Posts Tagged ‘it manager job description’

How Come You Don’t Know What Your IT Dream Job Is?

Thursday, November 19th, 2009
Image Credit What Does Your IT Dream Job Look Like?

What Does Your IT Dream Job Look Like?

Stop. I know that your normal day-to-day is crazy, you are overworked, underpaid and nobody really appreciates all of the fine things that you do. I get all that. My question for you is do you have any idea why you are doing what you are doing? What are you really working towards? If you don’t know, then perhaps now is the time to find out…

What Is Your IT Dream Job?

At the start of each year we all feel sorta guilty if we don’t come up with at least a few New Year’s resolutions. Generally these are quickly forgotten and we move on with the daily grind of life. However, if that’s all there is to life, then things pretty much suck. Wouldn’t you like to be one of those people who always seems to be happy and motivated – like they are working towards something?

Outside of getting a lobotomy or starting to take some happy pills on a regular basis, how can you become one of these “motivated” people? It’s actually rather simple, you need to have a goal. I’m not talking about one of those New Year’s resolutions in which you say that you want to lose 20 pounds or you want to start being nice to everyone. Nope, I’m talking longer term here.

I’m sure that you’ve all seen coworkers who put up pretty pictures of far-away beaches and fantastic locations all around their work cubes (maybe you do the same?) so that when things get bad (everyday), they can imagine that they are somewhere else. It turns out that they are on the right track.

To give yourself something to work for, you need to have a goal that you are working towards and the writer Marvin Walberg suggests that an IT dream job is as good of a goal as any.

Defining Your IT Dream Job

If you are going to be motivated to work towards a future IT dream job, then you are going to have to be able to visualize what that job looks like. Note that is different from how you are living your life right now!

Sure you could just sit back, shut your eyes for a bit and try to picture your dream job, but generally you just end up falling asleep when you do that. How about if we set some ground rules here to help you along?

First off, lets try to make this somewhat realistic. In your dream job you won’t be sitting on a golden throne getting foot massages while lower IT staffers feed you peeled grapes. Get over it. Instead of a visit to fantasy land, let’s try to keep things grounded in reality.

First, you need to come up with a job title – what would your dream IT job be called? This title does not have to currently exist – what would you like the job to be called?

Next, write down a job description. Yes you actually have to write it down or else there is no way that you are going to remember all of it. When you are describing the job you need to add as much detail to it as possible so that you’ll be able to create a vivid mental image of what you want.

Identify who you would be working for. Go ahead and identify who they would be working for. Not all IT dream jobs have you working as the CIO, lots of times we just want to have our own area to focus on and be left alone! Identify who would let you do that.

Who would you be working with? Who would be working for you? Give this some serious thought because often the other people in your work environment determine how much you like your job. It’s your IT dream job, so you get to pick who else is there.

Finally, describe a typical day at work in your IT dream job. When do you arrive at work (do you even go into work)? What is the first thing that you do? How many meetings do you go to? How long is your day? Once again include as many details as possible in order to make it play like a movie in your head.

What All Of This Means For You

We all picked the IT field to work in for a number of reasons. One of these was that it is a dynamic field – it’s always changing. Although at times this can be very frustrating, it also means that the future is not set in stone – we can still shape it.

In order to give yourself the motivation that it takes to be able to move forward with a purpose, you need to be able to picture what you are working for – your IT dream job should be part of this. The key is to sit down and spend the time to write down the details of exactly what that IT dream job would look like.

Once you are able to visualize it in your head, you can come back to your description over and over again in order to get reenergized. It’s this kind of daily motivation that will allow you to become a true IT Leader – you know what you want and you are working towards it.

Do you think that your department’s succession plan should be public knowledge?

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

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Isn’t it every IT Leader’s nightmare: you work long hours, pull of miraculous feats of IT project accomplishment in order to create one of the most complicated pieces of software ever, only to have all of your customers hate it?

