How to Improve your IT. Part 2 - Performance Housekeeping
IT Performance
A series of posts on how to improve the performance of your IT
IT Entropy
Over time all IT Departments suffer from a form of entropy in their performance capability. Progressively they become more complex, run a much higher risk of errors, suffer a decline in technical performance, lose their IT memory and incur increased operating costs, all as a result of doing nothing in particular other than running the day to day.
The principal causes of this IT entropy are: (in order of greatest impact)
The rapid pace of business change where pressure on IT to keep up often means production implementations are not always completed to IT’s satisfaction or to a professional standard. Final implementations could be flagged as ‘at risk’.
Introduction of new technologies.
Increasingly complex systems and applications development environments.
Increased security requirements.
Shorter development timeframes with an increased frequency of releases.
Loss of knowledgeable staff and IT memory.
Decreasing Workload Management efficiency and poorly defined inter-team workflows.
Ad-hoc, poorly documented or not fully implemented processes.
Increased systems management requirements resulting from a swath of new systems software, additional utilities and toolsets, new equipment additions and poorly managed retirements.
An ever-increasing demand for staff to acquire new skills and knowledge often without training.
A diminished sense of staff personal accountabilities.
Management of ageing legacy equipment, systems and applications.
Left unchecked, four key risks become deeply rooted in the IT Departments operation
Costs become very difficult to manage.
The risk of loss of systems availability increases.
Service Delivery and Customer Satisfaction levels decline with missed opportunities to redress.
Staff morale suffers and the risk of loss of key staff increases.
Conducting a Performance Housekeeping exercise every five years is enough to reduce the risks associated with each of these outcomes.
Performance Housekeeping
Regular housekeeping keeps these outcomes from taking root and from escalating, but I am yet to see an IT Department that does any regular housekeeping. I found that to improve overall IT performance, there are a set of basic housekeeping activities that need to be completed for each IT Team. Performance Housekeeping is the name I use to represent all of the IT Teams housekeeping activities.
Performance Housekeeping objectives
Performance Housekeeping within each IT Team is focussed on achieving the following objectives,
1. IT Team specific performance improvements and the introduction of performance metrics.
2. To consider migrating to the Best Practice IT standards.
3. To make all work process-driven.
4. To produce all work consistently with higher quality.
5. To handle an increasing workload with the capacity to do more with fewer resources.
6. 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.)
7. Automation of recurrent manual activities.
8. Workload Management improvements with an emphasis on inter-team workflows.
9. Clearing out of work request backlogs.
10. Identification of hardware assets that require risk mitigation.
12. Removal of redundant hardware, applications software, systems software, utilities and tools.
Future Posts
Each Post in this How to Improve your IT series represents the Performance Housekeeping activities for a specific IT Team. A downloadable Team Assessment Worksheet will also be made available for your 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 Team Manager should need only a few hours to complete an Assessment, any longer means there are already problems. 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 some people who accept far less than I do, my take on that being that their IT department performance reflected this.