Category: Looking Ahead

Too busy to be productive? Traps of our modern world

    Jim D

There was a very good article in the Wall Street Journal yesterday on ‘How to Save an Unproductive Day in 25 Minutes’.  I found it useful that the article points out a few techniques to keep that day from being a complete loss. But while the authors pointed out a portion of the cause of unproductivity (fragmentation and interruption), they failed to really pin down why so many of us struggle to be productive at work. Or perhaps to put it another way, why so many of us spend nearly all of our time killing alligators and spend so little time draining the swamp. This tendency of being ‘too busy to be productive’ finds particularly fertile ground in IT organizations.

The reason this is more prevalent in IT teams is because in IT there are are the usual ‘urgent’ distractions of email and phone calls and business meetings AND there are additional and very real urgent distractions of production issues and high priority projects that are running late but must be completed on a specific date. Thus, the opportunity and time to do important foundational tasks is even smaller. As a result, I come across many IT teams that are running at 100 miles an hour, not doing a good job of delivery of production or projects and their teams are at or close to burnout. And yet the solution to this very real and overwhelming issue is close at hand for IT leadership to leverage.

To solve this ‘too busy to be productive’ issue, you must address it on two levels: for your self and for your team. If you are running around with your hair on fire, then no amount of coaching by you will change how your team approaches their work. Let’s start with the knowledge that we will be able to change both your productivity and your team’s dramatically in two to three months. Understand that going forward, things that are important (and may or may not have a critical time deadline) will take precedence over everything that tends to interrupt but is not important. And you must demonstrate this improved choice everyday for the next 3 months. Here are the steps to get you and your team out of burnout and delivering with much greater quality and capability:

For you:

a) First, get your calendar balanced. Take your calendar for the next two months and let’s implement some radical changes. First go through your calendar and categorize your activities as either important or not important, reactive (dealing with a crisis demand or the fallout of an issue) or proactive (e.g. planning or addressing root causes). After categorizing, it would be interesting to see how much time you are spending on important and proactive work. My bet is it is less than 25%. And it is even less than that because the first part of the meeting focuses on today’s production failure rather than the planning work you were going to do. Next, either delegate or eliminate all the not important meetings from your calendar. Then, at least 3 times a week allocate 2 hours for important proactive work. Ensure you cover the areas you know need the most attention. If production is a problem, then spend two hours on root cause and how to improve change quality. If project delivery is a problem, spend an hour with your key team reviewing your project metrics and constraints affecting delivery and how to solve them. Spend at least 1 hour per week ensuring your key goals for the next 3 months and the next year are clear, and craft the messages to ensure they are well-communicated. Spend another hour figuring out how you can improve or coach your team to better performance. And stop doing every email and phone call that comes in. You do not need to meet with vendors for new products and solutions when you are having issues with your current delivery. At least half of your emails never need to be read or responded to – ignore them. Stop interrupting your meetings due to phone calls unless it is your boss or a very important customer.   Throughout your day, continually evaluate if you are spending good, solid time on important proactive work.

b) Make clear decisions and ensure you empower the team to execute with quality. Sometimes the cause of the productivity issue is a team caught up in over-analysis. If you are not making clear decisions or if you are making micro-decisions then you can cause your team to do 200% of the work necessary as they try to buttress their recommendation and collect every data point possible. Or the team may abdicate doing work they should do because in the end, they know that you will overrule them and make a micro-decision. Be self aware enough that you are causing these effects. If, in the past three months you have either recalled previous decisions more than once or sent multiple decisions back for more research than either the team is inadequate or you are not decisioning effectively. Sound out with a trusted colleague or coach if you need to improve your decisioning process. The bottom line is that you must stop requiring or doing unimportant analysis work or decision work. Let your team make the decisions for the areas they are accountable for and stop requiring perfect facts to make a decision in this imperfect world.