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Posted in IT jobs | 1 Comment »

IT Leaders Deal With The Three D’s: Death, Divorce, and Disease

Thursday, November 12th, 2009
Image Credit You Never Know Who's Going To Come Knocking For Your Team...

You Never Know Who's Going To Come Knocking For Your Team...

Bad things happen. Sometimes they are not all that bad – key employees leaving for example is bad, but not really all that “bad”. However, sometimes things really are bad: staff die or become seriously ill for long periods of time. What’s your plan for when this happens? What’s that, you don’t have a plan? You think that it’s the role of HR to take care of personal issues like this? Guess again…

Hey Pollyanna, Why Don’t We Ever Plan For The Worst?

You would think that since we work in an industry that has spent so much time trying to prepare our IT systems to deal with bad things, that at least some of this careful planning would have spilled over into how we manage our IT teams. You would be wrong. Just like little kids, IT Leaders for some unknown reason can’t imagine themselves or anyone on their staff dying (death), leaving (divorce), or getting seriously ill for a long time (disease).

One of the reasons that we never seem to get around to doing any proper succession planning is that we always seem to be too focused on the here and now. In order to plan for a future that has a different cast of characters in the IT department, IT Leaders need to sit down and do some serious thinking.

Why Bother Planning – Won’t Things Just Change Anyway?

Sure we all know that just like motherhood and apple pie IT team succession planning is a good thing to do. But do we really know ?WHY? it is a good thing to do? It turns out that there are two main reasons.

The first is the same problem that the U.S. faces with its 4-year presidential terms – continuity of leadership. Right now in your IT department you have plans that are asking for funding, you have plans that are underway, and hopefully you have plans that are just about to wrap up. If the firm loses key member(s) of the team or even you, then would these plans still complete successfully? Even if they did, would anyone have a clear idea of what to do next?

The second reason has to do with intellectual property. I speak from experience when I say that much of the value in any IT department is not in its written procedures or the code that lives on its servers, but rather what is in its employees heads. If you lose one of these staff members, the IP loss could be staggering if you don’t have a working succession plan in place.

What’s The Right Way To Do IT Department Succession Planning?

Gary Perman is an IT consultant who has spent a great deal of time creating IT succession plans. From his vantage point all IT succession plans have two key characteristics:

  • Simplicity: A succession plan has got to be easy to use. When an individual is no longer available to do a job, then it has to be clear who has been trained to step into their spot. Oh, and it also has to be clear who will take things over for that person.
  • More Than A Replacement Plan: A succession plan can’t just be a list of name. Instead it has to be a complete development plan that shows who is where in the skill development path that it is going to take in order to be ready to step into a particular role.

What All Of This Means To You

As an IT leader you’ve got to anticipate changes that will happen to your teams, including things happening to you. It is your responsibility to make sure that there is a plan in place to deal with the loss of any of your staff.

Since not everyone can do everyone else’s job, this means that you’ve got to create a succession plan and then you’ve got to publicize it. This is not a place for secrets. Once you publicize it, you’ve got to make it everyone’s responsibility to ensure that they are ready to step into the role(s) that they are slotted for.

You can help make this happen. Using techniques such as cross-training and job rotation will ensure that your staff will have an opportunity to develop all of the skills that they are going to need. Bad things happen, this doesn’t mean that you can’t be ready for them when they come.

Do you think that your department’s succession plan should be public knowledge?
Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental IT Leader Blog is updated.

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Stop. I know that your normal day-to-day is crazy, you are overworked, underpaid and nobody really appreciates all of the fine things that you do. I get all that. My question for you is do you have any idea why you are doing what you are doing? What are you really working towards? If you don’t know, then perhaps now is the time to find out…

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Posted in succession planning | No Comments »

The Answer Is 9, But Do You Know What The Question Is?

Thursday, November 5th, 2009

Image Credit
Your Technical Skills Aren't Going To Get You Your Next Promotion...

