Archive for December, 2010

Why 168 Is Not Enough For An IT Manager (The Secret Of Time Management)

Thursday, December 23rd, 2010
Image Credit Learning To Mange Your Time Is Critical To Your Success

Learning To Mange Your Time Is Critical To Your Success

How are you doing with managing your time? Nobody ever told you that being an IT manager was going to be this tough, did they? How did you spend your last day at work: a lot of phone calls (some completely worthless), a lunch meeting that may have been rescheduled at the last minute, work that is due soon, staff conflicts that only you can resolve, oh, and that budget thing is coming up again…

There simply is not enough time in the day for you to get everything done – we all have the same 168 hours each week; however, some IT managers seem to be able to get more done than others. How do they do it?

Looking For A Solution To The Time Management Problem

I had the same time management problem that you are facing now a few years back. I was simply overwhelmed with work and couldn’t even begin to find my way out from under all of the tasks that I had to work on. I knew that it was time to go to the library and do some reading.

I must have read every book that my library had on time management. What I discovered surprised me: there didn’t seem to be one magical “silver bullet” approach to solving the issue of having too little time and too much to do.

Instead, I finally uncovered more of a philosophy to dealing with limited time rather than a quick solution. The approach that ended up working for me had to do with starting in the right place: finding out where all of my time was going. Although this sounds simple, it’s actually quite difficult to do correctly.

It Takes A Log To Know What You Don’t Know

The idea is for you to create what the experts call an “activity log”. The whole purpose of this exercise is for you to write down what you are doing during the course of a day. I’ve found it helpful to write down a quick note on what I’m doing every 15 minutes during the day. If you wait too long to write things down, then you’ll pack a whole bunch of activities into a time period and you’ll forget what you’ve done.

You’re going to want to keep your log for a week. During this time you are going to want to note both what you’ve done and how long you worked on it. Once you’ve collected the notes for an entire week, you are going to need to sit down and do some analysis. The first thing that you’re going to want to do is to group the things that you did into categories for each day:

  • Calls

  • Meetings (scheduled)

  • Meetings (unscheduled)

  • Admin work (time cards, evaluations, etc.)

  • Reports / presentations

  • Travel

  • Lunch / breaks

  • Etc.

What To Do With All That Data?

So how do other IT managers spend their time? A 1990 study by Henry Mintzberg revealed that 48% of a manager’s time is spent dealing with staff. Interacting with clients, suppliers, and associates took up another 20% while working with peers accounted for 16% and the remaining 14% was split between dealing with senior management and “others”.

After you’ve categorized how you are spending your time, think back to what your goals for the week were (you did have goals, didn’t you?) How much of your time was spent working on things that were related to what you really wanted to accomplish?

If, as it often does, most of your time was spent working on things that were not related to your most important tasks then you’ve got some changes to make. The easiest thing to do is to stop doing the things that don’t matter. This could be as simple as delegating this work to other members of your team so that you can focus on what really counts.

What All Of This Means To You

Not having enough time to get everything that you need to accomplish done is a problem that every IT manager faces. The good ones eventually solve this problem.

The first step in getting a handle on your time is to keep a time log for a week and find out where all of your time is going. Once you’ve got the data, categorize it so that you can find out if you are spending your time working on the tasks that relate to what you really want to accomplish.

If it turns out that your time is not being spent correctly, make some changes! Ultimately good time management comes down to you having the ability to recognize where your time is going and having the ability to adjust how you choose to spend it…

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

Question For You: Do you think that keeping a time log for just a week is long enough?

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

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Doing a good job of managing your time is a challenge for every IT manager. Every day it seems like there are more and more things that you are being asked to do while the amount of time that you have to accomplish them keeps getting smaller and smaller. If only there was some way to organize what you had to work on so that you knew that you were making progress every day…

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Posted in time management | 2 Comments »

IT Managers Need To Spot The Warning Signs Of Poor Delegation

Thursday, December 16th, 2010
Image Credit Pay attention to the warning signs that you're not delegating enough…

Pay attention to the warning signs that you're not delegating enough…

You can do it (all)! Well, not really. In fact the really good IT managers realize that they can’t do it all. However, most of us seem to forget this and find ourselves in an overload situation where we’ve got too much to do and just not enough time to do it. How can we tell when things are starting to go bad so that we can prevent it from happening – before it happens?

When Bad Things Happen To You

I’m willing to guess that no matter where you live, you have smoke detectors installed in your house. Why do you have them? So that in the case that there is a fire, the smoke detector will go off and you’ll get the warning that you need to get out of there.

What your career as an IT manager needs is the same thing: a poor delegation detector. This kind of detector would go off if you weren’t doing a good job of delegating your work to your team. It would give you a warning that something was wrong and would allow you to fix things before they got too bad.

I’m sorry, there’s no device that you can screw into the wall that will start to chirp if you are doing a bad job of delegating. However, there are a number of warning signs that, if noticed, you can take action on to correct before the damage is done.

Your in-box, or these days your email in-box, can serve as a poor delegation early warning device. If it’s always full and you don’t have enough time during the day to at least read every email, then clearly you have a problem. You need to redirect some of that email to members of your team. This can be done by delegating whatever the email is discussing to others to take care of.

