The Accidental IT Leader

Dr. Jim Anderson To Speak At 16th Annual Pink Conference

Dr. Jim Anderson — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 22:06:18 +0000

Dr. Jim Anderson has been asked to deliver two speeches at the 16th Annual Pink Conference. The role that Blue Elephant Consulting plays in the IT industry has been recognized as being a thought leader and the organizers of the Pink Conference have asked Dr. Anderson to share some of his insights with the conference attendees. Dr. Anderson will be delivering two speeches at the conference in Las Vegas on Monday, February 20th.

The first speech that Dr. Anderson will be giving will be giving is titled “The Secret To Knowing Where You Are Going“. In this speech Dr. Anderson will be discussing the Balanced Scorecard management technique and showing the audience how it can be applied to an IT department.

Dr. Anderson’s goal will be to build a complete IT balanced scorecard during his presentation. He’ll also be showing how a single balanced scorecard can be used to monitor a department’s performance, communicate it’s strategy, and even ensure the proper execution of its strategy.

Dr. Anderson’s second speech is called “Secrets For Getting Them To Listen“. In this speech Dr. Anderson will be covering the common mistakes that IT professionals make when they are asked to deliver a presentation.

It’s not that they don’t know the material, rather it’s how they create their presentation and how they deliver it. Dr. Anderson will address both of these issues by using his presentation to create a complete IT presentation the correct way. He’ll introduce and use the Blue Elephant Presentation System to create an effective presentation that the audience will be talking about long after the presentation is over.

You are invited to join Dr. Anderson and attend both of his presentations — all you have to do is sign up for the 16th Annual Pink Conference. Here’s the link and I hope to see you there!

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Why IT Managers Can’t Pay Attention And What To Do About It

Dr. Jim Anderson — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 09:00:34 +0000

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Why Can't IT Managers just keep their minds on the task at hand?

How’s that job going IT manager? Do you find yourself and your IT team more and more often with too much to do and too few hands with which to do it? If so then maybe both of you are suffering from “IT Manager Attention Deficit Syndrome”. What can you do about it?

The Madness Of Trying To Do Too Much

So just exactly what does an IT manager do? A lot of what we are asked to take care of has to do with the routine stuff: keeping systems up, making sure that we have enough of the right kinds of IT staffing, completing IT projects, etc. It’s when we get sidetracked with the big “special projects” that our leadership can go off track.

Special projects, no matter if they are IT focused projects or company-wide projects that impact IT, can easily suck up a great deal of a IT manager’s limited time. We all know that these types of projects are important to the company in the long run; however, they are very expensive in terms of the time that they require in the short term.

What all this means is that IT managers need to learn how to live double lives. On one hand they need to keep doing what they’ve always been doing: using their management skills to make sure that the day-to-day IT department operations keep running smoothly. On the other hand, they need to make sure that each milestone of the special project is met on time and on budget. What’s an IT manager to do?

How To Keep It All In Balance

A big question that faces every IT manager is how best to keep themselves and their IT team on track given all of the work that they have to get done. One solution, of course, is to maintain a list of the various ongoing projects. This list can be used to make sure that you check on each project’s status every day.

A better solution is to realize who’s actually doing all of the work: your team. This means that you need to carve the time out of your schedule to socialize with them and let them know that you appreciate them keeping the ship running while at the same time working on the special projects.

Having meetings to allow different members of your team to update everyone on where their part of the program is at is a great idea. However, this part of the solution can be overdone. Make sure that you hold the right number of meetings – not too many and not too few. Remember that time spent in meeting is time that could be used making progress on the various projects!

What All Of This Means For You

In our hurry-up world, more and more IT managers are discovering that they have too much to do and not enough time in which to do it. What this means is that if they aren’t careful, things are going to start to get dropped.

In order to prevent this from happening, IT managers need to first detect that they have become overloaded. Once they know this, they need to take action. One thing that they can do is to take the time to let their IT dream team know that they appreciate all that they are doing for them. This will allow everyone to know that you understand that they are trying to do both their normal jobs as well as all of the IT special projects that seem to pop up.

It seems sort of counter-intuitive that the best way for a IT manager to manage too many responsibilities for himself and his team is to slow down and take time to connect with his team. However, it turns out that by doing this you can keep everyone working together and help everyone complete the things that need to be done.

