Archive for the ‘IT manager’ Category

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IT Manager Training Workshop Now Available For You!

Monday, January 17th, 2011
An IT Manager Training Workshop Is Not Available

An IT Manager Training Workshop Is Not Available

Blue Elephant Consulting is pleased to announce a new training partnership with OakTree Software. The two firms have teamed up to offer a two-day workshop for IT managers. For the first time, management training that was previously only available to Fortune 100 companies will now be made available to any manager or supervisor who needs it.

OakTree Software is a full-service Information Technology Company providing staffing, training, consulting, and network services to clients around the United States since 1995. OakTree is headquartered in Tulsa, Oklahoma, USA.

For the first time, an IT manager workshop called “Secrets Of Becoming An IT Leader Who Can Deliver Real Results” will be offered to the general public. Dr. Jim Anderson will be the instructor and the course will be presented at OakTree’s training facilities in Tulsa on Tuesday and Wednesday, March 1-2, 2011.

To register for this course, click here!

Here’s a description of the course:

Are you a new IT supervisor? Maybe you are a seasoned IT leader. While anyone can be a manager, it takes special skills to become a true IT Leader. Making the transition from an individual technical contributor to managing a team of technical professionals is never easy, and in today’s mixed up global economy it’s become even harder.

OakTree Software has teamed with the industry’s premier IT management skills consultant Dr. Jim Anderson, ”The Business Side of IT Expert,” to present a leadership workshop that has been tailored to meet the unique needs of IT managers and supervisors. Unlike any other management workshop, this is the one that will provide you with the real-world skills that you’re going to need to be successful in 2011 and beyond.

Building on the technical skills that you already have, this two-day workshop will provide you with both the foundational skills and the advanced techniques that you are going to need in order to be successful in an ever-changing world. Forget dry classroom lectures and get ready for the core knowledge, real world examples, and hands on role playing that will bring the skills that you need alive and make it easy to remember everything that is covered.

In order to ensure that you’ll get the opportunity to closely interact with Dr. Anderson and get all of your questions answered, we’re deliberately limiting the number of students that we’ll accept into this class. You can sign up for either one day (Fundamentals Skills) or at a discounted price two days (fundamental skills and Maximum Management Skills).

To register for this course, click here!

Day 1 — Fundamental Skills That Every Technical Manager Needs

    1. Setting Goals That Your Team Will Be Motivated To Achieve
    2. How To Hire The Best Employees (And How To Avoid Making Mistakes)
    3. Keeping The Team That You Have By Making The Grass Greener Here
    4. You Can’t Do It All — Delegate With Confidence
    5. 120 Hours Is Never Enough: How To Manage Your Time In Order To Be Successful
    6. It Takes A Team To Make You Successful
    7. How A Manager Becomes A Coach
    8. Problem Employees: What To Do With Your Bad Apples

Day 2 — Maximum Management: Skills That Produce Superior Managers and Teams

    1. Will You Be Ready When A Crises Hits?
    2. Move Your Career Forward By Moving Your Team Member’s Careers Forward
    3. The Difference Between Management & Leadership
    4. What You Need To Know About Setting & Executing A Strategy
    5. Budgeting: Follow The Numbers
    6. What Your Company’s Financial Statements Are Trying To Tell You
    7. Accounting 101: Using Net Present Value And Internal Rate Of Return To Make Decisions
    8. Follow The Money: How to Use The Breakeven Analysis And Operating Leverage Planning Tools

This is a great investment to make sure 2011 is your best year ever!

Course Prices: Discounted price for Day 1 & Day 2 – $1,450, Day 1 only – $800

To register for this course, click here!

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Why “I Don’t Care How You Feel” Is Bad IT Management

Thursday, December 10th, 2009

Life is hard for IT Leaders and it’s not going to be getting any easier anytime soon. With everything that you need to be doing, it sure seems like having to put up with team members who have personal issues that take away from their ability to do their jobs can only hurt performance. For that matter, those “touchy-feely” workplaces that places like Google and Apple have sure seem to be missing the mark — work is for work or have these companies forgotten that?