Although we can hope that you are valuable to your company, maybe even uniquely valuable, there are actually very few tasks that “only you” can do. If you are finding yourself working extra hours on things that you’ve decided that nobody else can do, then you are wrong. You need to take another look at these types of tasks and delegate most if not all of them to your team members.

When Bad Things Happen To Your Team

Although some of the early warning signs of poor delegation will show up in your life, more of them will show up in how your team is performing. Your delegation is what feeds the team new assignments. Once you stop doing this well, the team will suffer.

One of the most common complaints that I hear from IT managers is that tasks that they believed that they had delegated are not being completed or they are not being done on time. There can be many different reasons for this, but more often than not what I find is that they’ve been poorly delegated – minimal description, unclear due date, etc.

How much your team will be able to accomplish has to do with how they feel. If you are doing a poor job of delegating work, then this is going to impact your team. Specifically, they are going to feel that they lack authority to perform tasks or even to complete assignments. Not only do you have to delegate your work to your team, but you also have to do it publicly so that everyone knows that the person doing the work is doing it for you.

One of the classic IT manager shortcomings shows up when yes, the work is delegated, but when the results are provided back to the manager he or she ends up either second guessing the conclusions that were reached or simply redoing the work that was done. This is a classic case of “do it the way that I would do it” instead of trusting your team to complete the task in their own way.

What All Of This Means For You

It’s not easy being an IT manager. For the first time you have to learn to let go and allow the other members of your team perform work that you know very well that you could do yourself. Learning to let go, to delegate your work, is a key IT manager skill.

Delegation is a skill that we all need to work at in order to do better. Being aware of the early warning signs that you are not doing a good job of delegating is first step in preventing small problems from becoming larger ones. Be aware that poor delegation skills will not only affect your job performance, but also how your team performs.

Making sure that you are able to detect when you are not doing a good job of delegation is a critical IT manager job skill. Take the time to be more aware of how effective you are being and both your team and your career will do better.

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

Question For You: What is the best way that you’ve found to stay on top of all of that email that you get every day?

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

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

How are you doing with managing your time? Nobody ever told you that being an IT manager was going to be this tough, did they? How did you spend your last day at work: a lot of phone calls (some completely worthless), a lunch meeting that may have been rescheduled at the last minute, work that is due soon, staff conflicts that only you can resolve, oh, and that budget thing is coming up again…

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Why Delegation Is So Hard For IT Managers To Do

Thursday, December 9th, 2010
Image Credit Delegation Is Like Running In A Relay Race – You've Got To Give It Up Sometime

Delegation Is Like Running In A Relay Race – You've Got To Give It Up Sometime

Congratulations on becoming an IT manager. If you thought that you didn’t have enough time to get all of your work done before you became a manager, it’s not going to become any easier now. If you try to do it all yourself, you are going to fail. It’s time to try a different way to get things done – delegating.

But I Can Do It All Myself…

Let’s be frank here for just a moment. Yes, with a little luck you CAN do all of the work that needs to be done in your department. However, that’s not why your company picked you to become a manager. Your role as a manager is (here it comes) to manage your staff in order to accomplish far more than you could possibly hope to accomplish by yourself.

What this means is that instead of doing all of the work yourself, you are going to have to allow your staff to do the work that needs to be done. What you need to start doing is delegating work to your staff.

Delegation of work means that you are going to assign a specific task that you are responsible for to a member of your team. The person that you assign the work to needs to agree to complete it. Not only are you assigning the work, but you are also assigning the accountability for completing the assignment to that member of your team.

Here’s an important point: you can delegate accountability, but you can’t delegate responsibility. That means that although another member of your team may actually end up doing the work, at the end of the day your management will still be looking to you in order to make sure that the work gets done.

Delegating Is Good: The Benefits For You

Quick question for you: just what the heck are you supposed to be doing with your time now that you are an IT manager? It turns out that you are not really supposed to be doing IT work – that’s for your team to work on. You are supposed to be spending your time doing manager things like: planning, controlling expenses, doing business planning, getting funding and people, and dealing with staff issues.

I’m willing to bet that you currently have too much work to do. That clearly shows that you need to become a better delegator. By assigning work to your staff, you’ll take it off of your plate and reduce your overall stress level.

One of the benefits of delegating that most IT managers don’t take the time to realize is that it is exactly what your staff wants you to do. By delegating tasks to your staff, you are telling your team that you trust them to get the work done correctly and on time. This feeling of trust is a two-way street and the stronger that it is, the better your team will function.

Additionally, everyone on your team has career aspirations. In fact, someday they’d all like to have your job. Hopefully, when that day comes, you will have been promoted to a higher position (CIO?). By giving members of your team the ability to show how well they take directions and can complete work, you have a great way to evaluate them and determine who you will recommend to take over your position once you’ve moved on.

What All Of This Means For You

The good IT managers are the ones who can get the most work done. The bad ones are the ones who try to do everything themselves and end up getting nothing done. In order to be successful, you are going to have to get good at delegating the work that needs to be done to your team.

