Archive for the ‘communication’ Category

How IT Managers Work With Their CIO

Thursday, October 6th, 2011
Image Credit Presenting To The CIO Is A Big Step For IT Managers

Presenting To The CIO Is A Big Step For IT Managers

Congratulations IT Manager – you’ve been asked to make a presentation to your company’s CIO. Oh, oh. What are you going to have to do in order to make your career move forward due to this opportunity and not screw it up?

What Does A CIO Of Directors Want From A IT Manager?

Let’s make sure that we’re all on board here – do you really understand what the CIO does for the company? Although the CIO is in charge of the IT department, he or she is really responsible for making IT a company asset, not so much about the day-to-day working of the technology side of IT.

Although the CIO does understand the importance of information technology, they really don’t care about the nitty-gritty details that everyone in their department works on every day – they have much bigger things to worry about. That means that you are going to have present the information that they have requested very carefully.

Arthur Langer has done some research in this area and he has the following four recommendations for how IT Managers should present information to their CIO:

  1. New Ideas: IT Managers need to understand why they have been asked to make a presentation to the CIO. The CIO is not interested in what you spend most of your time worrying about – budget details, hiring issues, etc. Instead, his or her focus is on the IT department as a whole and they want to hear from you what you can do to help the department help out the rest of the company. This can include how your team can help out with ongoing operations as well as what you can do more strategically.

  2. Security: Every presentation that a IT Manager makes to the CIO needs to touch on the topic of information security. Remember, they don’t care about the details. Instead, what they want to hear from you is what you are doing to protect the company against risks and what you are doing to ensure that the company’s confidential information won’t get stolen.

  3. Data: If there is one thing that is keeping your CIO up at night, it’s worrying about all of that data that your company is sitting on. As the IT Manager, they see you as being responsible for keeping track of all of this data. That also means that you are viewed as acting as the point-of-contact if the company gets sued and one of those e-discovery programs has to be conducted.

  4. Analytics: Since the CIO sees the IT Manager as being in charge of all of the data that your team collects, they also see you as being responsible for finding ways to get the most out of that data. This means that you need to be ready to tell them how you plan on going about doing this.

How Can You Prepare For A CIO Presentation?

Being invited to make a presentation to your company’s CIO is a great honor. Now you’re going to have to ensure that you make the most of this opportunity. That means, sorry about this, you’re going to have to do some homework.

Here are four things that every IT Manager needs to do both before and during their presentation to the CIO:

  1. Know Your Audience: You should do this before every presentation, and presenting to your CIO is no different. You need to understand the personalities of the CIO. What is their background? What is their reputation within the company? What do other people who have presented to them have to say about them?

  2. Make Friends: How the presentation is going to turn out is often determined before it starts. If you can make contact with the CIO before the day of the presentation and ask them questions, then you will have a chance to have an ally in your corner on the day of your presentation.

  3. Time Counts: When you were told how much time you had for your presentation, the person who told it to you was lying. The way that these things work out is that you never get as much time as you were told, or even as much as you ended up being allocated. The CIO will hate you forever if you run over your allocated time and will love you forever if you finish up early. Always show up with multiple version of your presentation so that you can fit into smaller and smaller time periods.

  4. Use Stories: As one of the company’s IT Managers you have a great deal of sophisticated knowledge about all things related to the IT sector and how they work. Don’t share this during your presentation. Instead, keep things simple and use stories to make you points – this is what the CIO will be able to remember.

What All Of This Means For You

The definition of information technology is that it is how a company uses computers to become more successful. As one of the company’s IT Managers, it’s your job to make this happen. When your CIO summons you to present to them, you need to understand both what they are interested in and what they don’t want you to talk about.

When you are preparing for your presentation you’ll want to focus on what the CIO wants hear: how your IT team can help to grow the company, data security, data management, and how best to use the data that the company has. Additionally you’ll need to do your homework in order to prepare for your big presentation.

We talk a lot about finding ways to get the IT Manager a “seat at the table” when it comes to working with other departments. Being asked to present to your CIO is a fantastic opportunity for an IT Manager to make a name for himself or herself. Make sure that you take the time to prepare for this presentation and you’ll see your career take off…

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

Question For You: Do you think that you should prepare a separate handout for your presentation to the CIO?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

As an IT manager, your time is spent keeping projects and teams on track. You wouldn’t think that something like strategy would be part of your job at this stage of your career. I mean, that strategy stuff is what the big boys in IT spend their days worrying about right? Hmm, if you don’t start thinking about how to both come up with and execute a strategy now, how are you going to develop these management skills later on? Let’s see if we can show you what you need to be doing with strategy right now…

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Hey IT Manager, Are You Sending The Wrong Signals?

