IT Manager's Handbook: Getting Your New Job Done (8 page)

Projects exist for a variety of reasons, and most of all because they are important to someone. Maybe they’re important to you or your boss, maybe they’re important to the CEO. Either way, by learning about the project activity, you get a sense of where the priorities are for individuals as well as the department and company.

Some of these projects may fall squarely on your shoulders, and you may find that you’re the (unofficial) Project Manager. Some of your staff may be leading projects, and your involvement can vary depending on how well you determine they’re being run. Other projects may just have you as a team member, perhaps playing a very large role or perhaps a very small role.

Whether you’re forced to take ownership of a project, or simply sit in on some meetings, projects are an excellent way to quickly become knowledgeable about what’s going on, meet others in the organization, be involved, and allow others to see why you were hired.

Is the Status Quo Good Enough?

Just because there aren’t any complaints doesn’t mean that things are “good enough.” The lack of complaints may simply mean that people have grown tired of complaining and have just given up. You and your department should always strive to be better. Of course, “better” may have different meanings:

•
Better
Service Level Agreements (SLAs)

•
Faster transactions

•
Greater regulatory compliance

•
More thorough documentation

•
Higher system availability

•
Better reliability

•
Improved morale

•
Fewer errors

•
Processes with fewer steps

•
Better communication with the user community

You certainly weren’t chosen for this role to make things worse, and they probably wouldn’t have selected you if all they needed was someone to keep things as they are. It’s important to remember that making things better is often an
iterative
process, where a few changes now are followed by additional changes down the road, each contributing a little bit toward overall improvement.

For example, there are a number of things you can do to increase the up time of a database:

•
Keep the database software up to date with vendor patches and fixes

•
Run periodic recommended database maintenance procedures

•
Stay abreast of suggestions and guidelines from the vendors (hardware, database, OS) on best practices

•
Ensure that the database server doesn’t have other applications running on it, which can increase the chances of crashes

•
Keep the server’s operating system up to date with vendor patches and fixes

Each of these steps can improve the reliability of the database to various degrees. Taken together, they may significantly improve the uptime statistics.

You may find that a similar approach works best in improving the overall performance of your department. Although there may be a small number of things that can be changed to have a big impact, your focus should also be on the continual process of small improvements that chip away at problem areas. From your perspective as a manager, it’s sometimes very difficult to see changes on a day-to-day or week-to-week basis. You frequently have to look back over a period of months, or sometimes a year, and ask “remember when we used to … ?”

People to Meet and Know

At this point you’re busy developing relationships with your staff, your peers, and your boss, but it doesn’t end there. There are many people you should establish relationships with. It’s a good idea to start collecting names and setting up introductory meetings with key people you’ll be working with. Your boss, your peers, and even your staff can offer some names. If you were promoted into your new role without changing companies, you may already know many of these names. You may even have relationships with many of them, but you now need to forge those relationships from the perspective of the IT Manager.

Some areas you’ll want to be sure to connect with include:

•
Key user areas:
Find out which areas are most dependent on IT and the services IT provides. Meet with those department heads, learn how they use IT, when they have their busiest periods, etc. Examples may include marketing and sales, accounting, HR, and manufacturing departments.

•
Senior executives:
It’s always a good idea to have a strong relationship with upper management. Learn which ones are big proponents of IT and which have the worst experiences with IT. In addition to building a good rapport with executives, you should do the same with their assistants.

•
Human resources:
As described later in the section (
“Human Resource Issues”
on
page 25
), you’ll probably quickly discover many HR issues. Find out who in HR you can work with to review different situations.

•
Finance and accounting:
IT often has one of the largest departmental budgets. You’ll want to have someone to partner with in accounting to help you deal with budgeting issues, chargebacks, forecasting, tracking spending, etc. IT budgeting is discussed in depth in
Chapter 6, Managing the Money
on
page 161
.

•
Procurement:
IT has a large budget because it buys a lot of expensive hardware, software, and services, and all that buying generally goes through a formal procurement process. In some organizations, IT purchases go through the company’s general Procurement group. In other organizations, IT purchases may be done directly by the IT team. If the former, you’ll want to form a strong relationship with the Procurement group to make sure your orders are handled quickly and accurately. If the latter, find out how your own procurement process operates.

•
Legal:
With that large budget and all that purchasing come a lot of paperwork and contracts with an awful lot of legalese. Whether it’s a maintenance contract or a volume agreement with a vendor, you’ll be working with the company’s Legal department to wade through it all.

•
Audit:
In all likelihood, especially if yours is a publicly traded company or if you work in a heavily regulated industry (e.g., finance, health care), you’ll be doing a lot of work with your internal audit team, sometimes referred to as the Risk Management group. This is a result of the ever-increasing scrutiny and demand for integrity in the IT professional in recent times.
Chapter 8, Security and Compliance
on
page 205
details some of the topics that may have you working very closely with your Audit team.

