out of relationship, but if you do then you’ll find that a good mentoring relationship will allow your career to move along much faster than it is today…

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Management Skills™

Question For You: How many backup mentors do you think that you should have – is just one enough?

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 any of the trade press over the last couple of years, you have undoubtedly run across story after story that talked about the next big thing in IT: on-demand computing. I’m willing to bet that members of your IT team may be clambering to take your next project “into the cloud”. Sure it sounds sexy, but should you do it…?

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Why Does Mentoring Go Bad?

Thursday, July 22nd, 2010
Image Credit If A Mentoring Relationship Goes Bad, You Could Get Bitten

If A Mentoring Relationship Goes Bad, You Could Get Bitten

Quiz: what’s the best way to get your IT Leader career on the fast track to success? Answer: find yourself a good mentor. If you can find such a mentor, then you might think that you’ve got it made in the shade, so to speak. Umm, maybe not. If that mentoring relationship goes bad, your career just might be in trouble…

You’re Not Like Me – And That’s A Bad Thing

One of the key components of any mentoring relationship is that both the mentor and the mentee (is that even a word?) need to be compatible. You might think that this is a no-brainer, I mean the mentor accepted the role, right? However, this is not always the case: sometimes companies step in and assign mentoring pairs. In these types of cases, incompatible personalities can find themselves thrown together.

If you find yourself in this type of mentoring relationship, something’s got to give. Either you or the other party is going to have to make some changes in order to make the relationship work. If neither one of you is willing to bend, or bend enough, then it may be time to dissolve the deal.

I Don’t Have Time For You

When someone agrees to be a mentor, it’s really as though they are taking on another job. This is all fine and good, until their “real” job starts to require too much time. If this happens, then there’s a good chance that they won’t have enough (any) time to spend mentoring.

If you are the one being mentored, then if your mentor all of a sudden stops having time to work with you, what are you going to think? Clearly you’re not going to be happy about this and if it goes on for even a short amount of time you are quickly going to become resentful.

Even if the mentor’s time frees up again, the damage will already have been done. No longer will you be open to working with him/her and the benefits of mentoring will have evaporated for both of you.

Hey, Stop Doing That!

The worst thing that can happen to a mentoring relationship is if the mentor starts to manipulate the person that they are mentoring. This type of bad behavior most often occurs when the mentor is somewhere along the mentee’s reporting structure.

Manipulation can take on many forms. One form occurs when the mentor starts to boss the mentee around. Once again, this is an easy role to fall into if the person being mentored actually reports to the person doing the mentoring.

Since a mentor often has the ability to assign work to the mentee, this is another area where manipulation can creep in. By either assigning the wrong tasks or by withholding the right ones, a mentor can wreak havoc on the mentoring relationship.

What All Of This Means For You

There’s no doubt that a mentoring relationship can be one of the best things that can happen to any IT Leader’s career. It’s just that you need to make sure that it doesn’t lead to a divorce.

Mentoring relationships can go bad if the two parties are incompatible, don’t have enough time to nurture the relationship, or engage in manipulation. Once started, any of these actions can have a disastrous effect on the mentoring.

If you find yourself in a mentoring relationship that is going wrong, take action quickly! The longer that you stay in a bad mentoring situation, the less effective it’s going to be for both of you…

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Management Skills™

Question For You: What would you do if you found yourself in a bad mentoring relationship?

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

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Finding a mentor can be a real challenge for any IT Leader – they seem to be few and far between these days. However, if you think that when you get someone to agree to show you the ropes that the hard part is over, you’ve got another thing coming…

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Just Who’s Job Is Network Security Anyway?

Thursday, July 15th, 2010
Image Credit Who's In Charge Of Making Your Network A Safe Place?

Who's In Charge Of Making Your Network A Safe Place?

IT Leaders hope to be able to do their work in a secure environment – the last thing that any of us want to have worry about is dealing with an attack on our servers or network from bad guys. However, have you ever stopped to wonder just who’s job it is to keep everything secure?

How Goes The Battle?

Everyone in IT knows that there is a constant struggle going on between the good guys and the bad guys. The larger the company that you work for, the more often you’ll be attacked. This means that you need to be playing your role in helping the rest of the company constantly reevaluate its security policies.

If you need some good news, here it is: most companies are getting better at dealing with the IT monsters that we now recognize – worms, viruses, and others. The bad news is that the threats continue to evolve and mutate. The bad guys just keep getting smarter.

Who’s The Target?

Should you even be worrying about this? I mean, look, you’ve got enough on your plate already – do you really have to deal with this? The folks over at CIO Insite did a survey awhile back and found out that 50% of companies that are big (revenue of over $1B) have said that their web sites and corporate data have been targeted by the bad guys.

What Should Your Role Be?

