IT Manager's Handbook: Getting Your New Job Done (65 page)

•
Make others aware of steps you’re taking to reduce costs, as well as significant changes in IT’s operations and strategies.

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Share how changes to the industry (either IT or your organization’s), changes in key vendor plans, or changes in regulatory requirements will impact your team, and your plans to address them.

•
Let your users know about the mission, values, strategies, and goals you’ve developed for IT.

•
Consider doing a high-level presentation of IT’s activities on a regular basis (quarterly, semiannually, annually).

Not only does this put your and your department in a positive light regarding transparency and information, it also helps convey a sense of what IT actually does.
You
know the IT department does a lot more than resetting passwords; now it is your job to show
them
that.

Just as important as what information you share is
how
you share it. As mentioned earlier, you’re better off sharing proactively instead of just responding to request and inquiries. However, consider different mechanisms for sharing. In some cases, an e-mail is appropriate. In other cases, a more interactive mode, such as a phone call or in-person meeting, or even just walking around for the spontaneous chat, will help to greatly further the discussion and the relationship. Alternatively, you may want to meet formally with a group of key users to share some information. Also consider posting information like this on an internal website so they can always find the most up-to-date information. Doing this helps them see that everyone is getting the same information and also fosters greater discussion and Q&A. Finally, make sure you give credit where credit is due. Identify members of your team and those departments and user areas that helped you achieve successes. A little bit of credit sharing and modesty can go a long way.

Collecting Information

The flip side to sharing information is collecting it. Some information you’ll already have within IT, such as Help Desk metrics, IT spending, system and resource statistics (response times, availability, etc.), project status reports, etc. But other types of information you’ll have to go out and gather. Ideas for information you can collect are:

•
User satisfaction surveys.
Don’t just rely on statistics from the Help Desk and your
call tracking
software. In addition, go out and ask users directly about the Help Desk. See how well this matches up with the other metrics. As is often said, perception can be more important than reality. User surveys can also ask users about new features, functionality, services, and so on they’d like to see from IT. See the section
“User Surveys”
later in this chapter on
page 280
for more information.

•
Post implementation project reviews.
When a project is completed, it is tempting to just move on to the next project. But you should first stop and take a moment to objectively assess how well it went. You can use a survey format or a focus group format to ask the key participants in the project how things went. For example: Were objectives met? Is the system functioning as expected and is it easy to use? How did IT’s role in the project work? Were there sufficient communications? Was the project well planned? Were there good training and documentation? For specific advice on what to include in a Closeout Report (as reports at the end of projects are called), see the section
“Writing a Closeout Report”
on
page 121
in
Chapter 4, Project Management
.

•
Feedback about various IT services.
Ask for comments about all IT services, such as training (a class evaluation survey, for example), the company website, and any communications to users.

Other methods of getting information include:

•
Attend meetings with department heads.
When you meet with key users and department heads, listen for items that may identify an opportunity. These can include challenges they are trying to address, difficulties with existing systems and resources, changes they are expecting or trying to implement, etc.

•
Periodically follow up with individual users.
Perhaps you can pick some random trouble tickets that were opened at the Help Desk and follow up with those users. Won’t they be impressed that the manager of IT called to find out if they were satisfied with the support they received?

•
Ask users for information and advice.
Ask others how you are doing or if they are getting what they need from you and your department.

It is important to remember that the more information you can collect, the more valuable it is likely to become. For example, hearing about plans from the Sales and the Customer Service department heads individually is good. But hearing about both means you may be able to spot integration and leveraging opportunities or see overall changes in trends and directions that may not be apparent just from one set of plans alone.

Not only should you collect and share information, but you should encourage your team to do the same.

Proactive Solutions

Through information sharing and collecting you’ll find lots of opportunities for IT to deliver solutions. However, an important set of solutions for you to bring are often the ones the users didn’t even know existed or that they needed. Frequently, these can be delivered at little or no cost because they are features that are hidden in existing solutions or inexpensive to activate/implement. These can also be enterprisewide solutions that no individual department or user group thought to ask for. Some examples include:

•
Conference calling services. Many PBX solutions can provide limited conference calling capabilities that may suffice instead of paying for an outside service.

•
Proactive alerts about printer problems. Printer manufacturers have free utilities to monitor their printers. These can alert your team (sometimes interfacing directly to your call tracking software) about issues such as paper jams and low toner.

•
Virus detection alerts. In addition to alerting users when their antivirus software detects malware, the software may also be configurable to alert IT to respond. Not only does this make IT look proactive, but it also ensures that the user doesn’t ignore the problem by simply closing the warning prompt.

•
Conference room reservation systems. These can be inexpensive and integrate with your calendaring solution to eliminate overbooking of conference rooms. Large companies have systems devoted solely to this function but small companies often assign rooms an Outlook user name and then schedule them in the Calendar.

•
Webcasts of important meetings and announcements. These can be used for demos, training, major initiatives, etc. They can also be easily recorded and archived for on-demand viewing.

