Archive for 2010

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How Do IT Leaders Write A Good Job Description?

Thursday, November 11th, 2010
Image Credit Before you can hire someone, you need to describe the job

Before you can hire someone, you need to describe the job

How would you like to end up spending the next year in court and costing your company many millions of dollars? Not a good way to manage your IT Leader career, eh? Too many of us risk doing this whenever we try to fill an IT position without first clearly defining what the job is…

Just Exactly What Is A Job Description?

A job description is exactly what it sounds like – a description of an IT job that you are trying to fill. The reasons that you create one are many and varied.

The primary reason for creating a job description is simply because although you know what you are looking for in a job candidate, the team of people who will actually help you find that person do not know. The other reason that creating a job description is so important is that should it become necessary to fire someone, a good job description is the key to protecting yourself from a lawsuit.

In most companies you won’t be alone when you go to develop a job description. Your HR or legal departments probably already have a template for you to use. Just in case they don’t (or if it is incomplete), here’s what every job description should contain:

  • Title of the job, what business unit it will be part of, and the name of the part of the company that it will belong to

  • Responsibilities and assignments associated with the job

  • Who the hiring manager is and which manager the job reports to (they are not always the same)

  • A more detailed description of what the person who has the job will need to do including tasks, responsibilities, and perhaps even objectives for the job.

  • How much they will be paid, where they need to perform the work, and what hours you expect them to work.

  • What background is required to do the work such as college education, or previous work experience.

  • Any personal characteristics that may be required (outgoing personality, good with people, etc.)

The Process Of Creating A Job Description

Sometimes we find ourselves in the position of creating a job description for a job that already exists – the person has just left. In these cases, you should not feel constrained by what the job was in the past when you are creating the job description. Instead, write the job description for what you want the next person to do for you – what the job should be going forward.

As you are writing the job description, you are going to have to be very careful about detailing the differences between what a candidate brings to the job. We all have different types of job knowledge, sets of skills, and personal abilities. Each job requires a unique set of these and when you are creating the job description you’ll have to lay out what you are looking for.

Keep in mind that you are defining what you need to have the person that you hire do for you. If for some reason it turns out that they can’t do the job, you are going to have to let them go. These situations can get out of hand quickly (and become expensive). In order to protect yourself and your company, make sure that the job description has enough detail so that you can clearly make a case if someone doesn’t live up to your expectations.

Finally, a clearly written job description will keep you on the right side of the law. No matter what country you are in, having a job description that clearly states what you are looking for in a candidate will protect you from lawsuits from those whom you end up not hiring.

What All Of This Means For You

IT Leaders like to spend their time leading, charting new paths for their IT teams. Writing a job description may not seem like the best use of your time; however, it turns out that it is a crucial task to do and to do well.

When creating a job description, it’s important to make sure that it contains at least the important pieces of information that we’ve detailed here. Additionally, you’ll need to make sure to determine what skills are needed, what grounds for dismissal would be, and to be sure that you’ve covered all of the legal bases.

I’m not a lawyer and so you should be sure to talk to a lawyer when creating a job description. When you take the time to do this correctly, then you will have created a powerful document that will ensure that you get the right person for the job…

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

Question For You: How long do you think a job description should be? How long is too long?

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

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Congratulations – you’re an IT leader. Now go hire someone. Wait a minute, did anyone ever take the time to tell you just exactly how you should go about hiring staff? I mean, you’ve been on the other side of the table when you were looking for a job, but what are you supposed to do differently when you are the one doing the hiring?

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Posted in hiring | No Comments »

The Secret To Filling An Open IT Position The Right Way

Thursday, November 4th, 2010
Image Credit Filling That Position Is An IT Manager's Most Important Job

Filling That Position Is An IT Manager's Most Important Job

When you were just a worker-bee you didn’t have to worry about things like hiring people – you just had to worry about hanging on to the job that you had. Now that you are an IT manager, you’re going to have to start getting comfortable with your new role as someone who has to find people to fill open spots. Got any suggestions on how to do this correctly?

Step 1: Define The Job’s Requirements

Although the ultimate goal of the hiring process is to find the right person for the job, you don’t start out with people. Instead you need to start with the job.

