IT Manager's Handbook: Getting Your New Job Done (64 page)

Chapter table of contents

10.1
Relationships with Users

10.2
The Consumerization of IT

10.3
When Your Users are Part of a Mobile Work Force

10.4
The Help Desk

10.5
Service Level Agreements

10.6
Further References

The relationship you and your team have with the user community is one of the most important relationships you will have to maintain. In some regards, your reputation in the company can be measured by your relationship with the users. If you have a positive relationship, the user community (which for IT is essentially everyone in the organization) will be your ally for almost anything you want to do. However, if that relationship is less than positive, the user community will question and doubt all your plans—both the value of those plans and your ability to implement them successfully. Later in this chapter there is a discussion about
Help Desk services
on
page 275
, the most visible and most commonly thought of aspect of working with users. But first we discuss the overall relationship you and the IT department must maintain with the users.

10.1 Relationships with Users

One of the most important things you can do as an IT manager is to establish and maintain a good relationship with your users. They should see you as available, reliable, dedicated to service, and having their best interest at heart. For the most part, they do not care about your other customers, your bosses, the vendors, the technology issues—they care about their own needs. Prior to becoming a manager, you had exposure to only a portion of your users, and only a portion of their IT needs. Now that you’re managing the entire department, all the users, and all their IT needs, rest squarely on your shoulders.

One of the recurring themes in this book is the importance of understanding who your users are, what they need, and what are they doing that could impact or benefit you. While this chapter is dedicated to your role with the users, we also discuss related issues in detail in other parts of the book:

•
In the section
“The First 100 Days”
on
page 20
in
Chapter 1, The Role of an IT Manager
, it is explained that you need to determine who your team members and who your customers are; and that there are different user areas that will require your attention, and different user areas whose attention you require.

•
The section
“People to Meet and Know”
on
page 24
in
Chapter 1, The Role of an IT Manager
, discusses that there are many people you should establish relationships with, including your staff, your peers, and your boss, but it doesn’t end there.

•
As discussed in the section
“Communicate with Your Team”
on
page 32
in
Chapter 2, Managing Your IT Team
, communicate your vision for the department to your staff. They should understand both where you want the department to go and the plans you have for getting there.

•
Users of different generations may have different priorities, styles, and preferred ways of dealing with others. The discussion in the section
“Generational Issues at Work”
in
Chapter 2, Managing Your IT Team
on
page 57
covers this in detail.

Who Are Your Users?

IT departments have all kinds of users that represent a cross-section of the company: executives, assistants, local users, remote users, finance, marketing, warehouse, human resources, facilities, users that love technology and users that hate technology.

It’s important to note that some organizations don’t like the term “user.” Because IT is a service-focused organization, many organizations prefer “customer” or “client” instead. In an organization like a law firm, the term “client” could cause confusion, just as in other organizations the term “customer” might cause confusion.

Regardless of what they are called, users' needs are best addressed in a thorough and planned manner. Everyone knows what the results of knee-jerk reactions to problems are; the problem may get solved, but much more money and/or time is spent than should have been. Or the visible part of the problem goes away, while the underlying cause remains only to resurface at some point in the future. Spend some time in advance planning to address your users' needs.

Find Out Who Your Department Thinks Its Users Are

Don’t quibble, keep focused: who are the people your department is trying to serve?

This can be a simple inquiry; ask your team while you are discussing other matters with them. Keep it informal. They may say that their users are a small subset of the company; they may reply that their users are mostly in Legal or “Tom S., who calls me all the time.” While these are true, they are not the entire story. Your users may also include customers or business partners of the company; find out who they are, where they are, and how they function within their company, what their relationship is with your department, and what they want out of the relationship.

For a fuller discussion of this very important topic, see the sections
“Developing an IT Strategy”
on
page 10
and
“Determine Who Your Customers Are and What Their Needs Are”
in
Chapter 1, The Role of an IT Manager
on
page 12
. Your “customers” may or may not be who you think they are.

Find Out Who Your Boss Thinks Your Users Are

This is an important perspective for a few reasons. First, it gives you some insight into how he views the organization’s world. Second, it will probably alert you to where some of the challenges are. Those challenges might include some political minefields, or perhaps information on areas that have been particularly critical of IT’s services.

If your boss’s perception of who your users are varies significantly from yours, you need to learn why the difference exists, and which one of you is right. (It’s a safe bet you’re both right, though.) If your boss always mentions the shipping department’s needs and problems, ask why he never mentions the sales department.

Having spoken to your team and your boss, now canvass the rest of the organization. Contact the heads of the major departments of the company. Obviously, size matters. If you work for a 10-person start-up, talking to all the key players will not take long, nor will it be a major effort. You still need to prepare, but you can do it fairly quickly. On the other hand, if you work for a Fortune 500 corporation with divisions around the globe, canvassing your users is going to require some careful sampling.

