IT Mangers Can Turn Time Into Their Friend

Just where does the time seem to go? I don’t know about you but as of late I seem to be running out of time or just simply running behind more often than in the past. I’d like to blame the current turmoil in the financial markets; however, that’s not the problem. There are many, many more people who are better qualified than I talk about time management (I’m sorta a fan of GTD myself), but I do have one secret that I’d like to share with you. No promises, but if you believe what I’m going to share with you and if you take the time to implement it, then there is a pretty good chance that you’ll become the best IT manager in the world. Sound interesting? Then read on…

If you think back a bit, you might remember that there was a book called The Secret that was very popular awhile ago. In a nutshell, the secret was that if you can imagine something, then you can make it happen. This applies to making others believe that you have control over your time. However, I’m going get just a bit more specific here and give you one single change that if you implement it will have a dramatic and positive impact on your life: start showing up early.

What this means in the day-to-day life of a IT manager is that you need to start to show up for meeting early (5-10 minutes will do) and even more importantly, you need to start to jump on call bridges early (5 minutes will do here). I don’t know about you, but up until just recently I was a constantly late shower-upper. I would slide into calls 5 minutes late and hope that whoever was running the meeting would not stop the call and ask who had just joined when they heard the “beep” that announced my arrival. I’d slug through the call and then slink off when it was over no better or worse for the time spent on the call.

A few weeks ago, I accidentally showed up for a call early. You can imagine how surprised I was when there was nobody on the bridge when I joined (there was that moment where I felt that I needed to check to make sure that I had the right call-in numbers). What happened next really caught my attention: other people started to join. These just happened to be people that I had been trying with no luck to get in touch with. I had very quick, very short conversations with three of them as they joined and got commitments from them to send me answers and materials that I desperately needed. As others joined I exchanged small talk with them and reconnected with people that I knew but had not seen in a long time. When the call’s leader joined he fumbled around for a bit and this gave me time to ask a very good, penetrating question about what he wanted to accomplish on this call and that got everyone involved in a discussion. Man, it was almost like I was running the show!

Based on the success of this accidental event, I started showing up early for all of my meetings that week and found that the same sequence of events repeated itself. Others looked at me as though I was in charge, I connected with other people who were in the meeting, and I was able to make face-to-face requests for support and materials that were never turned down. Wow – who knew that getting what you wanted could be so easy?

Yes, I realize that showing up early for meetings and calls won’t solve all of life’s problems. However, it sure seems to make a lot of little things run much easier. When you couple that with the fact that it’s so very easy to do, why not give it a try and see what it does for you?

When do you show up for meetings & calls – early or late? When you are the one who is running the meeting do you show up early or do you still come late? Have you always been this way or did something cause you to be an early/late person? Leave a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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© Dr. Jim Anderson for The Accidental IT Leader, 2008. | Permalink | 6 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: employee, information technology, it, IT manager, meetings, time management

As we reach the end of the first decade of the new millennium, the IT workplace is once again starting to change. For at least the next few years we’re going to be seeing three distinct generations working together side-by-side: boomers (born before 1965), Gen-X’ers (1965-1979), and Gen-Y’ers (1980-1999). This arrangement causes conflicts and friction in all parts of a company; however, the IT department feels it the most because of the rapid changes that have happened in IT.

In order to keep an entire IT department staffed and motivated (and avoid having unhappy IT workers), things are going to have to change. One key change is going to be how we all think about IT jobs. In the immediate past, IT jobs were simply 40-hour-a-week commitments that pretty much started and ended at the same time each day. We might work different shifts; however, the company was fairly insistent that we show up and put our time in. All sorts of tools were created around this structure: time clocks, time sheets, overtime, comp-time, etc. Things are changing now and it’s because Gen-Y has arrived in the work place.

The Gen-Y crowd clearly prefer jobs that are defined by their task, not the amount of time that they take. This of course means that they want to be compensated for what they produce. In a way this is sort of a step backwards. Back when everyone worked on a farm or in the early days of factories, people were paid based on their personal output. This had its pluses and minuses and after the Great Depression when manufacturing got more complicated and unions arrived, the shift to paying by the hour started.

Younger workers are used to working in an asynchronous fashion — something that older workers may do also, but they hid it better. Getting into the office by 8am or staying at the office until 5pm makes little or no sense to younger workers if they have completed their work.

You can call task based work whatever you choose (“virtual work” seems to be winning), but by necessarily text=”Virtual Work” it is catching on. At IBM, 40% of their employees have no official offices. So what does all of this change mean for those who are in charge of making sure that a multi-generational IT department produces results? Here are the three key skills that will need to be mastered:

1. Clearly articulate the results that you expect — leave no room for misunderstanding. Then follow up by tying accountability to getting the job done.

2. Make physical attendance at the office / meetings optional. Note that everyone still needs to show up for meetings and communicate with team members.
3. Gage worker performance on the quality of the work performed.

What can you expect to gain from making these changes? Best Buy has implemented many of them and they claim to have seen a 35% increase in productivity and voluntary turnover drop by 320 basis points. What’s even more remarkable is that when asked, employees were unsure if they were now working more or fewer hours — they had simply stopped keeping track.

Tags: 40 hour week, productivity, quality, work task, work time

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© Dr. Jim Anderson for The Accidental IT Leader, 2008. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
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