For your team:

a) First, set goals and expectations that i) you want them to deliver with quality and ii) you will support them to fix things so their work can be done in an improved manner. You must let them know that not only is it ‘safe’ to do things with quality, it is expected. Your team and organization may have fallen into the trap of thinking the only thing that is important is that work must get done based on the timeline, even if it means slamming something in that is riddled with defects. By insisting on quality first, you put your team on notice that this is foundational. Now, it should also be noted that this is not a pass to then have endless delays and no accountability to deliver. Instead, you must work hard to deliver in as timely a manner possible, but with the quality.

b) Use the proactive important time or your calendar to work with your team on the things that will improve how the work is getting done. Are your processes convoluted and time-consuming? Then spend time with the team to straighten them out and lighten the load. Are the tools inadequate? Then figure out what is best practice and pilot an improved set. Are things going in with lousy quality and causing production issues and lots of rework? Then stop letting poor quality change in and fix it before production. Do this even if it means a train wreck on a promised implementation date with the customer. Go and personally talk to the customer that quality is too important to you and to him or her. (I have never met a customer who remembered they insisted something go into production when it was known poor quality and instead blamed IT. Conversely, if you delayed something by a few weeks or even months yet it went in with quality, 6 months later, they invariably remember the successful launch versus the delay.) Spend your time with your team draining the swamp.

c) Set their goals and their schedule leveraging the fact the people do urgent things first. In other words, it is a natural tendency to focus on the urgent things like email instead of getting a backout plan done for a change or mapping out how we improve our development process. So, as the leader, set clear deliverables and clear dates and accountability for the important things (thus making the important and proactive work important AND urgent) for your team. It is a very effective management technique. Then, you will find that much more of the proactive work will get done.

Watch what happens then as a virtuous cycle takes hold. Because implementations start to get done with more quality, there is less fallout and production incidents. With reduced demand to work production issues, your team should have more time and focus on doing more proactive work (you must do (c) above to get this effect, otherwise they will just do more email or other urgent and unimportant work). And as they do more proactive work, they eliminate bottlenecks and rework and become even more productive. This cycle will take a few months to gain traction. And if your organization is really in a rut it may take as long as 6 months to show measurable difference. But usually, the effect is much quicker, and the first lift can be outpaced by the second and third and subsequent lifts as the cycle repeats. I recall one infrastructure component team that had a terrible production track record, the rest of IT viewed them as a bottleneck in the project process and the team, being close to burnout, saw no solution except to double or triple the number of staff. By implementing this approach, within a few months their change success rate went from the mid eighties to better then 99% and they trimmed their implementation processes significantly in terms of effort to deliver a unit of work. Everyone understood what their goals were and what was important to get done to be successful. And when I asked one of the managers to compare his team’s work to the state three months prior, he said ‘It is night and day. I can get all the important work done and our implementations go smoothly. I no longer spend every evening on a bridge call trying to figure out why something is not working. And I come in the next morning refreshed and productive. My week is in a box.’ This was the result in just a few months.

It can be tough in IT with the press of production incidents and the pressure of critical project deadlines. Add to that our everyday distractions of email and mobile devices and trying to keep up with the pace of technology and we soon lose the forest for the trees. Perhaps the best treatise on this effect is in ‘The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People’ by Stephen R. Covey and his time management matrix.  By leveraging this knowledge of techniques to ensure we work on the important things versus the unimportant but urgent, you can be a better manager and your teams can be more successful and have their week in a box. You might even buy copies of this book for your managers so they understand what is happening themselves and learn personal techniques to address it.

All of us undoubtably, have had some experience where we felt trapped in an overwhelming level of work and no real way out. How did you solve this? Do these approaches resonate with you? Have you employed them to change your team in a sustaining way? I look forward to hearing from you.

