Archive for the ‘management’ Category

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IT Leader Start-Up Issues: What Have You Gotten Yourself Into?

Thursday, March 11th, 2010
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IT Leaders In New Positions Need To Take The Time To Do An Assessment

IT Leaders In New Positions Need To Take The Time To Do An Assessment

Every IT Shop Is Different

In the life of an IT Leader, there will come the day that you find yourself in a new position. You might be working for the same company and just be in a different role or you might be starting a new job – no matter, the challenge is the same. Where do you start? It turns out that doing nothing right off the bat might be the right idea…

Doing An Assessment Of Your Team

When you find yourself in a new IT Leader position, you might be tempted to do what many of us have done in the past – make some noise. We’ve all see others do this before: almost immediately upon assuming a new position, they do a reorganization or some such action just to show that they are going to “shake things up”. That’s all fine and good, but it really doesn’t accomplish anything.

Instead, your time would be better spent doing an assessment of the IT team that you’ve just inherited. To use the popular terminology of the day, this needs to be a 360-degree assessment of both those people who will be on your team as well as the people that you will now be working for.

What you’re going to be looking for is to develop a good understanding of how things are right now. You might be overflowing with things that you want to accomplish (or you might have been told what you will have to accomplish), but now is not the time to be making changes before you know what is going on.

You’re not going to find what you need written down anywhere, instead you’ve got a lot of talking to do. Your situational assessment needs to cover a lot of ground. Specifically you’re going to want to know about the following four areas:

  1. The IT ecosystem (hardware, network, communications, endpoints, etc.)
  2. Applications (business and support)
  3. Corporate organization and hierarchy
  4. Processes and procedures for common IT tasks

Results Of An IT Team Assessment

As you can probably guess by now, an IT assessment is not something that you can do overnight. It’s going to take some focused effort to uncover the information that you’re going to need.

What you should be looking to assemble out of all of this data collection are a set of key indicators that will tell you where you need to be spending your time. Each one of the areas that you’ve collected information on can probably by now be broken down into an additional level of detail: specific hardware systems (e.g. storage), specific applications, etc. Each of these IT components will have their own status.

This status in its simplest form can be thought of as being a traffic light: red, yellow, or green. The green status areas can safely be ignored for now – they are under control. Things get more interesting when you start to take a look at the yellow and red areas.

Clearly the red areas need immediate attention. However, it’s the yellow areas that will provide you with the greatest value for having done the whole assessment task. These are the areas that while they may be under control for now, have the potential to “go red” and quickly turn into a problem that could consume your hours, days, or even weeks.

What All Of This Means For You

When an IT leader is placed into a new position, his or her first actions can often set the stage for their long term success. Starting things off by taking actions just to look like you are doing something won’t help – it may do more harm than good.

Instead what you need to do is to take the time to do an assessment of your new IT environment. This will require you to look both up and down the company hierarchy. You’ll be trying to understand how all of the components of the IT department fit together (or don’t!)

A well done IT assessment will provide you with a clear roadmap on where you need to be spending your time. The areas that are either not doing well or just getting by are where you’ll need to be spending your time. Focus your time and talents here and you’ll be able to shine in your position.

Question For You: What do you think the most important thing that you can do is when you are just starting a new IT position?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

In order to be successful as an IT Leader (no matter where you are at in the company’s management hierarchy), you’re going to have to do what you are told. Well, wait a minute, maybe I should phrase that differently. How about something like this: you are going to have to find out what they want you to do and then you are going to have to do it?

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What Do IT Managers Really Do?

Thursday, September 24th, 2009
IT Leaders Are A Lot Like Music Conductors, But ...

IT Leaders Are A Lot Like Music Conductors, But ...

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.

If you think about it, what we really spend our time doing is managing people and hoping that they will help us to make our IT projects successful. That being said, did you ever get any training on how to mange people?

IT Leaders Don’t Make Beautiful Music

One of the more popular ways to think about the how IT Leaders do their job is to picture them as being orchestra conductors. You can almost imagine yourself standing in front of your team, tapping your conductor’s wand on the sheet music stand in front of you, and then with a flourish you begin.

First up is the requirements team, before they are done the system architects  step in followed by database developers and user interface developers softly at first and then louder as time moves on. Nice mental picture, eh?

Too bad life doesn’t really work out this way. Dr. Henry Mintzberg at McGill University says that in reality what you’d be hearing is what a pre-concert warm-up sounds like – everyone out of tune and playing over the top of each other. Now that’s what I am familiar with!

Dr. Mintzberg points out that each and every one of us is flawed - there is no such thing as a perfect IT Leader. However, the really good IT Leaders are less screwed-up and that is something that we can shoot for.