You’re going to have to sit down and take the time to lay out the job’s requirements. You won’t be able to even start the process of looking for someone to perform the job until after you make sure that you have a good understanding of just exactly what you are going to want them to be doing for you.

There are five different characteristics of a job description that you are going to have to document:

  • Primary responsibilities

  • Background needed

  • Personal characteristics

  • Organizational culture

  • Managerial style

Primary Responsibilities

In this part of a job description, you are going to want to identify the tasks that are involved in performing the job. Just as importantly, you may need to identify what tasks are not part of the job!

Background Needed

In your opinion, what kind of background is needed in order to successfully perform this type of job? Required background can include such things as college degrees, previous work experience, etc.

Personal Characteristics

This is where you start to really define what kind of person is going to be needed in order to perform this kind of job. One of the most important questions that you are going to have to specify for the job is if you need an extrovert or an introvert to fill the roll. Good people skills are not always needed if there is not a lot of contact with others required.

Organizational Culture

Every job exists within the company that created it. Every company has a different sense of corporate culture. Aspects of this culture that will impact the job can include things like how much teamwork is used to accomplish projects, how much conformity to company policies is required, and how rewards are handed out.

Management Style

In the end, how you manage will play a role in the type of person who will be best suited to fill this position. We all have different management styles and depending on our style, different types of workers will better suited to working for us.

What All Of This Means For You

One of the most critical jobs that an IT Leader has is hiring new workers to fill positions within the company. Before you can start the process of interviewing candidates, you need to first take the time to define the job’s requirements.

When defining an IT job’s requirements, you need to take into account a number of different factors. These include job responsibilities, background needed, personal characteristics, organizational culture, and your own management style.

Yes, this may seem like a lot of work to do up front when you have an open position on your team that you are trying to fill; however, the work is worth it. Knowing what job you are trying to fill is the key to finding the right person to do the work.

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

Question For You: How important do you think educational background is when you are trying to fill a position?

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

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

How would you like to end up spending the next year in court and costing your company many millions of dollars? Not a good way to manage your IT Leader career, eh? Too many of us risk doing this whenever we try to fill an IT position without first clearly defining what the job is…

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

Do IT Leaders (and CEOs) Have Their Heads Stuck In The Cloud?

Thursday, October 28th, 2010
Image Credit Some IT Leaders Think That They Know How To Reach The Cloud, But Do They Really?

Some IT Leaders Think That They Know How To Reach The Cloud, But Do They Really?

Ok, enough of this cloud stuff already! The field of IT is just like every other field out there and we have our own share of trendy topics – cloud computing sure seems to the one that we’re dealing with right now. With all of the magazine articles on clouds and conferences going on, you’d think that every IT Leader and CEO has a good understanding of just exactly what a cloud is. Well, you’d be wrong…

Everybody Thinks That Clouds Are Important

In order to be a successful IT Leader, you’re going to have to have the support of your firm’s Senior Management. I guess one good thing is that it’s become clear that firm’s senior management have been reading the headlines and actually recognize the term “cloud computing”. Mark McDonald over at Gartner has been asking around to find out just how deep this knowledge goes.

Back in 2009 (was it really that long ago?) only about 5% of a firm’s senior management recognized the term. That’s popped up to 37% these days (remember that not everyone works in IT!)

To take this one step further, they also appear to know that cloud computing is important. Those senior managers now list cloud computing as being one of their top 5 IT priorities.

One Out Of Three Isn’t Bad, Is It?

Good IT Leaders understand that in the field of IT, there is no such thing as just one magical technology. Instead, solutions to difficult business challenges are built using multiple IT technologies that all have to work together.

The same level of understanding about how the world of IT works is not shared by the rest of most firm’s senior management. Mark McDonald’s research shows that too little is fully understood about how cloud computing really works.
Clouds are built using three separate pieces of IT technology:

  • Server Virtualization

  • Service Orientated Architecture (SOA)

  • Software as a Service (SaaS)

In order to implement a cloud solution, firms need to adopt all three technologies. However, this point has not yet sunk in with most non-IT senior management.

Gartner’s research shows that most executives have very little interest in any of these technologies despite their belief that cloud computing is the way for their IT departments to go. Furthermore, roughly half of the executives surveyed believed that virtualization alone was the same thing as cloud computing.

What’s Next For Clouds?