The Good Old Days Where People Shut Up And Worked

Those of us who come from a technical background know how the world should be run. There should be a set of rules and everybody should know what the rules are and everybody should work according to the rules. If a business was run this way, an IT Leader’s job would be so much easier — you would only have to deal with the deviations from the rules.

However, we’ve tried doing this — it was called the 1950′s through the 1980′s. Remember the classic “IBM Man”? It turns out that the rigid workplace did work and you could get a great deal of productivity out of people; however, then the world changed.

What happened is that everything started moving much faster. Global competition showed up with a vengeance. Then the Internet arrived and things started moving even faster. All of those rigidly structured companies with their rigidly structured IT departments hit a brick wall. IBM felt it especially hard and there for awhile in the early 1990′s was teetering on the edge of failure.

What Works In Today’s IT Departments

If you miss the old days, you’re not going to like this part. After a lot of trial and error, we now know what it takes to make a modern company successful. The first step is to take the time to realize that the people working for the company are not “assets“, they really are people. These people have a life and potentially a family outside of work and the boundaries between the two have never been fixed.

This means that as an IT Leader you need to take the time to get to know the people who are working on your team. If you are able to really engage with them, to make a connection, then the boost to the productivity of your team can be almost magical.

The operative word here is “flexibility“. If you place people in a rigid IT environment, then they will at best do exactly what you tell them to do when you tell them to do it. If instead you are flexible and focus more on what you want them to do and no so much on how you want them to do it, then this causes your team members to become much more satisfied with their jobs and they will end up doing much more. This job satisfaction shows up as your team members treat customers and other employees better which then results in more loyal customers and more productive business interactions with other departments.

What All Of This Means For You

Creating a rigid IT team that has lots of rules to follow is a great way to keep things under control. New IT Leaders often gravitate to this type of solution because it’s familiar territory — almost like programming an IT system. However, this has been shown to be the wrong way to go about doing things.

The right way to have the most productive IT team is for you as an IT Leader to take the time to connect on a personal level with your team members. This means getting to know them and sharing your personal side with them also.

Creating an IT workplace in which the focus is on getting the work done and being flexible in just how it gets done is critical. This is the type of environment that will bring out the best in your team. The results that your team will produce from this type of situation will be the rocket fuel that powers your career to the next level.

Do you think that IT managers need to worry about getting to know all of their team members on a personal level?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

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…

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Are You Cut Out To Be An IT Leader?

Thursday, September 17th, 2009

There Are 5 Skills That You Need To Be A Product Manager

There Are 5 Skills That You Need To Be An IT Leader

Jeff Vance over at Sandstorm Media talked with me to get some inputs for an article that he was writing for the Project Manager Planet site. Yeah, yeah – I know that we’re IT Leaders not Project Managers. However, Jeff did a very good job of capturing a lot of what makes our job so hard to do.

Check out his article which is called 5 Signs You’re Not Cut Out to be a Project Manager. Give it a read and every time you see “Project Manager” just mentally replace it with “IT Leader” and it’ll work out for you.

Jeff has included the classic story of Charles Pellerin, NASA’s director of Astrophysics for the Hubble space telescope program which should serve as a good reminder for all IT Leaders that you should never give up trying to make something better…

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

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

So what do IT Leaders actually do? Generally I’d agree with you if you answered something like “create IT solutions“; however, I’ve been giving this some thought and I think that we’re missing the mark if that’s our answer…

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IT Leaders Know That It’s Not All About Them

Thursday, April 9th, 2009
IT Leaders Need To Learn To Not Be Micromangers

IT Leaders Need To Learn To Not Be Micromanagers

Please put your hand up in the air if you are a micromanager. Is your hand up – if it is then good, you have a pretty accurate picture of yourself. If it isn’t , then I bet if we talked with the people that you work with, we might get a different answer. By our very nature, IT Leaders tend to be the worst kind of micro-managers.

Where does our micromanaging come from? Of course we love to know how everything operates and so we are always seeking to gather more information. This is part of it, but it’s not the real root of the problem. That has to do with trust.

