Posts Tagged ‘goals’

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IT Managers Know That Their Goals Are The Secret To Time Management

Thursday, January 6th, 2011
Image Credit You've Got To Let Your Goals Show You The Way To Spend Your Time

You've Got To Let Your Goals Show You The Way To Spend Your Time

Doing a good job of managing your time is a challenge for every IT manager. Every day it seems like there are more and more things that you are being asked to do while the amount of time that you have to accomplish them keeps getting smaller and smaller. If only there was some way to organize what you had to work on so that you knew that you were making progress every day…

The Secret To Time Management Success: Goals

Look, the simple fact of time management is that we all start in the same place: too much to do and too little time in which to get it all done. To top things off, everything looks the same – we don’t know where to start.

This is where the power of your goals comes in. Assuming that you’ve taken the time to create good goals, ones that actually mean something to you and which are valid things for you to be striving towards, then you’ve got the guiding light that you’re going to need in order to get your limited time under control.

Your goals will help you guide your time by allowing you to identify just exactly what specific tasks you should be working on in order to achieve your goals. The side benefit of doing this is that your goals will also show you what you should NOT be working on because it’s not going to help you to achieve what’s really important – your goals.

Three Ways To Use Your Goals To Mange Your Time

In order to do a good job of using your goals to solve your time management challenges, you need to know how to get from having goals to having a time management solution. There are three basic steps that you are going to have to follow here:

  1. Break ‘Em Up: Your goals are probably high level statements like “replace such & such system” or “solve such & such problem”. These are fine for goals, but not so good as time management tools. You need to sit down and spend some time breaking up your goals into a smaller set of manageable tasks. In order to make sure that you’ve captured everything that you need to do, keep this list of tasks in sequential order.

  2. Make Time Guesses: Before you can come up with a plan for how you are going to get your work done, you first need to know how much time it’s all going to take. Take a look at each of the individual tasks that you broke each goal up into and estimate how long it’s going to take you to complete that task. In my world, after I’ve come up with my best guess I often double it in order to cover unexpected things that can delay me in getting it done. If you’ve never done something before, then ask others who have how long it took them to do it.

  3. Create Priorities: All goals are not created equally. Some are more important than others. In order to make sure that you spend your valuable time working on the right things, you’re going to need to prioritize your tasks. Some tasks may have to be started earlier than others because they will take longer to accomplish or because they require resources that are not currently available. It’s generally best if you group your tasks into one of three priorities: high, medium, low or whatever. This will show you what you should be working on now and what comes next.

What All Of This Means For You

As our lives as IT managers keep getting busier and busier, trying to do a good job of effectively managing our time can easily become a real challenge. It turns out that by using our goals as a way to get our bearings, IT managers can quickly establish a good time management system.

Just knowing what your goals are is not enough. You need to use three simple rules in order to use your goals to manage your time: break them down into smaller tasks, estimate the time each will require, and prioritize.

Although this may seem like a simple solution to a complex problem, you’ll be amazed at how quickly it works. In no time you’ll be on top of what you have to do and you’ll be getting the right things done. Perhaps you should start planning on what you’ll do with your free time…

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

Question For You: How many goals do you think an IT manager should have?

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

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

With a little luck, every IT manager realizes that they are only as good as the people that they have working for them. What this means is that they need to be a good boss if they want to be successful. This leads to a critical question: how good of a boss are you? It turns out that most of us seem to think that we’re a better boss than we probably really are…

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Top-Down Or Bottom-Up: What’s The Best Way To Set Goals?

Thursday, October 21st, 2010
Image CreditGoals Are Important – Which Way You Set Them Is Important Also

Goals Are Important – Which Way You Set Them Is Important Also

Everyone needs goals. As an IT Leader, it’s going to be your responsibility to help your team set both team and individual goals. Although at first this sounds pretty straightforward, in practice it often turns out to be a bit tricky. The most important question that you’re going to have to answer is which way do you want to go about setting goals: top-down or bottom-up?

The Top-Down Approach

Say hello to “Big Brother” – he’s going to be setting the goals for you and your team. The top-down approach to goal setting is where your company’s senior management identifies the goals that they want you and your team to be working towards. They then have you assign these goals to the members of your team.

When goals are set this way, the company generally has identified a broad set of goals that it would like to accomplish in the near future. Your assignment is to then take these broad goals and create objectives for your team members that are aligned with what the company is trying to accomplish.

Although it may seem a bit authoritative at first glance, this approach is actually well-suited to certain situations. Specifically there are three types of IT workers who need to have top-down goals assigned to them: those who need close supervision in order to do their job, new team members, and any team members who don’t know or understand what the company’s goals are.

The Bottom-Up Approach

As a manager, you’d think that the bottom-up approach for creating team member goals would be easier than the top-down approach, but it turns out that it isn’t. In the bottom-up approach, the members of your team create their own goals.

