First Days: Interconnectedness of History
Coming up to speed as a new IT leader requires that you take in a wider variety of information than ever before.
One of the things you will discover is that everything is connected. As Douglas Adams (author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy) wrote in his book Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, we are dealing with “the fundamental interconnectedness of all things.”
One of the places where this interconnectedness pops up is in the history of the organization. Depending on that history, this can be an important part of understanding the organization or it can be a small part.
Portions of this article are excerpted from my book, The I.T. Leader’s First Days, available from bookstores everywhere.
First Days: Learning The Organization
IT has always been a learning intensive career. When you move into IT Leadership, that learning changes.
One of the many things you have to learn about is the organization the IT department supports.
The IT department does not exist in a vacuum. Your department, and your job, exists to serve the larger organization. By understanding this larger context, you can make better decisions.
Schedule one-on-one meetings with the leadership team members and other key managers and individuals. These meetings will serve as anchor points for building your understanding.
Read MoreIT has always been a learning intensive career. When you move into IT Leadership, that learning changes.
One of the many things you have to learn about is the organization the IT department supports.
The IT department does not exist in a vacuum. Your department, and your job, exists to serve the larger organization. By understanding this larger context, you can make better decisions.
Schedule one-on-one meetings with the leadership team members and other key managers and individuals. These meetings will serve as anchor points for building your understanding.
Read MoreIntroducing The IT Director Book Series
Introducing The IT Director Series. This series is targeted towards current and future IT leaders.
As a new IT leader, you are stepping into a world of excitement and challenge. Prepare yourself.
You and your team must understand and apply ever-changing technology to make your organization successful. You must continually improve yourself, your team, and your company.
The I.T. Leader’s First Days introduces skills and techniques you need to be effective and provides you with the strategies for your first weeks and months on the job.
Long-time IT leader, author, and speaker John Bredesen leverages decades of experience to create the book you need to start your IT leadership career. Clear explanations with a splash of humor cover a broad range of topics needed to launch your leadership career. Check out The I.T. Director series to see all his books.
Starting your new job off right is important to you. This book will help you make your First Days successful.
Is your IT department working harder than ever and still falling behind? Does the organization have unreasonable expectations and tightening budgets? Do you have a strong understanding of your company’s needs and priorities?
Drawing on over 25 years of IT experience, John has learned that leading the IT department is more than just understanding technology. You must also understand the Business and the People and how everything works together.
The IT Leader’s Handbook will get you going in the right direction in four major areas: Foundations, Business, People, and Technology. Concepts like Focus & Finish, Square Root Of Change, and Proactivity Is Overrated, along with real-world advice, will help you raise your game and be a better IT Leader. In his personable style of writing, John uses triathlons, race cars, alligators, and sailing ships to present concepts that are straightforward to understand and powerful to implement.
If you want a book about the latest technology wizardry, this is not that book. If you want a book that will give you useful information on leading the IT department, regardless of your technology stack, this is the book for you.
New Book! The I.T. Leader’s First Days
Click here to see all bookstores!
Folks, I am very pleased to announce my second book. If you are a new or future IT Leader, The I.T. Leader’s First Days is for you. It covers the skills you need to have and how to come up to speed quickly in your new position.
The ebook is available NOW. Paperback & Hardcover will be available in the next few weeks.
Here is the book description for The I.T. Leader’s First Days:
As a new IT leader, you are stepping into a world of excitement and challenge. Prepare yourself.
You and your team must understand and apply ever-changing technology to make your organization successful. You must continually improve yourself, your team, and your company.
The I.T. Leader’s First Days introduces skills and techniques you need to be effective and provides you with the strategies for your first weeks and months on the job.
Long-time IT leader, author, and speaker John Bredesen leverages decades of experience to create the book you need to start your IT leadership career. Clear explanations with a splash of humor cover a broad range of topics needed to launch your leadership career. Check out The I.T. Director series to see all his books.
Starting your new job off right is important to you. This book will help you make your First Days successful.
IT Leaders: Show Your Work Screens
Last week, I talked about Point-of-Need help as a way to put better help in your internally developed systems. This week, I want to cover a related topic.
Imagine this situation (for those of us that have been in IT for a while, we don’t have to imagine because we have lived it). An application gets written and implemented. Years go by. The people in the organization that set the requirements have moved on to other jobs. The developers have moved on. New people come into the organization and start using the software.
Now we have a situation where the following is true:
- The interior logic and calculations in the code are no longer well known.
- Users understand the software by the output, not by the design.
- The assumptions and decisions made by the organization when developers created the software are no longer known by the users, management, or the new developers.
The last point is the hard one. It leads the organization to no longer trust the software. What can we do about it?
Portions of this article are excerpts from my book, The I.T. Leaders’ Handbook, available in paperback and ebook from fine bookstores everywhere.