•
Implementation of toll-free numbers for mobile workers. These can be 800 numbers to your main phone line and to your voicemail system. Not only are these convenient, but they can be far less expensive than hotel dialing fees and cell phone roaming charges.

•
Instant messaging and Web-conferencing solutions help facilitate communications with remote workers. The growth of telecommuters has generated a whole new set of tools to facilitate workers who work remotely and for the teams that have to support them. Being involved with remote and telecommuting workers is a great opportunity for you and IT.

•
Department and companywide intranet solutions. (Examples are discussed in
Chapter 11, Connectivity: Social Media, Handhelds, and More
, on
page 287
)
. Look to automatically install the links as favorites for all users so that they don’t have to hunt for the URL.

•
Have systems send out automated reports and alerts of important events. Imagine the department head of Sales automatically getting an alert or e-mail when the sales system reports a particularly big sale.

•
Upgrade of end-user tools. Look to do end-user upgrades (e.g., Microsoft Windows or Office, updates on handheld devices) that deliver clearly visible new features and functionality to the users. Also, make sure that there is communication about these as you do them. In addition, look beyond the basics of tools. For example, Microsoft Office has a large volume of free add-ins for its Office suite that can be distributed, and applications for handheld devices are growing at an incredible rate, and many of them are free. Look for those that really seem like they’d deliver value to a large portion of your user community and show the users how to use them. (Consider distributing a list of useful free apps for phone and tablet devices and simple instructions on how to acquire them.)

•
Set the configurations for end users to make life easier for them. For example, are the defaults set so that user documents are saved automatically to the network (or do they default to the local PC where they aren’t backed up and a disk crash could spell disaster)? Is your e-mail client set to do auto-archiving or to display message sizes so that users can easily identify those taking up the most space? Does your directory of printers contain enough information so that users can find the one they are looking for?

Don’t expect all your solutions to be welcomed and universally valued by all users. Some may find new implementations to be of no use or even annoying or burdensome. That’s okay. As long as they have the flexibility to ignore, disable, or tweak what you’ve done they’ll be fine. Also, as you deliver these solutions you’re giving people a sense of what IT can do, which will generate more visibility and understanding. If you implement an alert for big sales in the Sales system, the head of manufacturing may ask you about implementing an alert when his area exceeds a quota or, after implementing a conference room reservation system, the head of audio-visual may ask you about expanding that to reserve/track those portable projectors.

Being Flexible

Most organizations have adopted certain IT standards to drive efficiency of support, which can make a great deal of sense. Organizations will standardize on a certain vendor for their computers, oftentimes picking one product line, or even one model. They will standardize on desktop images, software versions, printer types, naming conventions, and so on.

Along these lines, organizations may also “lock down” the desktop environment so that users are limited in what they can do (e.g., users don’t have permission to install software). Such restrictions can address security and licensing concerns and reduce calls to the Help Desk if a user runs into trouble.

However, it is important not to take standards so far that they end up getting in the way of what your users need to do or are the catalyst for an adversarial relationship. For example, if you do lock down the desktop environment, consider giving the users some flexibility to choose their own wallpaper, colors, screen savers, etc. Allowing users to have pictures of their kids, pets, or favorite sports team for their desktop background can go a long way.

Similarly, some flexibility of technical standards is called for. In some cases, the bigger concern about exceptions to technical standards is not the impact on IT’s support, but the concern that other users will take note and want to “keep up with the Joneses” (sometimes referred to as “technology envy”). So when you have standards, make sure you are clear to yourself as to why you have them. After all, it causes little impact to IT if some users have different keyboards/mice, monitors, or even slightly different hardware specifications (such as memory, hard disk size, processor). In the end, many of these items are fairly meaningless in the scope of the bigger picture of what the IT role is. See more discussion on this topic in the section
“Standards”
in
Chapter 7, Getting Started with the Technical Environment
on
page 199
.

Nonetheless, having
some
standards is important. As data moves all over the place, and the questions become what the user’s hardware is and what the company’s hardware is, you can get into some awkward situations quickly. Never mind the complexities involved when an employee is fired from the company—let’s just stick with the “simple” issues of what your department will support. Without some standards, things get sticky fast. See the section
“The Consumerization of IT”
, on
page 271
later in this chapter and
Chapter 11, Connectivity: Social Media, Handhelds, and More
on
page 287
for a fuller discussion of these issues.

User Training

There are many options available for user training, as well as training for your staff. The ones you choose to use depend on the size and budget of your organization, as well as the skills you need to develop in your users.

In-House Classes

If you’re able to have your own training staff and facilities, you can tailor course content, schedule, and class size exactly to your needs. The costs are readily identifiable in terms of staff and equipment needed for the training room.

Third-Party Training Providers

These organizations can provide quality training in popular skill sets. Alternatively, you can usually arrange (at an additional charge) for these providers to deliver classes customized to your needs. Training providers usually have a staff of professional and highly experienced trainers, and the curricula for many classes usually adhere to outlines established by the appropriate vendor (e.g., Microsoft) to maintain their authorizations.