It’s All About The Interruptions

Think about how your yesterday went. Did you start the day with a plan and then were you able to accomplish that plan? I’m willing to bet that the answer is probably not. It’s a fact of life for the modern IT Leaders that every day is basically a stream of interruptions – one after another.

Don’t even get me started on what Blackberrys and email have done to compound the interruption problem. One top of this madness we need to find a way to mange the people that we work with – and it sure looks like we’re doing it the wrong way.

The Three Planes Of IT Leader Management

IT Leaders are never taught how to manage people to get results. This means that too many of us end up hiding behind emails and sticky notes when we are trying to get our virtual teams to accomplish tasks.

Dr. Mintzberg has identified three different “planes” of how we can mange people. We need to use all three, but we are currently not balancing how we use them.

  • The Direct Plane – this is where IT Leaders “get their hands dirty” and jump right in and manage actions directly. You know what this looks like – we mange projects, we write code. In all honesty this is the easiest way to do things because we don’t have to go through the effort of getting others to do work for us.
  • The Manage People Plane – this is the tricky one. If IT Leaders can find the time, then they can work with the people that they need to take action in order to make their IT project a success and motivate them, train them, build teams, etc. In other words, make it so that they can take action and be more effective. Easy to say, hard to do.
  • The Manage Information Plane – all too often this is where IT Leaders choose to hide out. Here we can mange information in order to drive people. We use budgets, objectives, we delegate tasks, set organizational structures, etc. All very powerful stuff, but note that we don’t necessarily have to deal with real people and all of the messy issues that that might entail.

Final Thoughts

Nobody ever taught you how to manage the people that you need to convince to do what you need them to do in order to make your IT project a success. You’ve probably discovered by now that you’ve got a lot of different ways to make things happen.

The worst kind of IT Leader manages only by using information. Sure this is a comfortable way of doing things and seems to be the simplest way to get things accomplished. However, it’s always better to spend the time working with the people that you need on your side. In the end you’ll be glad that you did and you will have found a way to transform yourself from an IT manager into a true leader.

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

I’ve got a quick question for you: what is the next step in your career? What do you want to get promoted to? In fact, as long as we are talking about that, what comes after THAT promotion? If you want to become a real IT Leader, then the career ladder generally goes: IT worker, manager, director, executive director, CIO. Got a plan on how you are going to get to that next step?

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6 Management Suggestions To Help IT Leaders In Tough Times

Thursday, May 21st, 2009
Tough Times Call For Solid IT Leadership Skills

Tough Times Call For Solid IT Leadership Skills

Can it get any worse than it already is? Does anyone see a light at the end of the tunnel yet? Times are tough all over, and being an IT Leader right now is just about the toughest job out there. It would be all too easy to tuck your head down, turn off the lights, and not talk to anyone until this is all over. However, you are an IT Leader and you can’t do that.

In these tough times you need to overcome your base instincts and do what good managers should do – lead. As a reminder of just what that really means in these tough times, here are six things that you should be doing right now:

  1. Treat your employees as responsible adults. Yes, sometimes in these dark days they don’t seem to act that way, but they are. This means that you can’t boss them around or soothe their fears with made up half truths.
  2. Reach out. This means that tough times call for you to reach out beyond your normal contact groups and have more fingers that go deeper into the company. This is the only way that you are going to be able to discover what is REALLY going on. This is the information that you’re going to need to be able to communicate to your team.
  3. Practice emotional intelligence. It’s true that your team will perform better even under all of this fear and doubt if they believe that you really do understand and respect them. This means providing opportunities for everyone’s opinions to be heard.
  4. Be Fair: Tough times won’t last  forever and you’re going to need your team to stick around when they no longer have to. This means that when you have to do distasteful tasks like layoffs, you need to be open and honest about why certain decisions were made. Everyone may not agree with you, but at least they’ll understand why you did what you did.
  5. Open The Door Wider. Allow your employees to being more of themselves to work. Time are tough and you are going to be asking more from your remaining staff, you need to make it easier for them to balance all parts of their life.
  6. Enjoy Your Job: It is critical that you find some part of your job that brings you joy and happiness. Even in these tough times, you need to let others know that this one thing makes you very happy. Your enthusiasm will be noticed and it’s catching – you’ll bring everyone’s mood up.

How many of these six management actions are you currently doing? Are they being successful? Do you disagree with anything that’s on my list? Did I leave anything off? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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IT Leader Book Review: “Lead Well And Prosper”

Thursday, April 16th, 2009
Nick McCormick Wrote The Management Book "Lead Well And Prosper"

Nick McCormick Wrote The Management Book "Lead Well And Prosper"

So how is an IT Leader supposed to keep on top of his / her game? There were very few college courses that we had to take during our undergraduate years that dealt with management (or even better, leadership). Even if you’ve gone on and gotten an MBA, precious little time is devoted to the day-to-day skills that one needs to be a good leader.