Thursday, January 27th, 2011
Image Credit It Turns Out That It's Not What You Say, But Rather How You Say It

It Turns Out That It's Not What You Say, But Rather How You Say It

When you become an IT manager, you probably decided right there and then that you wanted to become a success. Just because you are a manager, does not guarantee that you’ll be a success – it seems to take something else, something extra. It turns out that social signals are what determines how successful an IT manager will be. Do you know what signals you are sending out?

Welcome To The World Of “Honest Signals”

Dr. Alex Pentland at MIT has been studying the social cues that we transmit to others. What he’s discovered is that we communicate with others using much more than words. What we are trying to communicate comes across in our gestures, expressions, and the tone that we use.

Dr. Pentland’s research has gone one step further. What he’s uncovered is that we have a set of non-verbal cues, what he calls “honest signals”, that do more than just communicate from us to another person. They actually cause a change in the person that we are communicating with. In other words, what we are trying to get across “rubs off” on the person that we’re interacting with.

We’ve all seen this before. If we encounter someone who is very excited and outgoing, then we’ll become excited just by talking with them. Likewise, if we bump into someone who is having the worst day of their life, then we’ll be down and glum after we talk with them.

Why Do Some IT Managers Succeed And Others Don’t?

Great, so now you’ve just found out that as an IT Manager you are going to be “leaking” information through a bunch of non-verbal cues. That’s a bummer, but does it really matter – I mean you’ve got your technical act together and you believe that you know how to run an IT department, right?

It turns out that the non-verbal cues that you are giving off do matter. What the researchers have found through study is that the more successful IT managers are also the ones who are more energetic.

What this means is that the IT Managers who are going to both last in their roles and be successful display a set of common traits. These include talking to others more while at the same time taking the time to listen to them. More of their day is spent engaging in face-to-face discussions. They are better at working with other people and they can both pick up signals from others, get them to talk more, and get them to be more outgoing overall.

What the researchers have found is that your attitude and the positive energy that you give off play a key role in your eventual success. They’ve found that spending more face time with the people with whom you work is 2.5 times more important than gaining access to additional sources of information.

What All Of This Means For You

In order for an IT Manager to be successful, it’s going to take a lot more than just having good technical knowledge. Researchers who study human dynamics have discovered what they call “honest signals” which can have a dramatic impact on your success.

These signals cause changes in the people who receive them. This means that in order to be successful as an IT Manager you need to be broadcasting the right signals. If not, then no matter how good your manager skills are, you won’t be successful.

The good news is that once you know that honest signals exist and which ones are the ones that you want to be broadcasting, then you can focus on what you are transmitting. Awareness of the impact that you have on the people that you are meeting is the key to a manager’s long-term career success…

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

Question For You: Do you think that you can change the honest signals that you are transmitting to others?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

In order to maximize what you will be able to accomplish as an IT manager, you are going to have to be able to build effective teams. All too often when we are faced with a new challenge, we’ll simply look around for who’s available and draft them to be on the team that we’re putting together. Is it any wonder that all too often our teams never accomplish what they set out to do?

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Cheap & Easy IT Management: How To Use Social-Network Analysis To Boost Team Performance

Thursday, December 17th, 2009
Image Credit How Your Team Is Wired Can Make All The Difference In The World

How Your Team Is Wired Can Make All The Difference In The World

No budget, no special training, and yet you are expected to do more with less. How can you go about fixing what’s wrong with your IT team during tight economic times? It turns out that there is a simple way for you to identify where you are having issues and how you can fix them. All you need to do is to learn a about a new management tool called social-network analysis…

It’s Not Facebook

These day’s we’re reading so much about social networks that when we hear the phrase, we automatically think of web sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, or MySpace. Well, we’re not talking about those, but there are similarities.

Instead, what social-network mapping is all about is finding out who your team talks with in order to solve problems and get information. This is the type of information that everyone always knows, but never spends much time thinking about — it’s basically invisible.