Best, Jim

Two Months In

    Jim D

Given that it has been about two months since I started this blog, I thought it would be worthwhile to take a quick check of how’s it gone and map out things I hope to accomplish in the upcoming few months. First, I am surprised and pleased at how comfortable and accessible the IT management content is in this format. And, so that you can ensure I stay on pace, I should be able to produce 1 to 3 good, solid posts every week touching on a key facet of IT management. Even better, I have several collaboration efforts just underway and I am excited that we will be able to get this additional authorship and content posted over the next two to three months.

My other mid-term goal (four to six months) is to fill out the dedicated pages on key areas (like high performance teams). I hope to offer greater structure, techniques and templates on these pages that you can then reference and apply. So look for the first of these in the January timeframe. And if you have any suggestions or would like to assist, send me a comment, I would welcome your involvement.

Enjoy the upcoming holidays and know that you will see plenty more here on Recipes for IT.

Best, Jim

Getting Ready for 2012: A few things to add to your technology plans

    Jim D

By now, you have submitted your budget for 2012 and hopefully have an updated set of business and IT goals. And even if it is not final, you have a solid draft and good understanding of what you must get done in 2012 to be successful. So, here are several things to add to your technology plans if you are not already doing them:

Give them BYOD: If you have not enabled your company’s staff to do their work on their own mobile device yet, put it in your 2012 first quarter plan to pilot it and then to roll out in 2012. This is an easy win — it saves your company money and it enables your users to use the device they want to use and be more productive. Not sure how to begin? Here is one reference on how and another on the trends. And check out the prevalent toolset being used at Good Technologies.

Implement more self-service: An oft-neglected area is the improvement of your support functions and their productivity and service. In a typical corporation almost every employee is touched by the HR and Fiance processes, which can be heavily manual and archaic. By working with your Finance and HR functions you can reduce their costs and improve their delivery to their users through implementation of automation and self-service. Continued improvement in workflow toolsets from Sharepoint to Lombardi mean you can automate and put on your intranet more and more minor business processes than ever before at far less cost and effort. The end result is lower operations costs in HR and Finance, a more satisfied user base, and a better perception of IT.

Topgrade your team: With the weak economy of the past several years, and your budget being under pressure, there is significantly less turnover of personnel, even in IT. Don’t wait for the upturn to improve your team. Ensure you have rigorous improvement plans for the mediocre performers on your team. And if there is no material improvement, look to topgrade. Now is the time to replace poor performers with strong new talent. Don’t wait for the economy to fully turn around and growth to be required, everyone will be looking then, and it will be much harder to get the best talent.

Virtualize everything new: Perhaps you have made good progress on virtualization and are now above 40 or even 50% of your servers being virtualized. You should be able to get this to 80 or even 90%. How? Presumably you have projects in your 2012 budget to tackle some of the remaining significant pools of legacy servers. That’s great. But make sure you close the barn door. Insist that every new project must use virtualized servers and storage. And any exceptions require CIO approval with strong business case rationale. You want to use fiats sparingly, but this is one case where the change in behavior from every project thinking they must have dedicated infrastructure yields outstanding benefits across the board.

Start an intern or graduate program: Often, intern or graduate programs are the first areas to be cut when times get tough. Yet these programs enable you to bring on skilled resources at very low cost to assist your team. And you should really view them as extended interview sessions where you have productive work being done during the interview. As you should be keenly aware, the IT unemployment rate is quite low, this summer it was 3.8%, which is basically close to full employment. So, in order to get a jump on the best grads this year, start or expand your intern and graduate program. By bringing new talent in the door, you will reduce your overall, average IT staff cost, bring in new ideas and fresh energy,  and contribute to your community and local education institutions. A win-win-win all around.

