How to Improve your IT. Part 1 - Introduction
Introduction to IT
A series of posts on how to improve the performance of your IT. Some posts will have an accompanying downloadable Assessment Worksheet containing Performance Housekeeping activities.
Background
One of the outcomes of a 45-year career as an IT Management Consultant and trouble-shooter is that I gained a hard-earned reputation for being able to dramatically improve IT Department performance across the board.
The bulk of my consulting assignments (averaging 6 to 12 months each) involved taking on an IT management position to bring about performance improvement. Performance I define as being made up of: - Organization, People, Metrics, Process, Work Management, Service, Cost-effectiveness, Customer and Staff satisfaction.
My work experience has provided me with a unique perspective on IT as a result of having managed every IT Team. That is, I have been a CIO, IT Manager, Infrastructure Manager, Applications Development Manager, Technical Services Manager, Service Delivery Manager, Service Desk Manager, Data Centre Manager, Architecture Manager, Project Office Manager, as well as Database and Networking Manager. Many of these positions I have held more than once. I have managed 50 staff and 1000 staff. I have also been a Programmer and a Systems Analyst, starting my career with the build of an MVS Mainframe Data Centre. I contribute my success to this breadth and depth of experience.
Performance Housekeeping
The bottom line is that this background allowed me to form a unique appreciation and understanding of how an IT department works and how to get it to work at its best. It also allowed me to determine what essential Performance Housekeeping activities are required to obtain maximum performance within each IT Team which led to the following:
Better IT Budget management.
Business partnerships characterised as joint ventures.
Business needs are IT’s first priorities.
Understanding the essential elements that make IT work.
The four most problematic areas.
How to maximize resources.
How to substantially improve staff morale and job satisfaction levels.
Best practices for Managed Services.
Performance Housekeeping is conducted at an IT Team level with each Team having specific Housekeeping activities to do. The objectives of Performance Housekeeping are:
Become more Business focussed in all that is done.
IT Team specific performance improvements and the introduction of performance metrics.
To migrate to the agreed Best Practice IT standards.
To subject all work to Process.
To produce all work consistently and with higher quality.
To handle an increasing workload with the capacity to do more with less.
Identification and resolution of activities that are categorised as willful blindness. (adverse effects that are known about but are hidden from management. e.g., data corruption, report errors, back-up failures, invisible and redundant servers, theft, hacking.)
Automation of recurrent manual activities.
Workload Management improvements with an emphasis on inter-team workflows.
Clearing out of work backlogs.
Reduction of technical risk.
Identification of hardware assets that require risk mitigation.
Removal of redundant hardware, software, systems software, utilities and tools.
Best Practice IT Standards and Transformational Management model
There have also been two other outcomes from my work, the first of these has been the development of the Best Practice IT Standards and the second, a Transformational IT Management model. The development of the Best Practice IT Standards came about as a result of taking note of what worked best in all of the IT Departments, I worked in. They became part of my Change blueprint for addressing operational performance issues and bringing about improvements. The Transformational IT Management model came about as a result of reorganizing IT Departments and improving Team effectiveness.
Post Topics
As mentioned, the How to Improve your IT Posts cover a range of Housekeeping activities all aimed at improving overall IT Department performance. The Posts cannot cover every detail but should provide you with enough information for you to be able to carry out the Housekeeping activities. The Post topics are:
Performance Housekeeping.
A better IT Management Model.
The four IT Teams that account for 90% of all IT problems.
Service Desk.
Staff Training.
Quotations.
Workload Management.
Service Management Framework.
Managed Services
Infrastructure.
Applications Development.
Methodologies.
Project Management Office.
Projects.
Security.
Change Control.
Disaster Recovery.
Architecture.
Diagrams.
Technical resource management.
Data Centre and Operations.
Assessment Worksheets
You can’t manage what you can’t measure
Each Post in this How to Improve your IT series represents the Performance Housekeeping activities for a specific IT Team and will include a downloadable Assessment Worksheet for your own use.
The Worksheets will detail a ‘How To’ approach to Assess and Fix the usual issues with the IT Team concerned. The Worksheet also sets out the Best Practice IT Standard for each IT Team. These are working, checklist-style documents that have a standard format that formed part of my repeatable blueprint for addressing issues. They are designed in such a way that you can give each Worksheet to your Direct Report/IT Manager for them to complete. They are in two parts: An Assessment -Question/Answer part and a Fix -Actions part.
The Assessment -Question/Answer part is quick and easy to do as it is designed to home in on the key problem areas to see if they exist and to what extent. On average your Direct Report or the owning IT Team Manager should need only a few hours to complete an Assessment. The Fix Actions part gives you a head start on how to address the most common problems allowing you to determine what actions are required in your particular case.
I have used this approach many times across a large number of IT Departments - I can tell you that it absolutely works. As an IT Manager, I have always had very high standards, this management approach does not suit everyone, I have met many people who accept far less than I do, my take on that being that their IT Department performance and in particular Service Delivery reflected this.
Conclusion
After 45 years of IT practice, I can say with absolute certainty that IT is not that difficult to manage and that every IT Department needs Housekeeping every five years. IT Managers have problems because they either don’t understand the basics or do not pay attention to them. CIOs on the other hand have problems because they are distracted by the amount of IT spend, poor customer satisfaction levels and poor operational standards, these distractions keep them away from working on business strategic needs.
It’s really quite simple, get the basics right, do your housekeeping and everything else will, as a rule, fall nicely into place.