This is where things start to get tricky. For you see, everyone in IT really has a role to play in keeping the company’s IT assets secure. How an IT Leader goes about doing this can have a big impact on both their career as well as how secure the company is.

All too often, a company exists in react mode. We’ve all see how this plays out. An attack from the outside will be detected and then as many IT staffers who can be roped in are thrown into the mix in order to take the servers that are being attacked off line, make sure that all of the needed patches have been applied to the other servers, and then keep an eye out on the rest of the network in order to detect any unusual going ons.

As IT Leaders we need to realize that is exactly the wrong way to go about doing these things. What is needed is more of an automated approach to keeping the company’s severs, web sites, and network secure. The right way to do this is to establish standard procedures as well as a consistent set of company policies that get implemented in order to make sure that all of your security updates are in place. This is the key to stopping the “we’re under attack” madness.

What All Of This Means For You

Although your firm may have an IT team dedicated to network security, it is still the responsibility of every IT Leader to lend a hand in helping to keep the bad guys out.

Just exactly how to go about doing this is different at every company. In the worst case, it can mean leading a hand when an attack on the firm’s IT resources is detected. However, the smart IT Leaders deal with the problem before it shows up and create automated ways to keep IT resources secure.

Security is a part of every IT Leader’s life. Make sure that you spend the time helping to secure the company’s assets before things get bad and then you’ll be able to sleep better at night…!

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Management Skills™

Question For You: Who do you think should have the final say on securing the company’s IT assets?

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

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Quiz: what’s the best way to get your IT Leader career on the fast track to success? Answer: find yourself a good mentor. If you can find such a mentor, then you might think that you’ve got it made in the shade, so to speak. Umm, maybe not. If that mentoring relationship goes bad, your career just might be in trouble…

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Posted in security | 3 Comments »

A Tale Of Woe: What To Do When IT Is Too Complex?

Thursday, July 1st, 2010
Image Credit Is It A Solution That Only An IT Leader Could Love?

Is It A Solution That Only An IT Leader Could Love?

There probably isn’t a problem out there that couldn’t be solved by adding some IT to it. In fact, once you had done that, you could probably make that solution even better by adding more IT to it. At what point is too much IT considered to be too much of a good thing? IT Leaders need to be able to realize when enough is enough…

The Story Of A (Small) Bank

Doug Bartholomew has taken the time to hunt down stories about when IT Leaders allowed the technology monster to get out of its cage. One such story has to do with a small bank in Texas that had a pretty simple problem: they wanted to keep track of all of their interactions with their customers.

Now any IT Leader worth their salt would instantly realize that this type of customer issue is exactly what Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software packages have been designed for. The trick; however, is to match the solution to the problem – and that didn’t happen here.

The small bank had 16 bankers who keep track of everything on paper. It was working ok, but they had difficulty “seeing” just how much contact they were having with a given customer. Everyone agreed that a CRM solution was needed. In the end, the bank selected a Siebel Systems (now a part of Oracle) solution.

Did You Hear The One About The Monster Application…?

There’s no question that Siebel makes a great CRM application. I mean it sure seems like it can do just about everything. The problem in this case is that the small bank really didn’t want it to do everything: most of the installation of the application focused on turning off functionality that they didn’t want.

The next issue was the simple fact that for a customer who didn’t have a lot of existing technology, the solution that they had selected came across as being very complex. Multiple screens had to be navigated to complete a function and a new way of thinking about both products and customers had to be adopted.

The result of this is that the very folks that the bank needed to use the new system, the bankers, didn’t want anything to do with it. Once they stopped using it, the value of the application to the bank pretty much went out the door.

In the end, after having invested roughly $500,000 in software licenses and implementation costs, the bank ended up walking away from their CRM application.

A New Way Of Doing Business

This story might end on a sad note with the bank staff going back to doing everything by hand, but it doesn’t. Instead, the IT Leaders went out and found another application that better suited their needs. This new application was much simpler although it had a lot less functionality. It was just a shared database and spreadsheet program that was much easier for the bankers to use.

In fact, the bankers soon found that they were able to create customized reports without having to ask IT to help do it. Now that’s using IT the way that it’s supposed to be used!

What All Of This Means For You

IT Leaders do love our IT technology. However, we need to keep in mind that not every business problem that comes up needs to be solved with an ultra-sophisticated IT application.

We always have to take the time before we design an IT solution to study our customers: what is their real issue? The trick to creating the right IT solution is to provide the end user with just enough (but not too much) IT technology to get their job done.

IT Leaders who can take the time and not over design solutions for their end users are the ones who will be able to best meet the company’s goals of doing more and moving faster using IT technology.

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Management Skills™

Question For You: Do you think the bank should have stuck with their initial CRM solution and just customized it to meet their needs?

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

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Posted in information technology | 2 Comments »