Do some fun awards and incentives: Let’s face it, things are tough and have been for several years. The economy, the global situation (e.g., Euro), and the housing crisis contribute to a dour mood. And the upcoming yearlong political campaign in the US will only further heighten the general negativity. Your workforce though will not be as productive in this downtrodden mental state. So make a difference in 2012. Have some fun and celebrate successes, even smaller ones. Provide some fun and low cost rewards for your teams that meet your goals and values. And providing some fun recognition is a key retention factor for your best staff. Don’t make the mistake of rewarding the arsonist for putting out the fire he set, so ensure that you consider the means as well as the ends on any effort. But have some fun, make it unique, and reward the team!

Business intelligence: One last item to check to make sure you have it in your 2012 plan is leveraging the data you already have to know your customer better, improve your products or services, and reduce your costs. Why have advertising for customers who never click through or buy? Why do customers call your call center when they should be able to do it easier online? Knowing your customers and knowing your products and services requires IT to partner with the business to leverage the data you have to obtain intelligence. Investing in this area should be a key goal for 2012. If you are not doing much here, then I recommend finding out what your competitors are doing and sitting down with your business partners to sort through what you must do. Add it to your list.

What would you add to the 2012 plan? What are your highest priority areas for 2012? Risk and Regulatory? Growth and new product? Or Cost and Efficiency?

Share your thoughts, I look forward to hearing from you.

Best, Jim

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

10 Things to be Thankful for in IT

    Jim D

I was quite thankful for the Thanksgiving holiday weekend, both for the family time and the downtime. The downtime was especially appreciated as I had a cold from which to recover. Of course, being thankful while being miserable from a cold does not come easily, I thought it would be worthwhile and fun to list out the things in IT we should be thankful for this year:

10. Having far better cell coverage and Wi Fi connectivity in public places, unless you really need it…

9. For our legal teams, having Oracle continue to acquire companies so we can then have our lawyers keep busy and pore over those contracts and figure out how Oracle is going to take advantage

8. Still in 2011, at the typical company, that most colleagues tend to avoid using the low quality video chat screens now proliferating so they don’t wonder if we had just rolled out of bed

7. That HP’s board and CEO have avoided any more bone-headed moves the past few months

6. That we can deliver cool devices to our long suffering business colleagues through BYOD (bring your own device) and ‘sandbox’ approaches like GOOD Technology software

5. That the worst hack of the year impacted a gaming network (Sony’s playstation) rather than financial or life and death systems — though it still impacted over 70 million users and cost Sony nearly $200M

4. That Apple re-introduced simple elegance as a prominent technology feature to marketing and product teams everywhere, thus reducing the number of absurd Swiss Army knife systems requests

3. The internet for once again ensuring everyone on the planets knows all about critical news like Charlie Sheen and tiger’s blood or Premier League footballers and their girlfriends!

2. While the national unemployment rate hovers at 9% all year, that the unemployment rate for IT professionals has dropped below 4% – thank goodness we can still get a job!

1. That all those social media technologies we thought were really only for teenagers, helped usher in the Arab Spring!

Add yours to the list! I look forward to your comments.

Best, Jim

Delivering Efficiency and Cost Reduction: Long term tactics II

    Jim D

We have spend the past several weeks covering how to deliver efficiency and cost reduction in IT, and particularly how to do it while maintaining or improving your capabilities. In my last post we discussed some two long terms tactics to drive efficiency but also at the same time to achieve improved capability. In this post we will cover the another key long term tactics that you can leverage to achieve world class cost and performance: leveraging metrics and benchmarking.

Let’s assume you have begun to tackle the quality and team issues in your shop. One of the key weapons to enable you to make better decisions as a manager and to identify those areas that you need to focus on is having a level of transparency around the operational performance of your shop. This doesn’t mean your team must produce reams of reports for senior management or for you. If fact, that is typically wasted effort as it is as much a show as real data. What you require to obtain effective operational transparency is the regular reporting of key operational metrics as they are used by the teams themselves. You and your senior team should be reviewing the Key Process Metrics(KPMs) that are used by the operational teams to drive the processes day-to-day and week-to-week. These would include things such as change success rates by team or a summary of project statuses with regular project reporting behind each status.