Well, at least they all know that cloud computing exists and that’s got to be a good thing, right? Actually, no. Studies of new and emerging IT technologies have shown that they all seem to follow a predictable path.

Right now, most members of your firm’s senior management team are probably quite excited about the potential of cloud computing. Soon, this will change. As it becomes clear that this isn’t a magical cure (and cost reducer) that will solve all of your firm’s problems, cloud computing will move into what Gartner calls “the trough of disillusionment”. This is when people reject a novel new technology because it didn’t live up to its initial hype.

What All Of This Means For You

IT Leaders understand the true power of cloud computing. It offers a way to efficiently scale a firm’s computing infrastructure while at the same time allowing it to keep it’s IT operational costs under control.

Realizing that your senior management doesn’t quite fully “get” what cloud computing is and that they’ll soon decide that it’s not all that it was touted to be is an important understanding that we all need to have.

IT Leaders are going to have to continue to focus on finding ways to make use of cloud computing resources while incorporating its supporting technologies into the projects that they are working on today. Cloud computing will eventually arrive on the IT scene and it’s up to you to be ready when it comes.

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

Question For You: Which of the three supporting technologies do you think is the most important to making cloud computing a success?

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

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

When you were just a worker-bee you didn’t have to worry about things like hiring people – you just had to worry about hanging on to the job that you had. Now that you are an IT manager, you’re going to have to start getting comfortable with your new role as someone who has to find people to fill open spots. Got any suggestions on how to do this correctly?

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

Top-Down Or Bottom-Up: What’s The Best Way To Set Goals?

Thursday, October 21st, 2010
Image CreditGoals Are Important – Which Way You Set Them Is Important Also

Goals Are Important – Which Way You Set Them Is Important Also

Everyone needs goals. As an IT Leader, it’s going to be your responsibility to help your team set both team and individual goals. Although at first this sounds pretty straightforward, in practice it often turns out to be a bit tricky. The most important question that you’re going to have to answer is which way do you want to go about setting goals: top-down or bottom-up?

The Top-Down Approach

Say hello to “Big Brother” – he’s going to be setting the goals for you and your team. The top-down approach to goal setting is where your company’s senior management identifies the goals that they want you and your team to be working towards. They then have you assign these goals to the members of your team.

When goals are set this way, the company generally has identified a broad set of goals that it would like to accomplish in the near future. Your assignment is to then take these broad goals and create objectives for your team members that are aligned with what the company is trying to accomplish.

Although it may seem a bit authoritative at first glance, this approach is actually well-suited to certain situations. Specifically there are three types of IT workers who need to have top-down goals assigned to them: those who need close supervision in order to do their job, new team members, and any team members who don’t know or understand what the company’s goals are.

The Bottom-Up Approach

As a manager, you’d think that the bottom-up approach for creating team member goals would be easier than the top-down approach, but it turns out that it isn’t. In the bottom-up approach, the members of your team create their own goals.

Once this is done, it then becomes your responsibility to combine these various goals into a unified set of goals for the team. As you can well imagine, this can be quite a challenge for any manager.

There are certain types of team members for whom the bottom-up method of goal creation is well suited. Specifically, those team members who determine their own work, who understand the company’s goals and strategy for achieving those goals, and who understand the role that they play in the company.

It’s All About Buy-In

No matter which of these two methods is used to set the goals for your team, it’s going to be important that everyone on the team buy-in to both their personal and the team’s goals. As an IT Leader, it’s your job to make sure that this happens.

The best way to get buy-in from your team no matter which way you choose to go about setting goals is to get everyone involved in their goals. Involvement creates a sense of ownership and as an IT Leader, that’s what you want out of your team.

If you’ve used the top-down method to assign goals to team members, it can be a bit challenging to get buy-in. However, taking the time to talk with team members about their goals, why they are important, and how they relate to the company’s success can foster a sense of ownership.

What All Of This Means For You

Goals are a critical tool that IT Leader need in order to point the way for their teams. How best to create those goals has been an ongoing discussion since time began.

The two most common methods used today are top-down and bottom-up. In the top-down method IT Leaders assign goals related to the company’s objectives to team members. In the top-up approach, team members create their own goals and the IT Leader uses these to create a set of team goals.