Once you’ve collected this information from your team, you will then be able to create a social-network map that shows the communication gaps, related information bottlenecks, and team members that are not being fully utilized.

The immediate payoff for you as an IT Leader is that you’ll be able to improve collaboration within your team as well as perhaps uncovering some star performers that you simply didn’t know about.

How About An Example?

This kind of management tool just begs for an example, so let’s take a look at one. Let us pretend that you are an IT manager who is in charge of a team of 16 workers as shown in the following figure:

Example: You Are In Charge Of A Team Of 16 IT Workers

Example: You Are In Charge Of A Team Of 16 IT Workers

You create a questionnaire for your team that has only one question: “Whom do you go to in order to get answers to your technical questions?”. When you get the survey forms back, you lock the door to your office and get busy creating a social-network analysis map. Let’s say that you come up with something that looks like this:

The Result Of Your Social-Network Analysis

The Result Of Your Social-Network Analysis

Now you have to interpret what you’ve discovered. Clearly worker A is one of your star problem solvers — did you know that? It also looks like you have a hidden problem with worker H, they don’t seem to be seeking help to solve problems and nobody is asking them for help. Additionally, with only a couple of exceptions, your department seems to be divided into two groups that really aren’t talking with each other. Once again, did you know this?

For IT Leaders who are managing a team that is spread over multiple sites, this kind of social analysis can be even more valuable. If we sent our questionnaire out to all four sites that our team is located at, we might get the following results back.

Social-Network Analysis Of Workers At Multiple Sites

Social-Network Analysis Of Workers At Multiple Sites

What this is showing us is that although there appears to be information flowing within each of the four sites, there is very little information that flows between sites. A little more digging might reveal that the only people on your team who are talking to each other are the managers. If so, then you’ve got a problem that needs to be addressed.

What All Of This Means For You

In order to get the most value out of doing a social-network analysis, you are going to have to carefully pick the questions that you ask your team. One great question to include is to ask how interacting with a given team member affects the responder’s energy level. This can be a good way to uncover the energy vampires on your team.

The result of making the effort to map the social structure of your IT team should product tangible real-world payoffs. The most valuable of these is that once you know who has the most valuable information, then you can work to make sure that everyone has easier access to that information. This should result in a decrease in the number of steps that are required to solve issues.

Ultimately understanding the flow of communications within your team and then taking steps to improve and facilitate it will boost your team’s ability to innovate. Now that’s something that we all would like to have more of!

What Do You Think The Most Important Question To Ask In A Social-Network Analysis questionnaire would be?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

There is probably no way that you’re going to be getting more funding or headcount in the immediate future. Yet at the same time your senior management keeps talking about the need for the IT department to start showing some innovation. Sounds like you’ve gotten yourself into yet another bind. How about if we take a look at how you can exceed your expectations using what you already have…

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Email And The IT Manager: The Good, The Bad, And The Deleted

Friday, November 7th, 2008
Email Can Be A Powerful Tool - If You Know How To Use It...

Email Can Be A Powerful Tool - If You Know How To Use It...

As an IT Manager, how good are you at sending emails? I’m not talking about your typing skills, nor am I talking about how many of Microsoft Outlook’s 1,000,000 features you have mastered. Nope, what I’m talking about is how effective your emails are. Do they get the job done or do they just get deleted?

Let’s talk about email for just a minute. It’s actually a great way to communicate – most of the modern world runs on it and we all know the feeling of helplessness that we feel when our email system goes down / becomes unavailable – what should we do? That being said, there are really 5 different ways for us to communicate with other folks in the modern IT workplace. What are these 5 ways you ask? Well they just happen to be: email (of course), IM, phone, written note, and verbal conversation. None of these ways of communicating replaces any of the others. Rather, they are all different tools that are well suited to different situations. Email is one of these tools and so let’s talk about things that you can do to make it an effective tool for you.

Subject Lines: This is your million dollar waterfront property when dealing with emails. You have no gurantee that any other part of your email is going to be read by anyone else that you send it to so this is where you need to capture your audience’s attention. You’ve got what, maybe 80 characters max, in which to motivate your reader to actually open the email. Make each character count!