The ability to produce and manage using metrics depends substantially on the maturity of your teams. You should match the metrics to be reported and leveraged to your team’s maturity with an eye for the to master their current level and move to the next level.

For example, for production metrics you should start, if a Level 1 or 2 organization, with having basic asset information and totals by type and by business along with basic change success volumes and statistics and incident volumes and statistics. A level 3 organization would have additional information on causal factors. So in addition to change or incident statistics there would be data on why (or root cause) for a failed change or a production incident. A level 4 organization would have information on managing the process improvement itself. Thus you would have information on how long root cause takes to complete, how many are getting resolved, what areas have chronic issues, etc. Consider the analogy of having information on a car. At the lowest level, we have information on the car’s position, then we add information on the car’s velocity, and then on its acceleration at the highest level.

These three levels of information (basic position and volumes, then causes and verification metrics, then patterns and improvement metrics and effects) can be applied across any IT service or component. And in fact, if applied, your management team can move from guessing what to do, to knowing what the performance and capabilities are to understanding what is causing problems to scientifically fixing the problems. I would note that many IT managers would view putting the metrics in place as a laborious time-consuming step that may not yield results. They would rather fly and direct by the seat of their pants. This is why so many shops have failed improvement programs and a lack of effective results. It is far better to take a scientific, process-oriented approach and garner repeatable results that enable your improvement programs to accelerate and redouble their impact over time.

Another advantage of this level of transparency is that both your team and your business partners can now see measurable results rather than promises or rosy descriptions. You should always seek to make key data a commodity in your organization. You should be publish the key process metrics broadly. This will reinforce your goals and the importance of quality throughout your team and you will be surprised and the additional benefits that will be gathered by employees able to now to a better job because they have visibility of the impact of their efforts.

And when you do develop key process metrics, make sure you include metrics that have business meaning. For example, why publish metrics on number of incidents or outage time (or conversely system time availability) to your business partners? While there is some merit in these data for the technical team, you should publish for the business in more appropriate terms. For availability, publish the customer impact availability (which would be the total number of transaction failed or impacted to a customer divided by the total number of transaction that typically occur or would have occurred that month) plus the number of customers impacted. If you tell the business they had 50,000 customers impacted by IT last month versus you had 98.7% system time availability, it now becomes real for them. And they will then better understand the importance of investing in quality production.

In essence, by taking a metrics-based approach, we in IT are then following in the footsteps of the manufacturing revolutions on process that has been underway for the past 60 years. Your team should know about the basics on Continuous Process Improvement and Lean. Perhaps give them some books on Deming or others. We should run our shops as a factory for all of our routine or volume services. Our businesses must compete in a lean manufacturing world, and our work is not handcraft, it should be formalized and improved to yield astounding gains that compound over 12, 24 or 36 months.

On a final note, once you have the base metrics in place, you should benchmark. You will have one of two good outcomes: either you will find out you have great performance and a leader in the industry (and you can then market this to your business sponsors) or you will find out lots of areas you must improve and you now have what to work on for the next 12 months.

 

Have you seen success by applying these approaches? How has your team embraced or resisted taking such a disciplined approach? What would you add or change?

 

Best, Jim

Not Quite Y2K for IT, But Prepare for the London Olympics

    Jim D

Today in a quick conversation with a colleague we discussed the importance of preparing for the London Olympics for those firms serving markets that will be affected by the Olympics. In addition to the expected transportation crunch around London, there will be peaks in many service areas from ATMs to local financial transactions and purchases to inquiries for information. If your firm is serving the London or UK market, or is a 2012 Olympics Sponsor, I have compiled a quick checklist and schedule of activities to ensure your systems and operations are prepared. You can also use this checklist of course if your firm is engaged in similar events such as the World Cup or Superbowl or just for general improvement of performance at peak times.