In the real world, often a combination of top-down and bottom-up methods are used to create goals for IT teams. As an IT Leader, it’s your job to make sure that not only do the goals get created, but that each goal also has an owner who will be responsible for ensuring that it gets accomplished. Good luck!

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

Question For You: Which way of setting goals do you prefer: top-down or bottom-up?

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

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Ok, enough of this cloud stuff already! The field of IT is just like every other field out there and we have our own share of trendy topics – cloud computing sure seems to the one that we’re dealing with right now. With all of the magazine articles on clouds and conferences going on, you’d think that every IT Leader and CEO has a good understanding of just exactly what a cloud is. Well, you’d be wrong…

Tags: , , , , , , , ,
Posted in goals | 8 Comments »

He Shoots! He Scores! Why Goals Are Important To IT Leaders

Thursday, October 14th, 2010
Image Credit IT Managers need goals in order to win at the game of IT

IT Managers need goals in order to win at the game of IT

Being an IT Leader is a hard job. On any given day, you’ll have multiple people pulling on you trying to get you to do 100 different things. The question that you have to keep asking yourself is “what should my team be working on right now?”

This is exactly where new IT managers can get lost. They try to spend their limited time working on everything and they end up getting nothing done. The key to you being successful as an IT Leader is to do a good job of setting goals for your team. It may sound easy, but it turns out that it’s a bit tricky to do correctly…

Goals: Why Bother?

One of the first questions that needs to be answered is simply “Why?” Identifying and establishing goals is an effort and takes time. As an IT Leader, you are busy and this may not appear to be a critical task – perhaps you could skip it.

Yes you could, but don’t. The process of setting goals is how you commit to outcomes that either you or your team are able to accomplish. The reason that goals are so important is because they provide you with a clear focus – now you know what you need to be spending your precious limited time and resources on.

It’s this very focus that will allow you to stay the course. You will be less likely to be distracted by all of the other tasks that are clambering for your attention. You and your team know what you need to be working on and because you can focus on these tasks you’ll end up achieving your goals and being more successful.

Company Goals Should Drive Team and Individual Goals

Company Goals Should Drive Team and Individual Goals

Where To Start?

If I can get you to agree that goals for an IT Leader are important, then we’re on the right path. The next big question that comes up now is just how one goes about determining what your goals should be?

It turns out that the basic source for your team’s goals is already well known to you: it’s the company that you work for. Every company has a set of enterprise goals that get announced to investors and distributed throughout the company.

The goals that your team creates need to relate back to the company’s strategic goals. You can’t just parrot the company’s goals as your team’s goals. The reason is because your team can’t make the company’s goals happen. Rather, you need to scale down each of the company’s goals and identify how your team can contribute to the company’s goal.

It’s All About Understanding

If you just “set and forget” your goals, then you and your team will be missing out on the real power of having clearly defined goals. Once again, knowing what your goals are will help everyone on your team to prioritize all of the tasks that they are asked to perform. If it relates to a goal, then great – they should be working on it. If it doesn’t, then they probably should defer working on it for now.

Additionally, helping the members of your team relate their personal goals back to the company’s overall goals is a great way to keep your team together. If they can see how the work that they are doing on a daily basis is helping the company to achieve what it’s trying to do, then they will feel as though they are truly contributing to something that is larger than they are. Isn’t this what we all want?

What All Of This Means For You

As an IT Leader, you’ve got a tough job to do. You’ve got to establish a direction for your team and make sure that everyone doesn’t get distracted while they are working towards it.

The good news is that you have a powerful tool that can help you to be successful: goals. By starting with the company’s stated goals and using them to create related but customized goals for your team, you’ll have given everyone the ability to determine what they should and should not be working on.

All too often goals are seen as a necessary evil in IT departments. They get set at the beginning of the year and then they get ignored until the end of the year review. Stop doing this and start using good goals to motivate and manage your team. Success will be much easier to achieve once you’ve got goals on your side.

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

Question For You: How many goals do you think are needed for an IT team?

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

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Everyone needs goals. As an IT Leader, it’s going to be your responsibility to help your team set both team and individual goals. Although at first this sounds pretty straightforward, in practice it often turns out to be a bit tricky. The most important question that you’re going to have to answer is which way do you want to go about setting goals: top-down or bottom-up?

Tags: , , , , , , ,
Posted in goals | 1 Comment »

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