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

Question For You: What’s the best way to detect when you and your IT team have become overloaded?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

In tough times, every IT manager has seen their share of IT workers leave the company. Sometimes they leave because they find a job that they think will be a better fit for them or sometimes the company tells them to leave. No matter what the cause, the one thing that you don’t want them to do is leave unhappy. I’ve got some bad news for you – that’s exactly what is happening.

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What IT Managers Can Learn From The Failure Of A British IT Project

Dr. Jim Anderson — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 09:00:20 +0000

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What caused the largest IT project in history to fail?

The one thing that everyone in IT has learned is to stay away from projects that we just know are going to fail, right? It turns out that over in England, they seem to have forgotten this rule. They decided to do a huge IT project to modernize their health care system and guess what, it just failed. Sounds like a great learning opportunity for IT managers…

The UK Health Service IT Upgrade Project

So what was this monster project? It turns out that just like every other county; the UK’s public health care system uses a confusing tangle of outdated IT systems that don’t do a good job of talking to each other. Back in 2002, the UK government decided to do something about this and they were willing to put their money where their mouth was.

The total cost of the IT upgrade project was forecasted to be US$17 billion. Its goal was to digitize patient records in addition to linking all of the different parts of the UK’s National Health Service (NHS).

What Went Wrong

You have to love it when there is a plan, right? So what went wrong with the UK’s gigantic health care IT project? It turns out that a number of different things went wrong.

One of the things that caused the UK government to get fed up with the project and decide to take the dramatic step of cancelling it was that costs had gotten too large. Specifically, what the government was discovering was that hospitals were paying roughly $18M for IT systems as a part of the program. The problem with this is that the very same solutions could be purchased outside of the IT project for roughly $2M – $4M.

Another motivation for the cancelling of the program was that the IT contractor (Computer Sciences) was unable to deliver a key software application on time. This application was the cornerstone of the whole system. It was to help doctors and nurses follow patients as they moved through the hospital as well as keep track of any tests that they had done.

What All Of This Means For You

No IT manager wants to have their career or their IT dream team associated with a big IT project failure. The UK Health Service IT Upgrade Project is a very big and visible failure. In retrospect, what could an IT manager have done to avoid being associated with what happened to this project?

I think a key takeaway is that big is bad when it comes to the IT sector. A project this big and one that lasts this long (2002 was a long time ago), is bound to fail. A much better way of going about doing a project like this is to make a proposal to your management that you break it into multiple smaller projects. By doing this, there isn’t a single project that can fail, but rather a series of projects whose incremental successes can be built upon as you and your team get closer and closer to your overall goal.

By showing leadership and suggesting creating multiple projects, you can also adjust each project to reflect decreasing prices of IT components over time. Instead of having to lock into prices years before you’ll need the IT gear, this way you can adjust to the current prices when you reach that point.

IT managers can make sure that the IT projects that they are responsible for don’t encounter the same fate that the big UK health care IT upgrade project did. Plan your projects correctly and they’ll stay healthy.

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

Question For You: What should an IT manager do if you see that a proposed IT project is becoming too big?

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IT Managers Need To Forget The Yearly Reviews – Do It Monthly!

Dr. Jim Anderson — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 09:00:18 +0000

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Feedback sessions need to be done more often with younger IT workers…

A part of an IT Manager’s job is to let those people on his or her team know how they are doing. At most companies, this is done once a year during an annual employee review. I’m not sure about you, but have you ever asked yourself if this is the best way to do this kind of thing? In the age of Facebook and Twitter, maybe it’s time to do these kind of reviews more often…

How Most Companies Do Employee Reviews

Sure employee reviews are a good thing to do, but how are they done? Well, I’m sure that you’re aware of how they are done at your company, but do you know how they are done at other companies?

Assuming that you are an IT Manager at a fairly typical company, then you probably do employee reviews once a year. Guess what – that’s how most companies do them. In a recent survey, 51% of the 500 companies surveyed said that they do these types of reviews annually. 41% of the firms said that they do them semi-annually.

How Progressive Companies Do Employee Reviews

How about all of those fancy new-fangled firms that we are always reading about in the IT trade rags – how often do they do employee reviews? At the leader of the pack (for now), Facebook, they do employee reviews twice a year.