To ensure you have your services ready and able to operate smoothly during a peak such as the London Olympics, you should you first perform a capabilities analysis of those services and operations that will be under load. This entails having a good set of service volume (both normal and current peak), service performance, and service quality (how many transactions fail or have issue). Your business should have forecasts for the additional peak load during the event. Similar to the recent royal wedding, which was the busiest debit and credit transaction day in the UK, for services used by consumers expect higher load. It is likely that this load will be greater than what systems have previously support, and last thing you (or your business) would want is a failure in the middle of the Olympics with the lost revenue and reputation implications. And remember to not just look at your systems but also ask key suppliers for their plans. This includes higher level services provided by third parties but also basic ones such as network and cell phone carriers. Find out what planning and testing they have done or will do prior.

Once you have gather the data for your systems and operations, and projected a forecast, the next step is to test. You likely will want to do this testing subsequent to the normal business peak of the upcoming season and yearend — so plan for January and February to do extensive testing. Look to uncover at what point your system breaks and what breaks it. If you system shows significant signs of stress at current peaks or fails at only 5 or 10% load above current peaks, you should work quickly to remediate and improve the performance and capacity. Take this time to also address wherever you see significant defect rates in your systems or operations. Is there a high number of retries? Are sessions lost being lost? Are calls being dropped or abandoned? Any elevated level of defect should be addressed as these could skyrocket in a high peak situation, effectively a very public and impacting outage even if the system is still running. Once you have corrected the defect and performance bottlenecks, retest to ensure that there is not a performance issue lurking immediately behind the one you just fixed. And plan to implement you change at least 2 months before the event so you are not trying out an updated system for the first time on highest peak load.

Your final step is event preparation. Here you need to ensure you have adjusted your change practices and schedules as you would for any critical period (i.e., perhaps a change freeze for systems underlying key services at least a week before and throughout the Olympics). Ensure you are fully staffed (the Olympics is during vacation time) so that if something occurs you do not have a gap in key man coverage. Ensure additional capabilities (such as greater language coverage in call centers) have been planned and implemented. Either leverage your current command center of put in place a command centre as you would for a critical implementation. Have the command center manage both a business channel and a technical channel where you report a regular, appropriate intervals, the volumes and performance of the critical services. If you do have an issue, you will improve your time to respond and hopefully to restore as your command center will already be on top of it.

This should lead you to a successful Olympics (and perhaps a gold medal!).

As you wrapup, ensure you capture the peak data so you can understand how your systems and operations behave under stress. This will enable you to pinpoint where you should invest your next set of monies to get improvement (this is always helpful).

I look forward to your success and quiet delivery (staying out of the newspapers).

Best, Jim

Delivering Efficiency and Cost Reduction: Long term tactics

    Jim D

We have spend the past several weeks covering how to deliver efficiency and cost reduction in IT, and particularly how to do it while maintaining or improving your capabilities. In my last post we discussed what are some of the recent technology industry trends that enable reduced costs at the same or improved capabilities. In this post we will cover the first two of the long term tactics that you can leverage to achieve world class cost and performance: quality and a high performance team.