Once this is done, it then becomes your responsibility to combine these various goals into a unified set of goals for the team. As you can well imagine, this can be quite a challenge for any manager.

There are certain types of team members for whom the bottom-up method of goal creation is well suited. Specifically, those team members who determine their own work, who understand the company’s goals and strategy for achieving those goals, and who understand the role that they play in the company.

It’s All About Buy-In

No matter which of these two methods is used to set the goals for your team, it’s going to be important that everyone on the team buy-in to both their personal and the team’s goals. As an IT Leader, it’s your job to make sure that this happens.

The best way to get buy-in from your team no matter which way you choose to go about setting goals is to get everyone involved in their goals. Involvement creates a sense of ownership and as an IT Leader, that’s what you want out of your team.

If you’ve used the top-down method to assign goals to team members, it can be a bit challenging to get buy-in. However, taking the time to talk with team members about their goals, why they are important, and how they relate to the company’s success can foster a sense of ownership.

What All Of This Means For You

Goals are a critical tool that IT Leader need in order to point the way for their teams. How best to create those goals has been an ongoing discussion since time began.

The two most common methods used today are top-down and bottom-up. In the top-down method IT Leaders assign goals related to the company’s objectives to team members. In the top-up approach, team members create their own goals and the IT Leader uses these to create a set of team goals.

In the real world, often a combination of top-down and bottom-up methods are used to create goals for IT teams. As an IT Leader, it’s your job to make sure that not only do the goals get created, but that each goal also has an owner who will be responsible for ensuring that it gets accomplished. Good luck!

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

Question For You: Which way of setting goals do you prefer: top-down or bottom-up?

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

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Ok, enough of this cloud stuff already! The field of IT is just like every other field out there and we have our own share of trendy topics – cloud computing sure seems to the one that we’re dealing with right now. With all of the magazine articles on clouds and conferences going on, you’d think that every IT Leader and CEO has a good understanding of just exactly what a cloud is. Well, you’d be wrong…

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He Shoots! He Scores! Why Goals Are Important To IT Leaders

Thursday, October 14th, 2010
Image Credit IT Managers need goals in order to win at the game of IT

IT Managers need goals in order to win at the game of IT

Being an IT Leader is a hard job. On any given day, you’ll have multiple people pulling on you trying to get you to do 100 different things. The question that you have to keep asking yourself is “what should my team be working on right now?”

This is exactly where new IT managers can get lost. They try to spend their limited time working on everything and they end up getting nothing done. The key to you being successful as an IT Leader is to do a good job of setting goals for your team. It may sound easy, but it turns out that it’s a bit tricky to do correctly…

Goals: Why Bother?

One of the first questions that needs to be answered is simply “Why?” Identifying and establishing goals is an effort and takes time. As an IT Leader, you are busy and this may not appear to be a critical task – perhaps you could skip it.

Yes you could, but don’t. The process of setting goals is how you commit to outcomes that either you or your team are able to accomplish. The reason that goals are so important is because they provide you with a clear focus – now you know what you need to be spending your precious limited time and resources on.

It’s this very focus that will allow you to stay the course. You will be less likely to be distracted by all of the other tasks that are clambering for your attention. You and your team know what you need to be working on and because you can focus on these tasks you’ll end up achieving your goals and being more successful.

Company Goals Should Drive Team and Individual Goals

Company Goals Should Drive Team and Individual Goals

Where To Start?

If I can get you to agree that goals for an IT Leader are important, then we’re on the right path. The next big question that comes up now is just how one goes about determining what your goals should be?

It turns out that the basic source for your team’s goals is already well known to you: it’s the company that you work for. Every company has a set of enterprise goals that get announced to investors and distributed throughout the company.

The goals that your team creates need to relate back to the company’s strategic goals. You can’t just parrot the company’s goals as your team’s goals. The reason is because your team can’t make the company’s goals happen. Rather, you need to scale down each of the company’s goals and identify how your team can contribute to the company’s goal.

It’s All About Understanding

If you just “set and forget” your goals, then you and your team will be missing out on the real power of having clearly defined goals. Once again, knowing what your goals are will help everyone on your team to prioritize all of the tasks that they are asked to perform. If it relates to a goal, then great – they should be working on it. If it doesn’t, then they probably should defer working on it for now.

Additionally, helping the members of your team relate their personal goals back to the company’s overall goals is a great way to keep your team together. If they can see how the work that they are doing on a daily basis is helping the company to achieve what it’s trying to do, then they will feel as though they are truly contributing to something that is larger than they are. Isn’t this what we all want?

What All Of This Means For You

As an IT Leader, you’ve got a tough job to do. You’ve got to establish a direction for your team and make sure that everyone doesn’t get distracted while they are working towards it.

The good news is that you have a powerful tool that can help you to be successful: goals. By starting with the company’s stated goals and using them to create related but customized goals for your team, you’ll have given everyone the ability to determine what they should and should not be working on.