Some progressive firms have increased the frequency to as often as every two weeks. Their thinking is that by doing this they transform what is often a big scary meeting into something that is much more common and, hopefully, useful to the both the employees and their bosses.

What’s The Right Way To Do an Employee Review?

A number of consultants have pointed out that the frequency of employee reviews doesn’t really matter if you are doing these types of reviews wrong! They point out that if you flood the employee with too much information there is a good chance that they’ll simply shut down during the meeting.

When this happens, the review won’t produce the results that you are looking for. Instead what often happens is that the employee just ends up focusing on the criticism and ignores any suggestion of constructive ways that they can become better.

No matter how often as an IT Manager you choose to do employee reviews, you need to realize that this is an important part of your job. Being in regular communication with your staff is how you find out about small issues before they have a chance to grow into big issues that can end up distracting people and wasting time for everyone.

What All Of This Means For You

I think that we can all agree that IT workers who report to an IT Manager need to get feedback on their job performance. This is a cornerstone of good management. The big question is if getting this feedback once a year is the right way to do it.

At most companies, the employee review is an annual event. However, at a number of progressive firms it has been changed. Reviews are now done more often and are done much quicker. The goal is to provide feedback to the employee so that they can start to use the information as quickly as possible.

Ultimately, no matter how often employee reviews are held, the key is to make sure that the information that the IT worker gets is useful. IT Managers need to show leadership and make sure that they don’t overwhelm their staff with too much feedback that causes them to shut down and only focus on the negative. Become an IT Manager who knows when and how to provide employee feedback to members of your dream team, and you’ll be rewarded with a great IT department working for you.

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

Question For You: Do you think that it would be possible to do employee reviews too often?

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The Wrong Way For An IT Manager To Fire A Worker

Dr. Jim Anderson — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 09:00:37 +0000

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When IT Managers fire IT workers, they need to do it the right way…

It’s time for that IT worker to go. As an IT Manager, one of the most painful decisions that you are ever going to have to make is the decision to terminate an employee. Not only is this a tough call for you to make, if you have any sensitivity then you realize that it’s going to rough on them no matter how you go about doing this. Considering how important this is to both of you, perhaps we should spend a few moments talking about the right way to go about doing this part of your job…

Lessons From Yahoo – How Not To Fire An IT Worker

Just in case you were out of town and missed it, over at Yahoo they fired their then-CEO Carol Bartz the wrong way. As an IT Manager you need to be aware of what they did and why it was wrong. First off, Carol was fired over the phone. Secondly, as reported by her, Yahoo Chairman Roy Bostock who was doing the firing over the phone was also apparently reading the termination to her from a script that he had prepared. Can you say impersonal?

The lesson that you need to take away from this botched job of firing a worker is that it will come back to haunt you. Yahoo is probably going to have problems convincing people to come work for them because of this story. I mean would you want to work for a company that is that cold and impersonal when it comes to letting their workers go?

If you’ve got to fire somebody, then at least show some leadership and do it the right way. This means that if it is at all possible, you need to do it face-to-face. No, this doesn’t make it easier for you, but trust me this will make the whole experience better for both of you.

The Correct Way To Fire An IT Worker

So if Yahoo has shown IT Managers how NOT to fire workers, what is the correct way to perform this painful task? That’s actually a very good question that has multiple parts to its answer.

First off, we need to understand that some of the commonly held beliefs about the best way to let someone go (given to us by countless company legal departments) are wrong. Sure, these long-held myths seem to be the best way to do things, but it turns out that they actually boost the chances that the terminated worker is going to turn around and sue the company.

Let’s start with trying to understand what a worker who is being let go wants to hear from you. Even though you are firing them, studies have shown that the process can go much smoother if during the process you take the time to praise them. Clearly you need to be careful here – complement their good qualities, but make sure that it is very clear that they are still being let go.

Next, if at all possible don’t have them escorted from the building by a security guard. This takes away all of the good feelings (if there are any) that the praise that you shared with them during the firing discussion may have caused. Instead of a guard, you should be the one who walks them out of the building.

The other thing that you should not do is to have another person present in the room when you are doing the firing. Yes, I know that this is a basic recommendation from both your HR and legal departments. However, studies have shown that by having this 3rd party present is viewed by the person who is being fired as demonstrating a lack of respect for them. I for one can agree with this – it makes the person being fired feel as though the two of you are ganging up on them.