IT Leaders: Point of Need Help
If I told you to look at code in the above photo and tell me what it does, only a few of you could.
If I told you that to do your job, you had to read and understand it, unless you were one of those few, it would likely raise your stress.
But much of the software that businesses put out for internal use is as confusing as the code above. Why do we in IT department do that to our fellow employees?
Point-of-Need (PON) help is an idea that can help without redesigning a total new user interface.
Portions of this article are excerpts from my book, The I.T. Leaders’ Handbook, available in paperback and ebook from fine bookstores everywhere.
IT Leaders: Consultants & Contractors
IT Departments use external people regularly. While definitions can vary, here is what I use:
Contractors
We use contractors for staff augmentation. This can be situations where we need more developers or where we need a skill part time, like a DBA.
Consultants
We use consultants for deep technical expertise. Examples include a major new software product or the learning to use a new ERP module.
Let’s look at how we can be smart about using these types of resources.
Portions of this article are excerpts from my book, The I.T. Leaders’ Handbook, available in paperback and ebook from fine bookstores everywhere.
IT Leaders: Understanding How Vendors Make Money
Vendors have to make money to stay in business. Like it or not, it is in our best interest for our strategic vendors to make a profit off of our business. After all, win/win is the best way to sustain a long term strategic relationship.
If they don’t make a profit off of us over time, they will fire us. Yes, vendors do that — mainly by acting like a bad vendor until we go away. Or just tell us no the next time we want to place an order. Or dramatically raise prices.
If we understand how a vendor makes their profit, we also can understand where we have negotiation leverage. Just because we are ok with them making a profit, doesn’t mean we can’t negotiate to our benefit.
Let’s look at a few ways vendors can make money off us.
Portions of this article are excerpts from my book, The I.T. Leaders’ Handbook, available in paperback and ebook from fine bookstores everywhere.
Ask the IT Director: New Employee Turnaround
Dear IT Director,
I’m getting pressure for my team to turn around new employee requests faster. Our service level says five days, but often requests come inside that window. How can I get them respect the window?
Hopeful in Hoboken
Dear Hopeful,
Sorry, I don’t have good news for you. I’m afraid that your 5 day window is a relic of the past. You and your team are the ones that need to change, not the rest of the organization. Let’s look at why and what you can do.
IT Leaders: Questions to ask Vendors
By necessity, IT works with vendors. Some vendors are transactional and can easily be replaced. Some are strategic and are more critical to your organization. Ask these questions to build a good understanding of your strategic vendors. The answers won’t be easy to get and you may need to do some digging, but having them will definitely be beneficial.
Are you working with the vendor’s strengths?
As vendors grow, they add different products and services. Some will be major investments and will be implemented well. Some will be new and won’t have much depth or capabilities. A classic example is a new service that has just one or two people behind it. “Yeah, we do SharePoint consulting” may mean they have one person who knows a bit of SharePoint.
If a vendor has multiple products and services, take the time to learn which ones are strengths and which ones aren’t. The more important your need, the more important it is to work with the vendor’s strength. This will reduce the risk of vendor problems down the road.
Where does the vendor make their most profit?
This can be tough to figure out, as vendors aren’t always willing to share this. But it is important to your negotiation position to know this. A classic example is a services vendor. They likely make a good profit from consulting or contracting. They will protect that in any negotiations. Once you know that, you can work in other areas to get what you need. Sure, you can, and should, have discussions about cost, but there is more you are interested in. You can negotiate on topics such as support, specific personnel, add-ins, faster response and more if you respect their profit. There is a caveat on the size of the vendor. Once you get into Microsoft, Amazon, and Apple size vendors, we are dust mites on a flea on the tail and we have no influence over the dog.
How big is the development team?
For software companies, find out how big their developer team is. This tells you how many features they are planning on adding in the future. A small team may indicate that they believe the product is mature (startups are an exception, of course). Companies with multiple software products will move developers to the one needed the most new features. Putting it perhaps too simply, you don’t want to be on a product with a small maintenance team until you are winding down your own usage.
When was the last major rewrite?
Also related to software companies, understand that all major software products need to be re-architected and rewritten at least once in their lifecycle. I’m talking about ERPs, CRMs, Client Billing, etc. Ask questions about how long the product has been on the market and when the last rewrite was. Technology changes fast enough that if you get into the 5-7 year range, there should be a rewrite in the pipeline. For these large systems, it will take a few years to get the new product to replacement quality.
I’ve always been a fan of moving to the new product as soon as practical for my organization. The vendor will put most of the developer resources on the rewrite and their response will be much faster than the older version.
What investments have they made in the last two years?
Technology is a tough business and vendors need to be making investments and partnerships with others to be successful. Check out the News section on their website and see what they are doing. Especially for larger companies, those that go it alone will not last long.