When you get right down to it, micromanagers simply don’t trust the people who work for them. It’s sorta a “give it to me, I’ll just go ahead and do it myself because it’s too much of an effort to make sure you do it right” sort of an approach.

It turns out that micromanaging any workers is a bad idea, but micromanaging IT workers is the worst. IT workers very quickly start to understand what is going on and they will quickly become complacent – doing only what you tell them to do and no more. This is a recipe for disaster.

So what should an IT Leader be doing? Simple, you need to be doing the following three things over and over again:

  • Help your staff to learn to work by themselves. You can do this by giving them meaningful responsibilities.
  • You need to facilitate the work of your staff even if you are not creating the final product.
  • Finally, you should give your employees clear goals and then step back and let them work out the details.

It was the great general, General George Patton Jr, who probably said it the best: “Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do and they will surprise you with their ingenuity.”
Do you think that you are a micro-manager? Have you ever worked for a micromanager? How did that make you feel? Did I leave anything off of my list of how best to manger IT staff? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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Your Next IT Manager Challenge: Girl Fight!

Friday, January 30th, 2009

On Top Of Everything Else, IT Managers Need To Put A Stop To Girl Fighting At Work

On Top Of Everything Else, IT Managers Need To Put A Stop To Girl Fighting At Work

By this time in the 21st Century, I’m hoping that we’ve all got the diversity message: gender, race, age, sexual orientation (you too California) don’t matter when hiring people for jobs or when managing them. However, it turns out that there’s been a pink elephant lurking in the room that many of us (males) may have not noticed: girl fights!

I’m not talking about “I’ll see you out in the parking lot after work” types of fights. Rather, it turns out that there is a sneaky thing going on in the workplace. Women are actively treating each other badly. Hmm, where did this come from?

Peggy Klaus wrote a telling article in the New York Times a while back in which she pointed out the issue that has been there all along. Peggy is a leadership coach who has truly been there, done that. This has allowed her to spill the dirt on this dirty little secret…

So what are women doing to each other at work? This can be a long list. How about: limiting access to important committees and meetings, holding back on critical information, giving assignments and promotions to others, even blocking access to people who could be mentors or senior management.

Most of these bullying actions can be placed into one of four buckets of bad behaviors: verbal abuse, job sabotage, misuse of authority, or relationship destroying. Who knew that so much bad stuff was going on at work?

The folks over at the Workplace Bullying Institute have done  a study that showed that women bullies target their abuse towards women an amazing 70% of the time. On the other hand, men who are bullies seem to split their bullying equally between the sexes. This leads to the big question: why bully in the first place?

It turns out that there are a lot of theories for why women treat women badly in the workplace (no – this is not a Jerry Springer moment):

  1. Scarcity Breeds Bullies: since promotion spots are so few these days, women at upper levels are unwilling to help women at lower levels advance for fear that promotion spots will go to those that they help.
  2. Go Bootstrap Yourself: This is a familiar one – I had to get to where I am with no help from anyone, so you should have to do the same.
  3. Avoiding Favoritism: in today’s hype-PC work environments, women don’t want to create an appearance that they are favoring females over males.
  4. Hyper-emotionality: Everyone agrees that women are generally more sensitive to emotions than men are. Some also believe that women more easily take offense and can quickly start to hold a grudge. This means that they can start to overreact when they feel slighted by someone.

So what’s an IT Leader to do with all of this girl-fight knowledge? No matter if the IT Leader is male or female, the steps that need to be taken are the same. The first step is create a true “open door” policy so that when girl fighting goes on behind your back, the victims will feel free to come to you and report what is going on.

The second is that you need to call the bully on their actions. Depending on the IT Leader’s gender (like if you are a guy), you need to be careful here. However, mistreating any employee is unacceptable and the bully needs to be told that this will not be accepted.

The nice thing about bullies is that generally when they get caught, they back down and shape up quickly. Yet one more 21st Century task for an IT Leader to master!

Have you ever witnessed any girl fighting going on in your department? Was it a senior female employee bullying a more junior employee? Did anyone tell the bully to stop? What was the final result of the bully’s actions? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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