Finally, during the actual process of firing someone be sure to do it slowly. Remember, if you have been a good manager they should have been given plenty of warning and coaching before reaching this point. If you take your time and allow them to process what is happening, they will have more time to deal with this change.

One way to slow things down is to make sure that you carefully explain why they are being let go. Studies have shown that terminated employees were 10x more likely to sue their former employer if they felt that the reason for their dismissal had not been explained to them.

What All Of This Means For You

Firing workers sucks. It’s no fun for you and it’s no fun for them. However, as an IT Manager this is actually a key and important part of your management job – you need to ensure that you have the right dream team on board and you will have to make changes to that team by firing people every so often.

You need to understand how not to fire staff. Don’t do it over the phone (like they did at Yahoo) and don’t read from a script. Take the time to meet with the employee face-to-face and provide a complete explanation of why they are being let go. Try to do the actual firing with just you and the person who is being let go – ultimately this will help them deal with receiving this information.

No IT Manager gets up in the morning with the anticipation of having to fire a worker that day (at least I hope not). However, it does happen and you need to learn how to do a good job at this part of your position. Take the time to provide some humanity and understanding as a part of the termination process and you will make a difficult task that much easier for both you and the employee.

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

Question For You: Would you feel comfortable firing someone if nobody else was around while you did it?

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2 Rules For Being A Better IT Manager Boss

Dr. Jim Anderson — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 09:00:10 +0000

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You can't be a buddy and be a boss

When I’m working with new IT Managers I often run into the buddy / boss problem. It’s perfectly understandable that any person newly placed into an IT Manager position would like to establish a positive relationship with the people that they are managing. This is all well and good, but it’s all too easy for an IT Manager to go too far – you can be a boss, but you can’t be a buddy.

Pick One: Buddy Or Boss

How did you ever learn to be a boss? I’m going to guess that you never took any courses on the subject. Rather, you went to work and you had bosses. You watched what they did and saw what kind of results they got. When you got promoted, you did your level best to be like the ones that were able to get things done.

This is all well and good; however, the world moves on. The new management philosophy tells us that as bosses we need to “connect” with our teams in part to keep them from leaving. Exactly what this means or how best to do it is not terribly well defined.

All too often what I see IT Managers doing is starting out small and going out to happy hours and such events with their IT team. This then leads to other activities and eventually real friendships can develop with some of your staff. This is when problems start to pop up.

As the head of an IT team, your staff works for you. What this means is that at work you have a very clearly defined relationship. When you start to develop personal friendships outside of work, these relationships can start to blur the work relationships.

What happens is that your new friends stop taking what you say at work with the proper amount of seriousness. They forget that indeed they do need to do what you tell them to do – it’s not a request from a friend that they are receiving, but rather a command from their boss. The difference may be subtle, but it’s very, very important that they understand it.

Too Much Information

Along the same lines, the issue of how much of your personal life you should share with your team is another difficult issue that we all need to deal with. You don’t want to be seen as being cold and aloof, but how much is too much?

One of the key realizations that I’ve seen IT Managers struggle with is the simple fact that any personal information that you share with any of your team will undoubtedly end up getting repeated. Before you share it with your IT dream team, you need to determine what the long term cost of making that information public will be.

Trivial things like the fact that you own a dog are probably ok to share with staff. The fact that you got arrested as a youth for drunken driving is probably not. The litmus test that seems to work the best in these situations is to ask yourself if you saw the front-page story in the New York Times was the information that you are about to share with a staff member, how would your mother feel? If there is any doubt on your part, then keep your mouth shut!

What All Of This Means For You

IT Managers get way too much contradictory information when it come how best to manage a team of IT professionals. Gone are the days of aloof, remote bosses. IT Managers are expected to connect with their IT department and to bond with their employees.

However, it’s all too easy for an IT Manager to take this employee bonding stuff too far. You won’t be able to effectively manage your team if you become their “buddy”. Instead you need to maintain a professional distance between yourself and everyone else. This idea means that you shouldn’t end up sharing too much of your personal information with the people who work for you.

Nobody ever said that this leadership thing was going to be easy. IT Managers need to keep in mind the role that they play in the company that they work for and what this means for the relationships that they will establish. Remember, be a boss, not a buddy!

