Archive for the ‘decision’ Category

Why IT Managers Can’t Pay Attention And What To Do About It

Thursday, February 2nd, 2012
Image Credit Why Can't IT Managers just keep their minds on the task at hand?

Why Can't IT Managers just keep their minds on the task at hand?

How’s that job going IT manager? Do you find yourself and your IT team more and more often with too much to do and too few hands with which to do it? If so then maybe both of you are suffering from “IT Manager Attention Deficit Syndrome”. What can you do about it?

The Madness Of Trying To Do Too Much

So just exactly what does an IT manager do? A lot of what we are asked to take care of has to do with the routine stuff: keeping systems up, making sure that we have enough of the right kinds of IT staffing, completing IT projects, etc. It’s when we get sidetracked with the big “special projects” that our leadership can go off track.

Special projects, no matter if they are IT focused projects or company-wide projects that impact IT, can easily suck up a great deal of a IT manager’s limited time. We all know that these types of projects are important to the company in the long run; however, they are very expensive in terms of the time that they require in the short term.

What all this means is that IT managers need to learn how to live double lives. On one hand they need to keep doing what they’ve always been doing: using their management skills to make sure that the day-to-day IT department operations keep running smoothly. On the other hand, they need to make sure that each milestone of the special project is met on time and on budget. What’s an IT manager to do?

How To Keep It All In Balance

A big question that faces every IT manager is how best to keep themselves and their IT team on track given all of the work that they have to get done. One solution, of course, is to maintain a list of the various ongoing projects. This list can be used to make sure that you check on each project’s status every day.

A better solution is to realize who’s actually doing all of the work: your team. This means that you need to carve the time out of your schedule to socialize with them and let them know that you appreciate them keeping the ship running while at the same time working on the special projects.

Having meetings to allow different members of your team to update everyone on where their part of the program is at is a great idea. However, this part of the solution can be overdone. Make sure that you hold the right number of meetings – not too many and not too few. Remember that time spent in meeting is time that could be used making progress on the various projects!

What All Of This Means For You

In our hurry-up world, more and more IT managers are discovering that they have too much to do and not enough time in which to do it. What this means is that if they aren’t careful, things are going to start to get dropped.

In order to prevent this from happening, IT managers need to first detect that they have become overloaded. Once they know this, they need to take action. One thing that they can do is to take the time to let their IT dream team know that they appreciate all that they are doing for them. This will allow everyone to know that you understand that they are trying to do both their normal jobs as well as all of the IT special projects that seem to pop up.

It seems sort of counter-intuitive that the best way for a IT manager to manage too many responsibilities for himself and his team is to slow down and take time to connect with his team. However, it turns out that by doing this you can keep everyone working together and help everyone complete the things that need to be done.

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

Question For You: What’s the best way to detect when you and your IT team have become overloaded?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

In tough times, every IT manager has seen their share of IT workers leave the company. Sometimes they leave because they find a job that they think will be a better fit for them or sometimes the company tells them to leave. No matter what the cause, the one thing that you don’t want them to do is leave unhappy. I’ve got some bad news for you – that’s exactly what is happening.

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4 Ways That IT Managers Can Learn To Make Better Decisions

Thursday, September 15th, 2011
Image Credit IT Managers Need A Tool To Help Them Make Better Decisions

IT Managers Need A Tool To Help Them Make Better Decisions

An important part of the job of being an IT manager is the ability to make good decisions. Lots of good decisions. In fact, the ability to make more good decisions than bad decisions is arguably what allows an IT manager to keep his / her job. Now the only problem is that it’s really, really hard to make good decisions all the time. To help you do a better job of this, I’m going to share with you four decision making tools that will help you every time you have to make a decision.

A New Way Of Making Decisions

IT managers need a new way to make correct decisions. Our ultimate goal should be to find ways to make the right decision more often than not. One way to do this is to adopt the “evidence based decision making” approach. This form of decision making rejects using gut feels and relying on past limited personal experience and instead is based on evidence and logic.

The problem that most IT managers run into when they try to apply evidence based decision making to their organizations is that it runs counter to the way that things are currently done. Every company has its share of stories about gutsy managers who just knew what the right thing to do was, and did it. What we forget are the stories about the managers who thought that they knew what to do and ended up doing the wrong thing.

Ask For Evidence

IT managers are always being presented with requests for something. More often than not it is for assistance with a project, but it can also be for resources or even simply for permission to proceed. You need to take a careful look at each of these requests.

When an IT manager is using the evidence-based approach to making decisions, he or she needs to ask the people who are making the request for evidence. They are proposing doing something, they need to be able to prove to you that by taking the action that they want to take, good things will happen. If they can’t prove it, then you need to reject their request.

Look At Logic

When plans are presented to an IT manager, they are often backed up with the results of surveys, charts and graphs of data, and lots of other impressive looking results. When presented with this type of information, IT managers need to be on the alert.

All too often in our very busy lives we tend to accept what is presented to us at face value. What we really need to be doing is taking a step back and looking more closely at the underlying data.

The question that you need to be asking yourself is if the results that have been drawn from the data really make sense. Are there any gaps or leaps in logic that really just don’t hold up? You’ll be amazed at how often you’ll find things that don’t support the conclusions that have been reached. When this happens, you need to send the team making the request back to the drawing board.

Experiment & Reward

Not every project is going to succeed. In fact, in the world of IT some projects fail in a spectacular fashion. Things really don’t have to be this way. If IT managers could become better decision-makers then a lot of this could be avoided.