That’s where books like Nick McCormick’s Lead Well And Prosper come in to play. Nick reached out to me awhile ago and asked me to take a look at a copy of his book in order to get a bit of publicity for it. I agreed.

I’ve read a lot of management books in my time and I generally come away from them with mixed feelings. Books like Jack Welch’s “Jack: Straight from the Gut” always strike me as a good read, but don’t really provide me with any tools that I can use – Jack got lucky and did a good job.

There are a lot of other management books out there that read like a textbook because, in fact, they are. These always seem to be just a bit too removed from my reality to do much good.

Nick’s book, “Lead Well and Prosper”, attempts to strike a middle ground between these two extremes. By in large, he does a pretty good job. The one thing that struck me when I was reading this book was that Nick’s style of writing is very conversational. This means it feels like you are having a talk with the author when you read the book. This will work for some and won’t work for others who looking for books to be having a one-way dialog with them.

In the 15 chapters that make up the book, Nick starts each chapter off by presenting a fictitious scenario between two workers: Joe Kerr the manager (“Joker” – get it?), and Wanda B. Goode. After this scenario is presented in which Joe almost always makes a management mistake, Nick spends the rest of the chapter dissecting the situation and explaining what SHOULD have been done.

The scenarios are a little contrived, the analysis is a bit on the basic side, but I have to give to Nick – he hits most of bases in regards to what it takes to be a good manager.

So who should read this book? It’s a quick read at 75 pages and so it won’t take anyone too long to get through it. As I was reading it, I tried to think about who I would give it to. I came away with the impression that it would make an excellent gift for anyone who has been newly promoted. Yes, they probably already know many of the things that the book covers. However, when you are going into a new job is just the time to be reminded about what it takes to be a true leader.

Go out and pick up a copy of Nick McCormick’s book Lead Well and Prosper and when you are done reading it, pass it on to your next friend who finds themselves in a new position where they need to be reminded of what a leader really is.

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An IT Leader’s Guide To Managing “A-Type” Personalities

Wednesday, October 8th, 2008
Some Rivalry Is A Good Thing, Too Much Can Be Trouble...

Some Rivalry Is A Good Thing, Too Much Can Be Trouble...

So we’ve talked just a bit about the dangers of having players in your department / on your team who get so caught up in something that winning becomes everything to them. It’s almost as though you were attending an auction and it got down to the last two bidders on something and they both just went completely bonkers and started to try to out-bid each other – no longer caring what the real value of the thing that they were bidding on was. This can happen in IT and IT leaders need to spot the warning signs so that they know when to take action.

Rivalry: I’m pretty sure that we are all quite familiar with this driver of competitive arousal! What’s interesting is that it turns out that competitive arousal is quite common (oh, and dangerous) when the level of rivalry is intense. What this leads to quite naturally is the conclusion that head-to-head rivalry is the type of behavior that most interferes with rational decision making. In studies of auctions, researchers found that people would blow right by their preset limits when they were bidding against just a few bidders. The smaller the number of bidders, the greater the rivalry. In IT this drive can show it’s ugly head when we are in negotiations with vendors or with potential employee candidates.

Time Pressure: It’s almost like those scenes that you see in a movie: the sound of a ticking clock or the image of a digital timer counting down seems to cause people to become overwhelmed and can cause their desire to win to basically go crazy. This one is pretty easy for IT leaders to figure out. Time pressure impares decision making by increasing the IT employee’s psychological arousal. This then decreases their ability to find and apply any more relevant information that could help them solve the issue. The IT employee will then revert to their simple decision making processes and stick with it no matter if it is correct for the situation. We’ve all been in time crunches, it’s just that some of us let it impact our decision making ability more than others.

Spotlight: Everything changes when we think that all eyes are upon us. Once again research has shown that when there is an audience for what is going on, especially if the audience is fully engaged in the events, then this will increase the psychological arousal in an IT employee and thereby reduce their problem solving and creativity. In IT we can see this time after time when we work our way through negotiations, bidding wars, inter-departmental disputes, etc. If the issue is being worked quietly, then perhaps everyone will remain rational. However, once that big bright spotlight of publicity gets shone on the proceedings, then everything can change.

With all this being said, you might be getting the impression that competitive arousal is a bad thing. No so. However, too much of it can lead to bad decision making. Next time we’ll talk about how IT leaders can manage competitive arousal within their organization.

Have you ever witnessed a rivalry that got out of hand? What made you realize that you were no longer dealing with rational people? Was the rivalry ever resolved? How do you work under time pressures? Do you feel that the less time you have, the less creative you are? Leave a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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