IT Manager's Handbook: Getting Your New Job Done (10 page)

The communication of your goals and priorities to your team is vital. The way you communicate with them will vary with a project’s scope. A two-year project to implement an
Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)
application will require different communication than managing a weekend effort to upgrade the company’s database servers.

The following guidelines can be used when communicating with your team.

Make Sure the Team Understands the Overall Objective and Goals

Explain it in practical terms; for example: “implementing a new accounts payable system will eliminate all manual processes and hard-copy documents, thereby reducing turnaround time to 24 hours, and ensuring that no unauthorized payments are made.”

Explain How You Envision Achieving the Goal

You don’t have to offer too much detail, especially on a large project, but you should have some thoughts, visions, and ideas you can articulate as a type of road map. “Our first milestone is the end of February; by then we should have a prototype system for the users to look at. By mid-year we should have finalized all the details. We’re looking to plan for parallel testing in the fourth quarter, with the final cut-over set for December 31st.”

Encourage Questions and Input from Your Staff

There are several reasons why you should do this:

•
Asking for your staff’s input (and taking it seriously) will make your team feel like they are involved and a part of the decision-making process; they will work better and harder on a process they feel a part of and understand.

•
They are a lot closer to the work than you are—they’ll be the first to recognize an opportunity, a potential landmine, or a dead end.

•
The group will usually have important insights to share.

If the goal or plan is especially challenging, or perhaps it deviates somewhat from the company norm, you’ll have to be that much more motivating and enthusiastic when you communicate with the team.

Ask questions of the team to ensure that they have an appropriate understanding of the project. For example:

•
How do you think we should start?

•
Where do you see danger zones and areas of risk?

•
What are the key milestones?

•
What kinds of resources do you think we will need?

•
Who else in the company do you think might help?

Listen Carefully

Listening is more than just hearing the words. Notice the staff’s comments, tone, and body language. Use these as clues to determine if your team is buying in and is behind you. This can be more of a challenge with team members who are remote. With remote team members, consider drawing them out more than you usually do to ensure you feel confident about their thinking. And consider using available tools besides e-mail and phone calls (instant messaging, web-cams and video-conferencing,
social networking
tools, web-conferencing) for greater interaction, and to help build a stronger relationship with them. Make sure everyone feels free to air any doubts or concerns. One technique is to go around the table at the end of each meeting and to ask each member to express any concerns they have and then address them accordingly. Another is to encourage the staff to call, send e-mails, or meet with you privately (before or after the meeting) if they feel intimidated by speaking in front of a group.

Make sure you provide some guidance to your team as to when they should bring something to your attention. Some managers prefer hearing about every detail, some want to hear only items at higher levels, and others want to know only when there are big problems or exceptions.

Meet Regularly

Meeting frequencies might vary depending on the work at hand. Weekly and monthly meetings are common. During critical project times, it isn’t uncommon to have daily meetings. You can have too many meetings or too few—it depends on the project. Try to establish a rhythm that people can work with; if you establish a meeting time of every Friday morning, the team will work throughout the week with that in mind.

Meetings don’t have to always be project-oriented. Regular department meetings, as well as individual meetings, with your direct reports can help foster a culture of open communication and sharing of information.

Agile Meetings

Agile is a software development
methodology. Different “flavors” of Agile have daily meetings, often called “stand-ups” or “scrums,” as critical components of their methodology. The primary idea is to radically increase communication but in much briefer formats; they are called “stand-ups” for a reason—people tend to ramble less when they have to stand up the entire meeting.

Project Meetings

Project meetings are a separate type of meeting that have both additional benefits and potential problems. For a fuller discussion of project management, see
Chapter 4, Project Management
on
page 103
. Also in that chapter see the section
“Productive Project Meetings”
on
page 128
for specific ideas on improving the quality of your project meetings.

Company Mission, Vision, and Values

Another method of keeping your employees focused is to clearly outline the company’s mission, vision, and values. These terms can be confusing or off-putting to technical personnel, but they have an important role to play in the success of your organization. Devote a little time to understanding and following them and you will be rewarded many times over. All of these can provide helpful guidance and criteria when making operational and strategic decisions.

•
A
mission statement
explains the fundamental purpose of the company or organization. It concentrates on the objectives for the present, who the customer is, and what the critical processes are. Starbuck’s mission statement includes the phrase: “Apply the highest standards of excellence to the purchasing, roasting and fresh delivery of our coffee.”

•
A
vision statement
takes the mission statement to the next level by outlining what the organization wants to be. The vision statement focuses on the future and serves as a source of inspiration for employees. Starbuck’s vision statement includes the phrase: “To establish Starbucks as the most recognized and respected brand in the world.”

•
Company values:
Some companies place their highest value on customer service, or integrity and honesty. Some may have shareholder return (which is often a euphemism for profitability) as a priority. Many companies’ value statements include references to being “green,” or giving back to the community, etc. Starbucks’ site includes the phrase “[being] dedicated to serving ethically sourced coffee, caring for the environment and giving back to the communities where we do business.”

