Posts Tagged ‘performance’

3 Questions That Every IT Manager Should Be Asking About Clouds

Thursday, December 1st, 2011
Image Credit Get over your excitement about clouds and start asking questions

Get over your excitement about clouds and start asking questions

I love clouds, you love clouds, we all love clouds. It seems like everyone in IT is talking about cloud computing and how it’s the next big thing. Look, I think that there’s a lot of good things about cloud computing, but I’m not convinced that it’s the right solution for everyone. This brings up the question of how an IT manager can find out if cloud computing is right for his or her IT department. It turns out that there are three questions that just might provide the answer that you are looking for.

How Much Will This Save Me?

A lot of the excitement about cloud computing comes from the simple fact that most IT managers view the cloud as a way to reduce the cost of running an IT project. However, before visions of budget savings start dancing in your head, you need to answer some questions first.

Roger Cheng over at the Wall Street Journal has taken a look at where the expenses in running an IT department come from. What he’s discovered is that servers run about $2000 – $6,000. This capital expense can be avoided if instead of buying more servers a IT manager simply subscribes to more cloud computing resources when it’s time to expand a project’s IT infrastructure.

In addition to saving on buying more servers, there are potentially other savings that an IT manager can realize by moving a project to the cloud. Buying more servers would require more IT staff to act as systems administrators – no servers means no hiring of additional administrators. Sure, you want to manage a dream team of IT professionals, but first you need to make sure that the company can pay for them.

Are Cloud Services Reliable Enough?

It seems as though every other month or so there is another story in the paper about some cloud provider having an outage. One time it’s Amazon, the next it’s Google. As a IT manager you need to be asking yourself if this cloud computing stuff is really reliable enough for you to be trusting your company’s IT infrastructure to.

It turns out that the analysts have taken a look at the overall reliability of the clouds that are being provided and they are as, if not more, reliable than most company’s IT infrastructure. One reason for this is that providing a cloud is all that the providers do and so they hire and staff in order to ensure the reliability of their product.

What Don’t I Know About Clouds?

The wise IT manager knows to ask “what don’t I know enough to ask about?” One key issue has to do with your company’s most precious asset – its corporate data. When you move this project data to a cloud, you are asking another company to take care of it. Are you and your company’s management team comfortable doing this?

Is your project really going to save money by moving to the cloud? Not every project will – it all depends on how your IT department is set up now and what it’s going to look like in the future. You have other options for saving money – virtualizing the project servers that you have today is one way to accomplish this.

What All Of This Means For You

Cloud computing is all the rage these days. IT managers are getting more and more pressure to introduce cloud computing into their IT projects. Before they take this step, they need show some leadership and get some questions answered.

The promise of cloud computing is that it will save an IT project money. Do you know where these savings will come from? How does the reliability of the cloud compare to your IT project’s current level of reliability? Finally, what other options besides cloud computing do you have for boosting your IT project’s performance?

Cloud computing appears to be here to stay. However, that doesn’t mean that every IT manager should race out and jump into the cloud today. Take your time and get the answers to the important questions and your next step will become clear to you.

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

Question For You: Do you think that the company’s finance department should be involved in determining if the savings of moving into the cloud would be worth the effort for your project?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

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4 Secrets IT Managers Need To Do Successful Performance Appraisals

Thursday, February 24th, 2011
Image Credit
Performance Appraisals Shouldn't Be You Versus Them

Performance Appraisals Shouldn't Be You Versus Them

On top of everything else that you have to do as an IT manager, there are those performance appraisals. You don’t want to do them, your staff doesn’t want to do them, and yet the company insists on everyone doing them. As long as you’ve got to sit down and evaluate the performance of each member of your staff, it sure seems like you may as well get the most out of it. I’m willing to bet that nobody ever told you how to do a performance appraisal the right way. Well, that’s all going to change now because I’m going to share 4 secrets to getting the most out of performance appraisals with your staff…

Prepare, Prepare, Prepare

It is my hope that everyone knows that in order to run a successful performance appraisal every IT manager needs to take the time to prepare for it. However, what a lot of us forget is that it is also important that our employees prepare themselves for an appraisal.

What this means is that they need to take the time to reflect on what they have been working on and how it has turned out. Generally these discussions are best if they center on employee goals. Key questions need to be addressed such as the status of achieving goals, which (if any) goals were exceeded, goals that the employee may be struggling with, and of course things that may be holding the employee back from completing his or her goals.

Howdy Partner!

A performance appraisal environment can be toxic if you don’t take steps to make it more positive. IT employees generally view appraisals as an opportunity for their management to either dismiss them for poor performance or to inform them that they won’t be getting much of a raise this year.

As an IT manager you need to change this situation and turn it into more of a discussion between partners who are working together to achieve great things for the company. You can make this happen by taking time at the start of the meeting to put the employee at ease: explain to them why you are having the meeting and what you want to get out of it.

In order to make the meeting a positive meeting, you are going to want to encourage your employee to do most of the talking. As they talk, you are going to want to show what a good listener you can be. Ask questions and allow them to complete their thoughts. Echo back things that they have said when you ask them follow-up questions.

Your goal here should be to provide the employee with an opportunity to “get it all out” – to lay out how they feel that they’ve done since you last talked. All of this needs to be completed before you start to talk about your appraisal of their performance.

There’s A Gap!

When you start to provide your evaluation of your employee’s job performance, you are going to have to base it on the goals that had been laid out for them to accomplish. If you haven’t asked them to do something, then you can’t very well evaluate them on how they did.

When discussing accomplishments, you’re going to want to talk about how their performance measured up to what the goal was. What you are looking for here are gaps between what was expected and what was delivered.

Often times IT managers run into problems when the goal is a hard-to-measure goal. Things like “boost customer satisfaction” are good goals, but are difficult to measure.