The first and really most important area to tackle is quality. If a factory had a quarter of the output that it produced was defective and became scrap, it could no long compete in the lean manufacturing regime of today’s industry. Yet frequently, IT shops have defect rates of 10%, 20%, or even north of 50%. And much of the time and effort of the IT team is actually spent fixing things as opposed to new work or proper maintenance. You need to regard every defect in your shop as waste and as a cost to you and your business. You should tackle this waste wherever it occurs in your shop. It is not uncommon for more than 50% of large projects or programs to be over schedule and over budget. It is not uncommon to see shops where more than 10 or 20% of the changes result in some other problem, typically impacting production and service to the customers. These areas must be addressed with rigor.
For projects and programs, are you following a robust project methodology? Do you have proper sponsorship and governance? Are you leveraging a strong analysis and requirements management methodology and toolset? Are you taking advantage of modern methodologies that solve the tough parts of a problem first, get good prototypes out early for user review and avoid the big bang and timeliness issues of a waterfall approach? Are you giving your project managers a full toolset along with the industry training and empowerment to make the right calls? If not, then you are likely experiencing issues and delays on more than 25% and perhaps more than 50% of your projects. And that is where your money is being wasted. When a fully staffed project team is waiting for requirements signoff, or when requirements are being changed again, too late in the project cycle, you are burning project monies while the resources idle or have to do rework. By introducing a rigorous process and robust tools and metrics, you will be able to avoid most issues before they start and for those that do occur, you will know precisely why and be able to correct it for the next project.
For your production services, you should insist on at least a 98% change success rate and if you wish to be a 1st quartile shop you need to drive to a 99% or 99.5% change success rate. This means that for every 200 changes only 1 or 2 fail. These success rates can be achieved by ensuring you have an effective but not burdensome change process and you have rigorous change testing and planning (including a backout plan). Have your operations and service management experts participate in and provide guidance to those making the changes (either the application areas or the infrastructure teams). And ensure full root cause on any change that fails with the requisite actions to prevent re-occurance being completed. Publish simple and straightforward reports on change and project success and quality. By measuring quality your team will get the message and place much more emphasis on getting it right the first time. And remarkably, by focusing on quality first, you will get a strong reduction in cost (whereas if you first tried to reduce costs then to improve quality you would make little progress on either). Accompanying this thrust with simple but bedrock true messages such as ‘Do it right the first time’ and ‘Spend it like it is your own money’ go a long ways to get the spirit of what you are trying to get accomplished across. You must mean it though and you must back up doing it right, even if it costs more initially. Remember you are looking to establish a quality culture and achieve longer term returns here.

The other long term tactic we will discuss today is achieving a highly productive and well-balanced team. First, understand that while you are implementing longer term team plans you should leverage some or all of the near term tactics for staffing that I identified in the October 31st post. The long term tactics are straightforward and are based on you attaining a staffing mix that is composed of a balanced mix of top performing individuals who, for your company, are in the right geography and at critical mass sites.

Some key truths that should be recognized and understood before setting out to build such a highly productive team:

– top performing engineers, typically paid similar as their mediocre peers are not 10% better but 2x to 10x better

– having primarily only senior engineers and not a good mix of interns, graduates, junior and mid and senior level engineers will result in stagnation and overpaid senior engineers doing low level work

– having a dozen small sites with little interaction is far less synergistic and productive than having a few strategic sites with critical mass

– relying on contractors to do most of the critical or transformational work is a huge penalty to retain or grow top engineers

– line and mid-level managers must be very good people managers, not great engineers, otherwise you are likely have difficulty retaining good talent

– engineers do not want to work in an expensive in-city location like the financial district of London (that is for investment bankers)

– enabling an environment where mistakes can be made, lessons learned, and quality and innovation and initiative are prized means you will get a staff that behaves performs like that.

With these truths in mind, set about building the team by addressing your workforce strategy (sites and mix); upgrading your recruiting and performance management; and revising your goals and rewards. Then execute these relentlessly while you up the training and coaching. As this begins to bear results you will then need to prune the poor performing managers and filter out the low performing staff.

So build a workforce strategy that matches the size and scale of your company. If your company is global, you will need a global workforce. If it is domestically focused, be domestic but look at near shore engineering locations as well. Establish the proper contractor staff mix based on function (again see the near term efficiencies staff post). Ensure your locations match up to where you can draw talent. For example, minimize expensive in-city locations. Choose instead locations with good commuting, very good nearby engineering universities and vibrant nearby communities. You will be rewarded with better quality engineers and lower attrition. Do you have 12 locations each with 50 to 150 engineers? Consider consolidating to 3 or 4 sites each with 300 to 500 engineers. And one or two should be global or near shore sites. And ensure you set it up so any significant IT function is done in two locations (thus eliminating the cost for BCM and establishing opportunities for work handoff between the sites yielding faster time to market). Establish strong intern and graduate programs with the universities near your key sites. If you are overweight with senior engineers, ensure that your new hires are graduates or junior engineers (even if by mandate). As you compose the plan, engage you senior business leaders to ensure you have support for the changes and potential synergies with other business sites or locations. Ensure they understand you will always locate client-facing personnel with the client, but IT ‘back and middle office’ staff will be where it is best to recruit and retain IT talent.