Cut Down On The Chatter: How do you start your emails? Do you kick things off with sentences that sound like “Hi, how are you doing?” or “I was just thinking about you…”? Hey, if there is one thing that we are all lacking it is time. If the reader of your email can’t quickly figure out why you’ve sent them the email, then there is  a good chance that they aren’t going to spent the time to read very far into your email. Try this: state your reason for sending the email in the first sentence in the email. This will allow your reader to quickly determine if they care about the rest.

Make Clear Requests: How many times have you received an email that was making a vague and unclear request? Using words like “look into” or “find out more about” just don’t clearly state what question the writer is trying to get an answer to. If you are going to send someone an email in order to get them to do something for you, please make sure that you provide the details that they will need in order to understand exactly what you want them to do and, of course, be sure to include a reasonable and specific deadline.

It’s Email, Not IM: Don’t get the two confused. In IM conversations we often misspell words and use lots of abbreviations in order to boost our typing speed. This kind of communication looks lousy when used for email. One additional point: emails often get forward to others and so you don’t want to come off looking “sloppy” to everyone who sees your email with IM content.

T.M.I.: Too Much Information is a common problem for emails. A single email should really only deal with one issue / question. Loading it up with more than one can quickly overwhelm your reader. If you have multiple issues / questions, then use multiple emails to gather information about them – this makes life easier for everyone involved.

How good of an emailer do you think that you are? Do you work with anyone who does a poor job of using email effectively? What are they doing wrong? Have you tried to correct them? Were you successful? Leave a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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Employee Motivation: What To Do When You Feel Passed Over

Thursday, July 17th, 2008

Employee Motivation is based on being recognized for our work

I recently had a chance to talk with a friend of mine who works as a developer in the information technology department for a major telecommunications firm. I was surprised to discover that he was very angry and was thinking about quitting his job. It turns out that he had just completed a major project. He and two others had put in those non-stop 60-70 hour days. He had been away from home for the better part of two months and he was very proud of what was finally produced.

However, what had gotten him angry was that two other individuals had joined the project late in the game, had not worked nearly as hard as the core group of three had, and in the end they not only got credit for the project’s success, but they also got promotions while the core group of three were not promoted. Is is any wonder that my friend was so angry?

We spend a lot of time recruiting the best information technology employees and then we spend at least as much time worrying about employee motivation all too often only to end up with angry, bitter staff. In the case of my friend, what had gone wrong was instantly clear to me because I’ve done it to myself countless time. I call this situation, the “engineering field of dreams” problem.

Jobs in Information Technology allow us to focus on building things using only our minds and hands (for typing). As engineers we have a bad habit of completely focusing on solving the technical problem that we’ve been assigned and not lifting our heads up until we have a finished product. The problem with this is that we then expect the rest of the world to look at what we’ve made and realize what a great worker we are. In my case, I blame my Mom because whenever I took something that I had made to her she always reacted with joy and surprise and told me that it was the best thing that she had ever seen. Unfortunately, the rest of the world doesn’t work that way.

So what should my friend have done? While he was working on the project he should have realized that he had another job to do at the same time. In IT management speak we’d call this an “overlay job”. Every single day he needed to be managing his career — thinking about what he needed to be doing in order to get recognized for what he was doing and get considered for a promotion the next time an opening showed up. You know what he said when I told him this: “Hey Jim, I just don’t like to brag about myself!” Two quick replies to that: (1) if you don’t, then who do you think will? and (2) bragging would be bad, informing others would be good.

I ended up having a very long talk with my friend; however, here is the gist of what we talked about. He needs to identify who he needs to make aware of his contributions (his boss, his bosses boss, and the bosses of any department that his project interfaces with). He needs to communicate with these people regularly (Monday, Wednesday, and Friday). Communicating does not mean sending them mindless status reports. He needs to send brief, concise emails that provide valuable information such as “We had a problem, but here is how we solved it…” When he sends an email to these important people, he needs to address it to only them — don’t CC them or send it to a distro list. One-to-one sends a powerful message. Finally, he needs to do more than just send emails: he needs face time with the decision makers. I suggested that he use the excuse of “checking to make sure that you agree with the decisions that we’ve made” line to set up a meeting.

So remember: you are in charge of your career and nobody else. As technical professionals we all suffer from a “love my work, love me” syndrome and we need to do a better job of communicating with those in charge in order to move our career along.

Posted in career, communication, field of dreams, motivation | 4 Comments »