Your Technical Skills Aren't Going To Get You Your Next Promotion...

What is it going to take for you to get promoted? What set of skills as an IT Leader do you need to develop in order to have any chance at moving up to the next level? If you don’t know what you need to know, then how is that promotion going to happen?

It turns out that once upon a time that the oldest man in the IT department at my company sat me down and explained to me what it was going to take to move up in my IT department. Now I’ll pass that information on to you.

The Oldest Man In IT

Ah, the early days in your IT career. All you really needed to know was one programming language and maybe some database skills and you were off and running. Nowadays it seems like you’ve got to know three or four languages, at least a couple of database dialects, and one or two web-based frameworks to get your job done.

What I hadn’t realized in my youthful exuberance was that learning more languages, databases, or web skills was NOT what the company wanted me to do in order to be considered for my next management promotion. This is what Carl told me on that day that changed my career forever.

Carl was the oldest guy working in the company’s IT department. Nobody actually knew how long he had been there, but we all knew that it was longer than we had been on board. Carl’s cube had the most amazing collection of “stuff” from magnetic tapes stacked on the floor to punch cards left over from when the “big transition” had happened to online storage. Oh, and he had a lot of ashtrays from when you could still smoke at your desk – that’s how long he had been on board.

Life Lessons From Carl

Carl and I got along fantastically. I don’t think that I had any special qualities, it was probably just that I was less of a young jerk than everyone else. The fact that I could admit when I was wrong and ask for help probably went a long way also.

At any rate, after I had been in the same frontline programming job for a couple of years, I happened to be having lunch with Carl one day and I blurted out that I was unhappy with my job. I told him that after two years I thought that I deserved to be promoted and I couldn’t figure out why it hadn’t happened yet.

Carl, in his slow, easy going way, asked me what I was going to do about this. I told him that I was going to show the powers that be that I deserved to be promoted: I was going to sign up for every training course and get every technical certification that I could. Carl sorta smiled at me and said “You can do all that, but it’s not going to get you promoted.”

Just How Do You Get Promoted In IT?

Carl went on to explain to me that I was looking at the problem all wrong. He said that in IT as in all parts of a business, management really just does two things. Oh yeah, sometimes you’ll see exceptions to the rule in IT where managers will still be coding, but watch them: they probably won’t go far above their current position.

What Carl told me next is what has stuck with me for all of these years. He told me that in IT, just as in the rest of the company, mangers don’t actually do anything. That is, they don’t actually create things. Instead, the work that they do can be broken down into two separate tasks: they manage people and they manage budgets. If you understand this, he told me, you’ll be on your way to being promoted.

“Great, I don’t have experience doing any of that” I can remember telling him. Carl looked at me and said “Well then, there are nine things that you are going to have to learn before you can be promoted.” You can bet that I was reaching for a napkin to write down this golden advice. Here’s the list of things that I was going to have to learn to do that Carl shared with me:

  1. Understand your workforce
  2. Active listening
  3. How to be truly appreciative
  4. How to communicate clearly
  5. Use humor wisely
  6. Inspire a team
  7. Organization
  8. Time management
  9. Budget management

I can remember looking at that list somewhat in disbelief – I had none of these skills, how the heck was I going to prepare to be promoted?

What Does All Of This Mean For You?

Knowing what it takes to get promoted into the higher levels of IT management is, of course, only one part of the battle. I would argue that knowing what you need to learn is the first and the most important part of getting your next promotion.

You are not going to find all of the information that you need in one place. Sorry, going out and getting that MBA is not the silver bullet that will get you your next promotion.

What you are going to have to do is launch a multi-pronged strategy to acquire the skills that you need. Initial knowledge can be picked up by doing some reading; however, to really learn what you need to know, you are going to have to find ways to actually do the work in the real world before you get promoted.

Everything is possible, you just need to realize that even in IT, technical skills will only take you so far. Learning the skills that you need to become an IT leader is what is going to allow you to get to the next level in your career.