It is difficult for us IT folks to let go, but we have to. By delegating work that you could do yourself to your team, you accomplish several things at the same time. Asking members of your team to complete projects for you allows you to develop a feeling of trust between you and your team. It also gives you a way to evaluate the work performance of members of your team so that you’ll know who to recommend for promotions when the day comes.

It’s not easy to give up control over how work gets done, but it is a fundamental part of being an IT manager. The better that you get at delegating work (and making sure that it gets done correctly, on time), the more successful you will be as an IT manager.

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

Question For You: What IT manager tasks do you think should never be delegated?

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

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

You can do it (all)! Well, not really. In fact the really good IT managers realize that they can’t do it all. However, most of us seem to forget this and find ourselves in an overload situation where we’ve got too much to do and just not enough time to do it. How can we tell when things are starting to go bad so that we can prevent it from happening – before it happens?

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Posted in delegation | No Comments »

IT Managers Need To Understand Why Staff Stay – And Why They Leave

Thursday, December 2nd, 2010
Image Credit
Putting Up Signs Won't Prevent People From Leaving

Putting Up Signs Won't Prevent People From Leaving

As an IT manager, your job is to lead a team and accomplish tasks. Sounds simple enough, doesn’t it? You can only do this if the team that you are managing stays together. If people start to leave, it’s disruptive when they leave and you are going to be distracted as you work to fill the open positions. It sure seems like you should have a good understanding of why members of your team will both stay and why they might leave…

Why Do People Stay In Their Job?

Sadly, there is no one right answer to the question of why IT workers stay in their job. Every one of us is different and we are all constantly dealing with an ever-changing set of life circumstances. These are the things that can cause enough pressure in our lives that will make leaving our current job seem like a valid choice.

As an IT manager, you need to understand why your staff will stay with the company. These are the things that you are going to want to spend your time making sure that they remain in place:

  • Company Pride: it turns out that who we work for really does matter despite what we might say on a daily basis. When others ask us where we work, if the company has a good reputation and is looked up to, this will extend to your staff and they will be proud to tell others where they work. Working at an Enron or a Worldcom after they had been disgraced would have been a difficult place for IT staff to remain.

  • Manager Respect: how your staff feels about you can be an incredibly powerful attraction force. If your staff feels that you support them and if they respect you, then they are going to be much more likely to stay in their current job. The good news about this is that this is the one retention force that you have the most control over – do this well and you’ll be able to keep more of your staff on board.

  • Enough Compensation: your team is giving their time and talents to the company. In return for this, they want to receive something in return. They will always be comparing the two – are they getting enough for what they are giving? Although in reality, your control over how much they get paid may be limited, you can control other aspects of their compensation (work start times, flex time, etc.) that will shape how they feel that they are being rewarded for their time and talent.

  • Type of work: how a worker feels about the work that they are performing can have a big influence on their desire to stay or go. If they feel that their work is meaningful, then they’ll stay. If they decide that their work doesn’t matter or isn’t having any impact on the world, then they’ll be much more likely to leave and seek out more meaningful work.

Why Do People Stay In Their Job?

As an IT manager you are always going to be dealing with the issue of having people leave the company. Although you can’t completely control this, you can at least be aware of the factors that can make it more likely that members of your team will leave.

IT managers who are aware of what makes workers leave are able to better work to make sure that they don’t:

  • Changes In Company Leadership: for a whole variety of reasons there can big changes that happen at the top your company. It can be caused by the sale of the company or just an unhappy board of directors. No matter the reason, nobody likes change.

    If your staff feel that the company is now going to be heading a different direction and they don’t fully understand why, then they may decide to leave. Communication or the lack thereof can be a big part of this leaving factor.

  • Conflict With Managers: one of the most powerful reasons for people to leave the firm is because they are not getting along with their manager. No matter how wonderful the rest of the company is, this every-day type of conflict can override everything else and cause people to leave.

  • Friends Leave: every team is a collection of relationships. When a worker’s friends leave the company, that worker’s network of relationships is damaged and if there is not enough of a network left, then there’s a good chance that the worker may leave.

  • Work-life balance issues: every team member has a life outside of work. If work starts to interfere with how a person is living their life, then there is going to be conflict that may end up in making the person have to make a choice between work and other activities. Work often loses this battle.

What All Of This Means For You

As an IT manager you need a team in order to accomplish your goals. Every member of your team will constantly be making judgements as to if they should remain in their job or move on to another job.

IT managers need to understand what will make their staff stay in their jobs. At the same time, managers need to also understand the forces that can cause team members to decide to leave the team.

We’ve identified the major forces that you are going to have to be aware of in order to keep your team together. Although you can’t control everything, staying on top of these issues allows an IT manager to keep your team together and on track.

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

Question For You: Since you don’t control how much your team gets paid, what other types of compensation can you control?

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

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Congratulations on becoming an IT manager. If you thought that you didn’t have enough time to get all of your work done before you became a manager, it’s not going to become any easier now. If you try to do it all yourself, you are going to fail. It’s time to try a different way to get things done – delegating.

Tags: , , , , , , ,
Posted in retention | 2 Comments »