Posts Tagged ‘it strategy’

5 Steps IT Managers Need To Create A Strategy

Thursday, October 20th, 2011
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An effective IT strategy can result in success for your team

An effective IT strategy can result in success for your team

Hmm, isn’t strategy something that the big boys are supposed to be taking care of? Most IT managers probably don’t think that they either have the skills needed to create and implement an effective strategy or that it’s simply not part of their job. Just to be clear about this: creating and implementing an effective IT strategy for your team is most definitely a part of your job. Now let’s figure out just exactly how to go about doing it…

Step 1: SWOT

The first step in developing a workable IT strategy is to take the time to perform a SWOT analysis: Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. The key here is to perform this analysis from the vantage point of your team: what do you do well, where is your team dropping the ball, what projects or opportunities do you see coming your way, what might make your team not matter anymore?

Step 2: Identify Internal Resources

Once you’ve identified the opportunities that are available to your team, you next need to determine how you can take advantage of them. In order to be assigned to work on a project or to obtain new resources, you need to be able to leverage internal resources. Use this opportunity to reach out to people and organizations within the company and forge relationships that will help your team to be able to accomplish more.

Step 3: Threats & Opportunities

Your team will always be facing both threats to its value to the company as well as opportunities for it to become more valuable. You need to look at each of these and identify what alternatives you have for dealing with them. Ensure that you both have accurate information as well as all of the information that you need. Once you’ve done this, pick one of the alternatives and make it your strategy of record for dealing with this threat / opportunity.

Step 4: Building A Good Fit

What’s going to make a strategy work with your team is to find a way to make the all of the different parts work together to make your team stronger. An example of this could be if you wanted your team to play a big roll in the company’s rollout of a new vacation management program you might have your team take a Ruby training class so that you could offer to take care of both the front-end and the back-end parts of the project.

Step 5: Alignment

Just coming up with a strategy is not enough. Once you’ve created the strategy, you need to sell it to your team. You’ll know that you’ve successfully done this once everyone knows what the strategy is and understands what their role in implementing the strategy is.

What All Of This Means For You

Creating and implementing an IT strategy for your team is a part of every IT manager’s job. The trick is knowing the 5 steps that are involved in doing this correctly.

Creating a strategy starts with performing a SWAT analysis, finding internal resources and using them to come up with a strategy to counter threats and take advantage of opportunities, combine activities in order to create a good fit among internal activities. Finally, take the time to create alignment between the various players.

Creating a strategy is the key to providing your team with a clear direction for the work that they will be doing. That’s why it is such a critical task for IT managers to do well. Follow these 5 steps and you will be seen as a strategic IT manager!

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

Question For You: How often do you think that you should revisit your IT strategy to see if it needs to be updated?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

So what’s it going to take to make you a successful IT manager? Is it going to be your understanding of a wide variety of emerging technologies? Is it your ability to understand where the company stands in the marketplace and where it wants to go? Or is it your business skills that allow you to seamlessly network with the rest of the company in order to lead your IT team? Turns out that these are all good to have; however, what it’s going to take to get you to the finish line is something much more valuable: personal energy.

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You Don’t Do A Good Job At Multitasking IT Leader, Get Over It

Thursday, October 8th, 2009
People Who Multitask Think That They Can Do It Well, But They Can't! (c) - 2009

People Who Multitask Think That They Can Do It Well, But They Can't! (c) - 2009

Too little time, too much to do. Does that adequately describe your IT leader job? I don’t know about you, but often is the time that I’ve looked with envy at my peers who are great multitaskers and wished that I could be more like them. It turns out that I was wishing for the wrong thing – multitaskers actually do a lousy job at just about everything.

The Study

Ruth Pennenaker reports that some researchers at Stanford University have just completed a groundbreaking study on people who multitask. You know who you are – you’re talking on the phone even as you are answering emails and zipping off text messages on you iPhone all at the same time. Oh how I have so wanted to be you!

The researchers found that most persistent multitaskers actually performed badly in a variety of tasks that they were asked to do. As the researchers dove deeper to find out why the multitaskers were doing so badly, what they found was that they don’t do a very good job of focusing on what they are trying to do. This also means that they are much more likely to get distracted while they are trying to perform a task. On top of all this, the study showed that they are actually weaker than non-multitaskers at shifting between tasks and organizing the information that they collect.

Results Of The Study

My favorite part of the study is where the researchers discovered that people who are always multitasking are actually worse at multitasking than those of us who ordinarily don’t multitask!

When the study was started, the researchers started with the idea that multitaskers have some characteristic that makes them better at multitasking than regular folks. What they discovered is that multitaskers are just pretty much lousy at doing everything.

One of the researchers was quoted as saying “We kept looking for multitaskers’ advantages in this study. But we kept finding only disadvantages. We thought multitaskers were very much in control of information. It turns out, they were just getting it all confused.”

However, doesn’t it LOOK like multitaskers are always busy? Shouldn’t that mean that they must be getting more done than the rest of us who just can’t do that much all at the same time? It turns out that high multitaskers are “suckers for irrelevancy“. Simply put, sure they are doing things, but what they are working on more often than not really doesn’t matter.

A Personal Multitasking (Failure) Story

I firmly fall into the “not a good multasker” camp and I should know it. However, every once in awhile I try my hand at multitasking, generally with disastrous results. Allow me to share my most recent story:

I was late for a doctor’s appointment and yet I had a conference call that I needed to participate in (not just listen to). I jumped into the car, programmed the Garmin GPS system with the doctor’s office address, stuck my Blackberry headset in my ear, and set the Garmin on “mute” so that it wouldn’t interfere with my conference call.

As I hurtled down the highway in the far left lane at about 70 mph jabbering away in an animated conversation on the conference call, I happened to look over at the Garmin and noticed that it was signaling that I needed to be taking the exit that I was just about to pass by (remember that I had been smart enough to mute it so I had no warning). Oh, oh.

A non-multitasking person would have realized that (1) I had already gone too far past the exit to make it, (2) I was in the wrong lane to try to make the exit, (3) I was going too fast to make the exit. In my multitasking state, I realized none of this and I attempted to go for it.

I didn’t make it. I was going to fast and I was too far past the exit to have ever had any chance of making it. What I ended up doing was plowing headfirst into the aluminum guardrails which were anchored to solid 4″x4″ chunks of wood. I probably hit them going a good 40 mph despite having tried to stand on the breaks once I realized what was going to happen.

Thanks to seatbelts and airbags, I walked away without a scratch. However, the car was a total loss. Oh, and I got a $100+ ticket from the police for basically being a bad driver. I say once again – I can’t multitask!

Final Thoughts

IT leaders who multitask will perform at a lower level than those who focus on one task at a time. Although this seems to fly in the face of everything that we’ve seen in our workplace (don’t multitaskers get all of the promotions?), you can’t argue with research results.

Should you try to convince your friends and peers who are multitaskers to stop doing it because it just doesn’t work? No. The core of the problem is that not only do multitaskers think they’re great at what they do; they’ve also convinced everybody else they’re good at it too.

Ultimately those of us who are not multitaskers will be able to show better results for how we’ve spent our time. If we can make sure that the rules of the game that we’re playing are all about results and not appearances, then the non-multitaskers will win every time.

If you can focus on one task at a time and do it well instead of trying to do multiple tasks at the same time poorly 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

Welcome to the world of overused buzz words! The star of the show these days is “innovation” – everyone wants it, everyone is talking about it, nobody really knows how to get it. IT Leaders find themselves in a situation where if they aren’t careful, they just might make one of three different mistakes that could prevent innovation from happening within their teams…

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