Make sure your recruiting practices are up to snuff. You should be doing a thorough filtering of technical talent while also ensuring that you are getting someone who can work well with others and has the same key values of quality, initiative and responsibility that you are seeking. Leverage team interview or top-grading practices as appropriate to ensure you weed out those that do not interact well (especially management recruits or team leads). Invariably, management in a IT organization can improve how they handle performance management. Because most of the managers are engineers, their ability to interact firmly with another person in a highly constructive manner is typically under-developed. Provide classes and interactive session on how to do coaching and provide feedback to employees. Even better, insist that performance reviews must be read and signed off by the manager’s manager before being given to improve the quality of the reviews. This a key element to focus on because the line manager’s interaction with an employee is the largest factor in undesired attrition and employee engagement.

Even if you execute your workforce mix and your recruiting and performance management flawlessly and you do not align your goals and rewards (and incentives) you will not get the change you desire. Quite simply, your smartest team members, will observe what you reward, and if you do not reinforce the values you are looking to achieve (productivity, quality, initiative, etc), you will not get the changes desired. So, gather your senior team. Work together to revise and update the vision and goals of your organization. Ensure they are big enough goals (e.g., Not ‘ Save $40M in costs’ instead ‘ Become top quartile in quality and efficiency in IT for our industry and company size by 201x’). And then line up quarterly awards that are very public that reward those who exemplify the values and results you are looking to achieve. The organization will then align their efforts much more keenly to your vision and goals.

Now that you have the foundation in place for long term results, execute and improve every quarter. You will need to begin pruning. And as you add new and better capability to your organization through improved recruiting techniques, you can afford to prune those marginal managers that you couldn’t lose before. This will provide another round of lift for your team productivity as they are replaced with better internal candidates who have grasped the new values and effort or better filtered external talent.

In the next post on long term tactics, we will talk about the metrics and benchmarking you will use to ensure you stay on track an enable you to identify additional and continual improvements. But you are on your way now.

What areas would you change? What pitfalls do you see or have you encountered? Post a comment and let me know. I look forward to your feedback.

Best, Jim

 

Hello world!

    Jim D

Hello! This is the first post for the Recipes for IT blog. As I outlined in the introduction to the site, I am looking to provide a good reference discussion site for best practices in IT and in particular for IT management. I will try to touch on 1 or 2 themes or topics each week and I look forward to the responses and discussion that they spark.

As some of you may know, I have worked as a senior leader in IT for over 20 years and I have spent most of my time in IT being responsible for turning poor-performing shops into high performance teams that provide competitive advantage. Over the years, I believe I have been able to ascertain numerous best practices and approaches that enable IT leaders to be much more successful. Delivering IT today, with all of the cost reduction demands, the rapidly changing technology, the impact of IT consumerization, and security and risk demands, is, simply put, tough work. It is complicated and hard work to get the complex IT mechanism, with all the usual legacy systems issues, to perform as well as the business requires.

So to help those IT leaders out, I have started this site to provide recipes and ideas on how to tackle tough but solvable problems they face.

I will cover topics from how to recruit and develop a high performance team, to how to deliver projects predictably with speed, to how to vastly improve your production availability. And we will discuss and provide perspective on the latest trends from cloud to mobile to agile.

Later this week, I am thinking the first topic should be how to tackle cost reductions in a tough environment given the economic situation.

Best, Jim