Meet the Users

Once you’ve started to assemble a list of who your users are (either by name, or group, or function) you need to meet with them, establish a relationship, and ask them some questions about their needs.

These questions can help to get the discussion started:

•
What services do you currently get from the IT department?

•
How well does IT satisfy your needs?

•
Have we fallen short in any areas? Or surpassed expectations in others?

•
Which services do you need, or would you like, that you are not currently getting?

•
How do you view the use of information technology in your department?

•
Who else would be worth speaking to?

•
What are your short-term and long-term goals and needs?

•
Have you read, or heard, about any technology solutions, perhaps used by competitors, that you’d like to explore?

Ask these questions of the key department managers in your company. Tell them you are trying to align your department’s functions with their needs. They may look at you funny—especially if they haven’t seen this level of interest before from IT—but they will usually be happy to chat.

Use meetings like this to establish a continuing dialog and relationship with key users and departments. This might be an ongoing process, or it might be facilitated through periodic meetings, perhaps a few times a year.

And remember that these discussions should not be one way. You have as much information to share as your users do. See the section
“Sharing Information”
later in this chapter on
page 266
.

Although much of the discussion may be at a high level, you may also get one or two detail items (e.g., “This printer always jams with legal paper,” or “Whenever I log in from home I always have to enter my password twice”). These are great opportunities to demonstrate for them what they can expect from you as the new IT Manager. You should investigate these problems and make sure that they are resolved. Then, just as important, follow up with that department head to tell him you looked into the problem(s) he reported and provide an explanation of what was found, and how it was addressed. Even though they are small problems, you’ll be showing that you listened to what was said, cared about it, took action, and followed up. You’ll never be faulted for demonstrating those traits.

What you are trying to do is establish and develop a relationship. Remember that in the beginning, the most important asset you may bring to these discussions will probably be a set of ears.

Being Available and Reachable

It is important to remember that IT is a service organization and is there to provide services to others, whether they are customers, partners, or end users. As such, one of the easiest ways to damage your reputation is by ignoring those you are supposed to be servicing. “Ignoring people” comes in all shapes and sizes; it can be not responding to phone calls and e-mails, skipping meetings you’re invited to, or failure to follow up on commitments you make. Invert the last sentence and you can see how you
should be
operating with the users.

Of course, a prompt follow-up and response are only half the equation. The other half is being proactive. A number of things can be done to show that you are always thinking about the user community:

•
Call and/or meet periodically with various key users and department heads to review project status and to discuss new initiatives, pain points, etc.

•
Send e-mails to users about new solutions that you think they might find valuable and offer your team’s assistance to help investigate.

•
Alert users to articles in your trade journals about what other organizations are doing and how others have addressed the same problems the business areas in your company are facing.

•
Notify them if you hear about seminars, webinars, trade shows, conferences, user group meetings, websites, and so on that you think would be of value to them.

•
Discuss with your users activities that are going on in the industry that relate to them. If your HRIS vendor merges with another or releases a new version of their software, your VP of HR will probably be very interested.

•
Make training, FAQs, and tips and tricks available.

•
Share IT plans and activities (see next section).

Sharing Information

Some individuals and teams seem to be reluctant to share information about what they are doing, and what’s going on in their areas. However, one of the best ways to get others to share information with you is to start off by sharing information with them. In addition to some of the ideas mentioned in the previous section, there are other ways to share information with your user community:

•
Share a high-level status of all of IT’s projects, particularly those that will benefit the user community. The users may not care as much about purely technical activities (such as expanding the SAN), but they will be interested in those that benefit them directly, improve service levels and reliability, enhance functionality, generate revenues or cost-savings, etc.

•
For key users and department heads, provide a deeper dive into the projects that are directly related to them. Of course, as discussed in
Chapter 4, Project Management (page 103)
, these stakeholders should be getting regular project status reports from the project managers. But there will be added emphasis if you personally review the status with the key individuals.

•
Share the results of your own metrics, both good and bad. These metrics can include statistics about the Help Desk, user surveys, transaction processing, response time, system reliability, etc. You should include commentary explaining what led to the metrics changing (or why they haven’t changed) and what steps you plan to address areas that haven’t improved or have deteriorated.

•
Don’t be afraid to alert users to problems that IT is having. When there is a problem it is important to acknowledge it and to talk about your plans. For example, if one of your databases is suddenly responding very slowly, advise the users that IT is aware of it and is working on the problem. If nothing else, you may deflect some calls that were going to the Help Desk. Provide periodic updates until the problem is resolved.