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

Question For You: If you make a mistake and become too friendly with one of your team members, what’s the best way to correct the situation?

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

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Merry Christmas – Take The Week Off!

Dr. Jim Anderson — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 04:01:54 +0000

Here's Hoping That You Name Shows Up On The "Nice" List This Year!

Loyal readers & subscribers, here’s hoping that this upcoming Christmas season week is a great week for you – I’m taking it off! Blogging will resume after the holidays…

Everyone seems to celebrate something different this week, but I’m hoping that no matter how you choose to spend your time, you will enjoy yourself. The world can wait, let’s spend time with friends and family and we’ll get back to the madness when the new year begins…

Have a happy and safe week no matter where you are and we’ll talk again next week.

- Dr. Jim Anderson

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IT Manager Leadership: Two Ways To Lead When You’re Not In Charge

Dr. Jim Anderson — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 16:00:37 +0000

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IT Leaders Need To Show Teams Which Way To Go

When I work with IT Leaders who are looking for ways to get that next promotion, I tell them that they are going to need to demonstrate leadership. This is an easy thing for me to say and a very hard thing for them to do. Complicating matters even more is the fact that IT managers are finding themselves drafted onto team that they are just members of, not leaders of. What’s an IT manager to do?

It’s Always All About Goals

When an IT manager is told to work as part of a team but not told to manage it, it can be easy to treat this as a low priority task if you aren’t appointed to run the show. I mean really, you’ve got other tasks that you are responsible for and you’re running the show there.

However, that would be a mistake on your part. It turns out that in real life senior management are often put on teams that they may not have been told to manage. If you can demonstrate the ability to work with and to even lead this type of team, you’ll be demonstrating skills that will make you a candidate for a promotion.

The first thing that you need to do when you become part of a team that you are not leading is to encourage the team to take the time to write down what they are hoping to achieve. Step up and lead the discussion as the team tries to clarify what their shared objectives are.

To Get The Right Answers, You Need To Know How To Think Correctly

Teams can be a confusing mess. There are all sorts of people and everybody thinks that they know how to solve the problem that the team has been asked to take care of. More often than not the first team meeting dissolves into a set of isolated conversations and not much gets accomplished.

You have an opportunity to show leadership in this situation. You can help the team actually accomplish something by showing them how to apply systematic thinking to the problem at hand.

Instead of just randomly breaking off pieces of the problem and then attempting to do a deep dive and come up with a solution for it, instead take a step back. Start by making sure that all of the needed data has been gathered.

Next take the time to determine how the current situation was created. Once you get group agreement on that move on and identify a set of possible solutions. It’s going to be much easier to get the team to select a workable solution from a set of possible solutions instead of trying to build solutions from the ground up with only various parts of the required data.

What Does All Of This Mean For You

IT managers will always be finding themselves in situations where they have not explicitly been put in charge providing management to a team. When this happens to you, there are two ways that you can deal with it: give up and complain about the situation or choose to demonstrate your leadership skills.

In order to show leadership and how you can manage a team, you need to start by creating a set of clear objectives that the group can work towards – goals if you like. This will provide direction for the team. Next, show the team how to think in a systematic fashion. Lay out the challenges, identify the constraints, and then start to identify solutions.

Leadership is a tricky thing. It’s not something that is handed to you, rather you have to earn it. IT managers who master the ability to create goals that a team will accept and then show the team how to think systematically will be one step closer to earning the leadership of that team.

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

Question For You: Do you think that you should create team goals by yourself or with the rest of the team?

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. Learn what you need to know to do the job. Subscribe now: Click Here!

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Video: IT Manager Challenge – Bridging That Generation Gap

Dr. Jim Anderson — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 09:00:47 +0000

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ig88cH4AzTk

Dr. Jim Anderson explains why the arrival of the Millennials in the workplace is going to require IT managers to change how they mange their teams.

Dr. Anderson explains how the relationship between the Millennials and the baby boomer generation won’t be an issue. Rather it’s the relationship between the Millennials and their X/Y generation managers that will be the source of friction!

To get more information on how to be a better IT manager, subscribe tot he free monthly The Accidental IT Leader newsletter at: http://goo.gl/d0Jy9

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3 Questions That Every IT Manager Should Be Asking About Clouds

Dr. Jim Anderson — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 13:00:36 +0000

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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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