What single skill do you think that is a must have in order to get promoted in IT?

innovative?

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

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Bad things happen. Sometimes they are not all that bad – key employees leaving for example is bad, but not really all that “bad”. However, sometimes things really are bad: staff die or become seriously ill for long periods of time. What’s your plan for when this happens? What’s that, you don’t have a plan? You think that it’s the role of HR to take care of personal issues like this? Guess again…

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Posted in promotion | 2 Comments »

It Takes A Village To Innovate Like An IT Department

Thursday, October 29th, 2009
Innovation In An IT Department Is Not Done Alone

Innovation In An IT Department Is Not Done Alone

So IT Leader, what are you going to do about boosting the innovation within your team? Your hands are tied when it comes to giving out raises – not that money really helps innovation. You don’t have any spots to offer promotions into because the company has adopted a “flat” organizational structure. Oh, and all of your workers are running around afraid that they might lose their jobs any day now. Good luck with making innovation happen here!

It’s All About Words

Sure we read about big “innovation generation” exercises that those fancy firms put on where they haul everyone out into the woods for a week and make them climb trees together until they agree to work together if only they’d be allowed to return home and eat normal food once again. It turns out that as an IT Leader, you can make innovation happen within your team by doing something much simpler (and less costly).

Innovation happens when the right person talks with the right person. As an IT Leader it’s your job to make this happen. This means that you’ve got to know both your team and the rest of the company. Since you know your staff, you know what their talents are. Using this information, you need to have them go out and talk with the other parts of the company where there are people with complementary talents.

Just Make A Decision Already!

If you want to kill innovation in your department, then the simplest thing that you can do is to make it hard to get permission to test a new idea. All too often the decision making processes that we have in place are legacy artifacts that are left over from days gone by.

If you take a look at just what it takes in order for a fresh idea to bubble to the surface and get permission to be tested, then you’ll know what needs to change. This process should have as little friction as possible and should be perceived as being easy to do.

Who’s In Charge Here?

When it’s time to come up with a new idea, the person that you appoint to run the show will be key to its success or failure. I’m just as guilty of this as anyone but we naturally tend to choose the best performers in one particular area to lead the team that is in charge of innovating. It turns out that this is the wrong decision.

What we should be doing is realizing that success in this area is going to really be more dependent on connections that the leader has with other parts of the company instead of any special technical skills that they may have. This means that we need to find those team members who are the best “hooked in” and let them lead the team.

Come Together, Right Now…

Where people sit and who they work side-by-side with is key to their ability to come up with innovative ideas. If you insist that your team members sit in the same location or if you resist transferring people to other departments to work on a project, then you’ll be acting as a roadblock to the very innovation that you are so desperately seeking.

Beware Energy Vampires

Hopefully it goes without staying that it’s much easier to work with positive people instead of negative people. This is something that you’ve got to watch out for and plan around very carefully.

It can be very easy to identify those people that will enable your team to make forward progress and those that will drain both their energy and enthusiasm. Once you know this, then you’ve got to work to keep your team away from the “energy vampires” so that they’ll remain highly productive.

Final Thoughts

Nobody ever said that being an IT Leader was going to be an easy job. One of your responsibilities is to make sure that your team is able to create and deliver innovative ideas. With little budget or other such levers, you’re going to have to get creative.

Knowing that innovation is often caused by having your staff interact with others, you need to make sure that such opportunities exist. Simplifying decision making and ensuring that novel ideas can be tested is a good way to foster innovation. Remember that in the end, an IT team that be innovative will have the ability to solve the greatest number of business problems.

What’s the one thing that holding you back from being more innovative?

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

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

What is it going to take for you to get promoted? What set of skills as an IT Leader do you need to develop in order to have any chance at moving up to the next level? If you don’t know what you need to know, then how is that promotion going to happen?

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Posted in innovation | No Comments »