One way to avoid big IT project failures is to encourage small IT project failures. That’s not as bad as it may sound. IT managers need to create an environment in which employees are encouraged to start pilot projects and to try out new ideas using trials before the IT manager has to commit to a much larger project.

Many of these smaller projects will fail. This is a good thing – far better to have a small project fail and learn from it than have a much larger project fail and learn nothing. IT managers need to reward IT staff that work on projects that fail – everyone needs to see that there is much to be learned from each project no matter how it turns out.

Find Wisdom

Perhaps the simplest way for IT managers to make better decisions more of the time is for them to have one simple realization. If an IT manager can understand that they don’t know it all, that there is still a lot that they need to learn, then they’ll be able to make better decisions.

Far too often IT managers assume that they know everything that they need to know in order to make the right decision. However, the reality is much different – there is no way that they know what they don’t know. Admitting that you don’t know it all is the first step in being open to collecting more information and becoming an IT manager who makes better decisions.

What All Of This Means For You

All too often IT managers lose their job because they made bad decisions. It turns out that a big part of being the IT manager is the ability to make a lot of good decisions. What is needed are tools that will help a IT manager to do a better job of making the correct decision.

Four such tools exist and can be used by IT managers. The first is to demand evidence when a proposal is made. The next is to test the logic behind any proposal that is made. To ensure that the IT department can support the IT manager in making good decisions, the IT manager needs to allow trial programs to be run. These trials need to be allowed to fail and IT employees have to be rewarded for uncovering information before a bigger investment was made. Finally, IT managers need to teach their staff that they don’t know everything and everyone must respect the fact that there is much more for them to learn.

Although IT managers deal with technology, much of their day-to-day job has to do with teaching. In order to make better decisions, they need to take the time to teach their IT team how to look at opportunities and how to use the information that is available to make the best decisions each and every time.

Question For You: How do you think that an IT manager should react to an IT trial program that failed?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

When I work with IT Leaders who are looking for ways to get that next promotion, I tell them that they are going to need to demonstrate leadership. This is an easy thing for me to say and a very hard thing for them to do. Complicating matters even more is the fact that IT managers are finding themselves drafted onto team that they are just members of, not leaders of. What’s an IT manager to do?

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Group Decisions Can Be The Wrong Decision For IT Leaders

Thursday, May 28th, 2009
IT leaders Need To Know How Groups Make Decisions

IT leaders Need To Know How Groups Make Decisions

Decisions, decisions, decisions – how is an IT Leader supposed to make good ones? In our eternal quest to find a way to make good IT decisions on technologies, staff, and projects, is there a silver bullet that we can find that will show us the way?

One approach that is used by (too) many IT Leaders is to follow the crowd. I can see you shaking your head, but  come on, admit it, we all like to go where everyone else is going. If you don’t believe me than look around you – what development techniques are you using (agile?), what data center changes are going on (virtualization?), what initiatives are you working on (social networking?). Maybe Jason Zweig over at the Wall Street Journal can provide some insight on group decision making.

How Do Groups Make Decisions?

Group decision making is how a lot of IT decision making gets done. Robert Sutton, an organizational psychologist,  over at Stanford University has spent time studying how groups make decisions. I like what he has to say – “The best groups will be better than their best individual members and the worst groups will be worse than the worst individual.”

Sutton says that the reason that groups to behave this way is because of two things. The first is that they may have a tenancy to follow a given leader in sort of a rush to conform. The other possibility is that the group will split into warring factions and won’t be able to reach any decisions.

How Can Groups Make GOOD Decisions?

Richard Larrick over at Duke University believes that in order for any IT group to be able to make good decisions, the IT Leader needs to have built the group correctly. Groups need to be built using people who have different perspectives, experiences, and who are not shy about speaking up. Of course group members also need to have those IT skills that we all value so highly: the ability to take in lots of information, filter out the important parts, and learn from any mistakes that they make.

Tips For Making Better Group Decisions

So how can an IT Leader help a group to make a good decision instead of getting tied up in knots? There’s no magic cure, but here are some suggestions on what can be done to improve your odds of getting good decisions out of your groups:

  • Measure Success: Use the collective knowledge of the group to clearly define how a decision’s success should be measured. Starting at the end helps to make better decisions.
  • Use Numbers Carefully: Groups like to use facts and statistics when making decisions. However, you need to use this kind of data to rank your options. Then the group needs to do additional research and find out what’s really going on. Then create another list of ranked solutions. Average them out and you’ll have a balanced decision.
  • Reframing: When a group is charged with trying to answer a big question (“should we close our data centers”), use the power of multiple people to take both sides of the argument (“close” vs. “don’t close”) and have them build cases for their position. This will provid you with your best chance of seeing all sides of the question.

Final Thoughts On Group Decisions

Most IT Leaders would like to be thought of as bold decision makers who are never wrong. The reality is that sometimes a group really is needed in order to fully understand difficult questions. Building the group correctly and making sure that they know how to reach good decisions is part of what it takes to be a good IT Leader.

Questions For You

Have you ever had to build a group to study a problem? Did you do a good job of selecting the right people? Have you ever been on a group that was trying to solve a problem? Did you look at all sides of the problem or did you rush to make a decision? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

What We’ll Talk About Next Time

Did you even know that something called an “Non-compete Clause” existed? It turns out that you may have signed one when you started your current job (it differs from company to company). This piece of paper basically spells out the legal agreement between you and the company – they want you to stay and they want to scare you into not leaving…

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