Defining and articulating the company’s mission, vision, and values shouldn’t be your responsibility as an IT Manager; someone else should be doing that for you (and the rest of the company). But once your company has a mission statement, communicate it to your staff. Make it clear how the company’s mission, vision, and values will impact your group’s projects, assignments, priorities, and contributions. Also, explain how your team’s efforts will support the company’s mission, vision, and values.

Company values are a means you should use to keep your employees on the right track. If your company hasn’t made its values clear, ask your management to do so. Again, defining and communicating company values aren’t your job; you can participate if a company-wide committee is formed, but you should not have to come up with these on your own. “Company values” are defined by the entire company and can be useful guides in determining employee behavior. They typically include statements such as “taking care of our people: The key to our success is treating people well. We do this by encouraging associates to speak up and take risks, by recognizing and rewarding good performance and by leading and developing people so they may grow” (corporate.homedepot.com).

In addition to communicating the company’s mission, goals, and values to your team, it’s also vital that you share with them
the goals and values of the IT department
, objectives that should reflect both the company’s mission and your own goals and values. Coming up with the goals and values of the IT department is something you should do collaboratively with your team. Solicit their ideas and let them review and comment on drafts. You may want to even have the team take the first cut at putting these together by asking for volunteers for a small committee to develop them for your review.

Be as Clear as Possible about Your Real Priorities

It takes more than just stating that something is a priority for everyone on a team to realize that it is a priority. If coding a specific interface is a critical task for a larger project, you have to say so, but also remember that your actions can dilute your words. If you rarely ask about the status of the interface, or only one person is assigned to work on it part-time, even though you say it is a priority, you’ll be sending mixed signals. You can demonstrate the task’s importance by focusing on it during meetings, reallocating additional resources to it, sacrificing lesser priorities for it, and so on.

Avoid Burnout in Your Employees

With IT so critical to today’s organizations, the demands on the staff can be enormous. Glassy-eyed programmers, cases of Red Bull, sleeping bags under desks, and 3  AM pizza deliveries have become routine. And, these demands have only increased in recent years as economic downturns have placed increased workloads on shrinking resources. IT demands are heavy because:

•
Virtually every aspect of an organization is dependent on IT and its services.

•
In the digital world we now live in, the workplace is 24/7/365 and the demands are nonstop. The technology allows people to work 24 hours a day, from anywhere in the world, on devices that slip into a pocket.

•
The lure of a complex technical challenge often excites people to work 20 hours a day. (In the early days of developing the Macintosh, Steve Jobs handed out T-shirts that read: “Working 90 hours a week and loving it.”)

•
IT staff is needed during working hours to ensure that systems are running as they should and responding to problems. However, the staff is also needed during off hours because that’s often the only time that certain work (e.g., maintenance, upgrades) can be done.

•
Unlike the days of assembly-line labor, the work of IT isn’t measured in products produced per unit of time so there are no clear external indicators of when the work is “complete.” (“The IT job is one where you get an ‘F’ if you fail but only a ‘C’ if you succeed—this stuff is supposed to work, right?” Bill Gates,
Business @ the Speed of Thought
.)

•
Highly energized and motivated employees may not even realize the condition they are getting themselves into. While it may be tempting to push your staff, or allow them to push themselves to the limit, it’s important to remember that you won’t get much work out of them once they’ve hit that wall.

•
The new, streamlined corporate world demands even more of IT departments, while simultaneously either keeping staff at current levels or even cutting back. The challenges have stretched many IT departments to the breaking point.

Make Your Employees Aware of the Dangers of Burnout

Often people most susceptible to burnout are the ones unaware of the problem. They work like dogs for two years and then they crash. Keep your eye out for employees who seem to be burning out. Fatigue and difficulty concentrating are obvious symptoms. Also look for changes in employees’ behaviors and attitudes. If a normally enthusiastic employee suddenly seems apathetic, it could be a tell-tale sign. Of course, there are other explanations for these symptoms as well. You may not notice these yourself; other members of the team may see them before you do, but they should be on the lookout for the signs and should feel comfortable alerting you.

Outline the Prices Employees Can Pay

When making them aware of the problem, outline the various possible costs of burnout:

•
Deterioration of health

•
Errors on the job

•
Relationships with coworkers suffer

•
Problems at home with family and relationships

•
Loss of job

The short-term gains for working weekends for six months in a row don’t outweigh the long-term losses of any of the ones just listed.

Deal with the Situation

As the manager, you need to be more aware of the problem of burnout and take steps to monitor and avoid it:

•
Be very clear about your performance and productivity expectations regarding your employees. Define simple measures and metrics and communicate them clearly and often. Get realistic commitments from your employees regarding timelines and deliverables. Also, make sure they feel safe in telling you when your expectations are too demanding or unrealistic.

•
Be very conscious of the levels of effort all of your team members are putting out. And don’t think in absolute numbers. A 10-hour day may not seem like a big deal to you, but it can be an enormous commitment for a single parent or a person just coming off working three demanding projects.

•
Spread the effort around. The amount of IT work is endless—as a manager, you have a responsibility to your company and your employees to carefully allocate work across the board. Certainly people have different work outputs, just as they have different working and communication styles. Your job is to consider the team as a whole, each person as an important part of that whole, and get the jobs done within that context.