All too often goals are seen as a necessary evil in IT departments. They get set at the beginning of the year and then they get ignored until the end of the year review. Stop doing this and start using good goals to motivate and manage your team. Success will be much easier to achieve once you’ve got goals on your side.

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

Question For You: How many goals do you think are needed for an IT team?

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

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Everyone needs goals. As an IT Leader, it’s going to be your responsibility to help your team set both team and individual goals. Although at first this sounds pretty straightforward, in practice it often turns out to be a bit tricky. The most important question that you’re going to have to answer is which way do you want to go about setting goals: top-down or bottom-up?

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Posted in goals | 1 Comment »

IT Leaders Need To Know What Their Company’s Goals Are

Thursday, February 25th, 2010
Image Credit
You Can’t Score If You Don’t Know What The Goals Are

You Can’t Score If You Don’t Know What The Goals Are

As an IT leader you’ve got a lot to do. As though it wasn’t enough to stay on top of your staff keeping them happy, engaged, and productive, you are also constantly working to stay on top of all of that changing technology (can anyone say “new release”?) It turns out that you have an additional task that you might not be taking the time to do: figuring out where your company is trying to get to.

Why Knowing The Goals Is Important

How many of those “corporate” emails have arrived in your inbox this week so far? You know the ones that I’m talking about: they talk about the quarterly profits, some clever words that your CEO / COO / CFO / CIO said that got quoted in some trade journal, etc. Did you take the time to read it? Probably not – your too busy doing real IT work.

It turns out that you should take the time to read these emails. The reason is because this is how the company is telling you where they are trying to go as a company. Sure you might be working shoveling coal down in the IT boiler room of the company, but you have a vested interest in where the ship is sailing to because at the very least if it hits a rock, you’ll be affected too.

The leaders of your company work for the people who own the company. This means that the company has to make money or else the leaders will be replaced. How they plan on going about making that money is what you really care about. In order to hold on to their jobs, your management needs to be successful at almost any cost. This means that their goals need to be your goals.

How To Find Out What Your Company’s Goals Are

If we can all agree that knowing what your company is trying to do is important, then we can move on to trying to answer the really big question: just how can an IT Leader go about getting your hands on this type of information? It turns out that it is both easy and hard to do.

The easy part of this is to do some reading. Depending on whether your company is a public company or is privately held, there will be either more or less written information available to you. Things like quarterly reports and annual reports, although dry at times, do make for great reading if you are an IT Leader who wants to know where your company is headed.

Now about those emails that you’ve been getting. Sure, any one of the corporate emails that we all get probably isn’t all that important by itself. However, when you take them all together they can tell you a very interesting story.

Your senior management can’t actually accomplish any of the goals that they set for the company by themselves. They need your help. I tend to look upon those corporate emails as a desperate plea for assistance by management. The tricky part is that they generally can’t come out and say that their jobs depend on you helping them accomplish the company’s goals, instead they have to use clever wording that hides their pleas.

What To Do With This Knowledge

Once you’ve done your reading, listened to any speeches that your senior management has given, and generally come to an understanding of just what the company is trying to accomplish and where they are trying to get to, the big question is what now?

In order to move your career forward, you need to actually use the information that you’ve uncovered. The trick here is that you need to use it in a visible way. As you work on IT projects and participate in IT meetings, you’d like to become known as the person who is always asking the question “how does this help us to reach our company goals?” Sure, it might get to be a bit redundant over time, but the word will get out that you actually know what the company is trying to do and this can be a great career booster.

Just keeping everyone else on track is not enough, you’ve got to do more. Specifically those high-level company goals won’t exactly translate into specific IT project actions. This means that you need to step up and help to interpret the goals into specific IT actions that people on your team need to take. Depending on the goal, the actions may relate to reducing or avoiding costs, improving efficiency, etc.

What All Of This Means For You

We all feel that we are drowning in too much information already; however, it turns out that we still have one additional job that we need to be doing. The company that we work for has goals and it turns out that IT Leaders can play a big role in seeing that these goals happen.

In order to help the company, IT Leaders need to first make sure that they understand just exactly what the company’s goals are. Next they need to make sure that they let everyone else know that the goals are important. Finally, within an IT Leader’s team, real actions need to be taken in order to translate high-level company goals into specific IT tasks.

If we can view company goals as not being a bothersome distraction, and instead start to view them as a request for assistance that only we can provide, then change can happen. Your career is tied to how successful your company is and helping the company to achieve its goals is one way to be successful.

Question for you: where would you go to learn what your company’s real goals for this year are?

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

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

What do you think the mood of your IT team is right now? Poor? Downright bad? If your workplace is like most businesses out there right now, your team is still reeling from all of the layoffs, hiring freezes, pay cuts, etc. If nothing else, there has been a lingering sense of dread that has been in the air for the better part of two years. What do you need to be doing?

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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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