If you find a gap between a goal and your employee’s accomplishments, then this is where you should focus your discussion. It’s going to be important that you clearly show the employee why this goal was an important goal to accomplish by mapping it back to what the overall company is trying to accomplish and then showing how your employee’s efforts support the company.

You need to get the employee to concur that a gap in performance exists. Once you’ve been able to do this, the next step is to work with them to try to identify a root cause for the gap.

It’s All About The (Root) Causes

The purpose of searching for root causes is to start to identify ways that your employee can improve their performance. With a little luck, this search will allow you to avoid casting blame on the employee directly, and instead the both of you will be able to work together in order to search for the outside cause of the performance gap.

Your role here is to motivate the employee to give you useful feedback as you search for the root cause. There are several ways to do this. This is a good time to be selective – you don’t want to dredge up everything that you feel that the employee didn’t due well enough during the last review period. Be sure to mix in some praise for what they did accomplish – this will make reviewing the gaps easier for both of you to do.

Ultimately the goal is to work as a team to find ways to attack the issue that is preventing the goals from being met. If you can get the employee to work with you in order to accomplish this, then you will be a successful IT manager.

What All Of This Means For You

A well done IT worker performance appraisal is very much like a work of art. It takes planning, requires a good environment in which to create it, and it has focus: in this case on gaps in an employee’s performance.

IT managers need to take the time to make sure that a performance appraisal doesn’t turn into a waste of time. These are unique events that can better align the team and turn low performers into rising stars.

Taking the time and making the effort to get the most of your next set of performance appraisals can pay off for you. The better feedback that you can provide to your team, the better performance you’ll get out of them. Ultimately, how you conduct performance appraisals will determine how far your IT career takes you…

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

Question For You: How many performance appraisals do you think you should have with each employee each year?

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

P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental IT Leader Newsletter are now available. It’s your career. Subscribe now: Click Here!

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Most IT managers have never been trained on how to properly conduct a performance review with members of their team. What this means is that all too often they end up doing these reviews incorrectly. Not only is this bad for the team – you can’t fix what nobody knows about, but it could also have disastrous consequences for the company. Let’s talk about four of the biggest mistakes IT managers make and how you can avoid them.

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What Can Top Athletes Teach You About Being A Better IT Leader?

Wednesday, December 3rd, 2008
Top Athletes Can Teach IT Leaders How To Reach The Next Level

Top Athletes Can Teach IT Leaders How To Reach The Next Level

So we all know that Tiger Woods is a fantastic golfer. However, do you think that he’d be any good at running an IT department? The answer, somewhat surprisingly, is that yes, he probably would do a good job. The reason is that there is a lot of similarity between being an excellent athlete and being a top-notch IT manager.

Graham Jones is the founder of a company called Lane4 which uses studies of professional athletes to help managers do a better job of managing. One of the interesting things that he has discovered is that in the area of sports, just like in the world of business, one of the main obstacles to achieving something that has been identified as being “impossible” just might be a self-limiting way of thinking.

One of the first things that you have to realize about being an IT leader is that great leaders are not born, but are rather made. Sure some leaders have nature gifts such as communication skills and leadership attributes; however, the most important skill that they need to have is mental toughness – this means that they get better at doing their job when things get tough.

Great IT leaders rise up not due to chance or luck, but rather because they planned to succeed. Specifically, they identified and achieved lots and lots of little goals in order to get to where they are. This requires them to sharpen their skills and to, much like Madonna, reinvent themselves many times in order to stay out in front of their peers.

So what can IT leaders learn from top athletes? Simple, how to succeed over and over again. Here are the steps that are needed to do achieve top performance over and over again:

Gotta Learn To Love That Pressure

Call it what you like, but pressure is what drives great athletes and great IT leaders to achieve their best. What this means for you is that you’ve got to find a way to learn to love pressure. Another way to say this is that you’ve got to commit yourself to using work pressure to continually improve yourself all the time.

One secret to dealing effectively with pressure is to only focus on making yourself better. Don’t let yourself get distracted by other IT leaders who mange / complete successful projects, get promoted, win awards, etc. Instead, focus on those things that you can control and don’t spend any time thinking about the rest.

You need to be able to step away from the workplace pressure. This means that you actually do need to have another life – family / hobbies / sports, whatever. Top athletes have the ability to flip the pressure switch on when they are “on the job” and then flip it off when they are involved in their other life.

It’s All About The Long Term

By the way, you will occasionally fail. This means that you need to have a way to pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and get back to work. A good way to be able to do this is to have long term goals that you focus on.

What star athletes do is to create very detailed plans that are made up of a series of short term goals. The plan is laid out so that the athlete can do his / her best at the right time – not peaking too early or too late. IT leaders need to do the same. You want to make sure that when you have a big success, it is the right time for it to get maximum exposure within the company.

Push Baby, Push!

We all push ourselves based on the people who we work directly with. If we are working with a bunch of slackers, then there won’t be much self-pushing going on. Instead, we should be searching for opportunities to work with the best-of-the-best. This is very similar to when top athletes train with their fiercest competitors in order to push themselves to be their very best.

Invent And Then Reinvent Yourself

Always be sure to get feedback from trusted sources. This will allow you to understand what you are doing well and where you need to make changes. These changes will allow you to reinvent yourself so that you can become the best IT leader that you can be.

Party Like A Rock Star

Something that IT leaders all to often pass over is to take a break after a major achievement and celebrate. Spending as much effort celebrating a success as you did achieving the success is a way to reward yourself. This is the time to blow off some steam, pause and catch your breath before you push on to the next higher level.

Do you feel like you are performing at your peak management level? Do you have a plan with goals for how you are going to reach the next level in your career? Are you “training” with the best of the best in your office? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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