Quick Introductory Meetings

Introductory meetings can be as short as 10 minutes or as long as an hour (usually it’s dependent on how much either of you enjoys talking). You can start off by saying up front that you don’t have a particular agenda and that you’re simply in the process of meeting key people in the company to establish relationships. Ideally, it’s best if you can go into these meetings with some background; for example, perhaps recent experiences (either good or bad) that this individual or department has had with IT or upcoming projects you know you’ll be working on together.

More than likely, the people you meet with will ask you about your background, how you like your new role so far, and similar questions. They’ll probably be reasonably honest, but polite, about their opinions of IT. As you meet with all the different people, you may begin to see a pattern emerge that tells you what kind of reputation your department has in the organization. This information can prove to be very valuable in figuring out where the strong and weak spots are.

Human Resource Issues

In short order, you’ll start to learn about the HR problems that you’ll be facing. Some you may have known about, others you may sense by intuition, but in all likelihood most of them will be brought directly to you, perhaps by your staff, the HR department, your boss and peers, and maybe even from the user community.
Chapter 2, Managing Your IT Team
on
page 31
, has further discussion about this subject.

Some of your staff will be delighted to bring their pet issues to you, in hopes that a new manager will finally take care of things. Some things to be on the lookout for are:

•
Staff who are unhappy with their job, title, or salary

•
Those who are unhappy with their cubicle or office

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Employees who think they are being treated unfairly compared to others

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Issues of racial or sexual discrimination

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Staff who think some of their coworkers aren’t pulling their weight

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Individuals who feel their contributions aren’t being recognized

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Employees who feel that they should be much further along in their career given their experience, education, certifications, etc.

•
Coworkers who simply can’t get along

As you become aware of these issues, it’s important that you listen objectively and effectively. Repeating what someone has said in your own words works well since it shows them that you heard what they said. Ask questions about the situation and take good notes about what you’re being told.

Soon, Later, and Tomorrow: When Should You Address Issues

Some issues may not require much follow-up aside from continued observation. For example, if an employee says he didn’t get the rating he deserved on his last review, there’s not much you can do about that as a new manager. However, you can promise the employee that you will judge everyone fairly and objectively when you do performance reviews.

Other issues may require some follow-up. For example, if an employee says that he should have an office instead of cubicle, you can check with HR to see what the policy is. Maybe the employee is in a position that doesn’t merit an office, and you can explain the company policy. Perhaps they do merit an office, but there may not be one available right now. You can promise that offices will go to eligible employees, in order of seniority, when the space is available.

Some issues will require a longer term effort to deal with. If there are complaints about inequities in titles and salaries, for example, you may find that you agree with the people raising the issue. But correcting things of this nature will take time, careful planning, and perhaps some organizational upheaval.

Regardless of What Happens, Let Them Know You’ve Heard Them

The important things to remember as HR issues come your way are that each person deserves to know that they have your attention and that they each deserve a response. It may not always be a response that they like, but they each deserve one. You certainly don’t want to earn a reputation in your first weeks that you ignore things. You can promise the team that if they bring you an issue, you will get them an answer, but they need to know that sometimes getting that answer may take time, and sometimes that answer may be no.

Budgeting

One of the less exciting and less interesting parts of your job, but important enough to get its own chapter (see
Chapter 6, Managing the Money,
on
page 161
), is IT budgeting. Few departments will spend more money than IT, and it’s important that you become knowledgeable about your department budget. Since you aren’t likely to be held entirely responsible for a budget you didn’t create, you don’t have to start sweating over it right off—you’ll probably be given some leeway.

The easiest way to get started is to get a copy of your department’s current budget. Then you’ll want to ask Accounting for a report that indicates how much money your department is actually spending. By glancing at these reports you can quickly see which categories are the largest portions of the IT budget (and perhaps require the most scrutiny) and see where the biggest differences are between the actual spending history and what was budgeted. Make sure Accounting knows that you want to get
all
the budget reports for your department.

In general, you won’t be expected to explain every dollar. However, you will want to learn about those items that have the biggest impact on IT budgets and items with significant changes from year to year.

As you learn about the budget you inherited, you should be thinking about next year’s budget—the one you’ll be responsible for preparing, presenting, defending, and adhering to. As is typical, each year’s budget is compared to the previous year’s. It’s important that you make note of which items might go up so that you can explain them.

Making Those First Decisions

There’s a saying that “20 percent of life is what happens to you and that 80 percent is how you deal with it.” Another way to look at it is that your success is not much more than the cumulative results of the decisions you make.

Some decisions may be easy: “Can I leave a little early today?” Others could be more difficult: “Accounting is working on closing the books and won’t allow any downtime, but we need to take their database off line to run a maintenance routine to prevent it from getting corrupted.”

Anytime you make a decision, you want to make sure that it’s based on sound reasoning that you can later defend if necessary. You may get faulted for making a bad decision, but if it’s based on reasoned thinking, you can hold your head up with pride.