IT Management 101 – Establish First 90-Day Objectives

It’s time to start putting plans on paper. It’s not a plan if it is not written down. If it isn’t worth the time to write it down and communicate it to others, then it probably isn’t worth doing.

I recommend you approach planning the management of IT resources in two distinct ways. There are short term, immediate issues that should be addressed and long term issues. My first set of objectives will always be a 30 – 90 day plan. This short term plan will also always be approached in a manner to support long range objectives.

It’s important to make a note here. You will know more about the long term strategy needed after a few months. The best assessment will not provide you with enough insight to develop a bullet proof long term strategy ‘right out of the gate’. Planning is an evolving element and not just a static thing.

This is not to suggest that plans are so dynamic that they are constantly changing radically. However, they do change and should as the business dynamics evolve and as you become more attune to the needs of the company.
How do you go about developing your first 90-day plan ?

With time and experience, it actually becomes a second sense as to what the priorities need to be after going through the assessments. For this exercise, we will take a little more structured approach.

First thing to do is to establish where you believe the organization you are responsible for is today and where it needs to be in 12 – 24 months. As mentioned earlier, any short term plan has to support a long term plan. Otherwise, you may have to pull pieces out or rework them because you did not approach the short term issues in a way that supports your long term goals.
To do that, refer back to the elements that you needed to be looking for and understanding in your assessments. They are:

• Infrastructure
• Business applications
• IT staffing organization
• IT processes

And your assessment of these major IT components need to be viewed in context of:

• Company goals
• Client needs
• Available capita

There are many factors surrounding or affecting any planning that you need to do. For example, the graphic below shows there are diverse issues that have to be accounted for as you develop your plan.

All of these elements have a bearing on how you put your plans together. As mentioned before, every IT management situation has different dynamics. While most situations require planning and solid execution to be a success, every situation is unique as you look to develop the first 90- day plan.

By the way, this certainly is not all of the issues that can influence your planning.

You should also know that there will be many different routes that you can take to reach your objective. There are many ways to “skin a cat” as they say.

Let’s say you’ve inherited a Client Support Desk as the new manager. As you went through all the interviews and reached your assessment, you identified 10 issues that needed to be addressed. And let’s say that 3 of those issues were all very important and you aren’t sure which needs to take highest priority.

If possible, start them all assuming the resources are available. If one is a prerequisite to other issues, then that more or less dictates that it has to be a higher priority. You also should be validating your initiatives with stakeholders of the company so you know that your priorities are their priorities.

As you go through the assessments for your particular situation, there should be some very specific needs identified that are on the critical path. It might be finishing an active project, adding capability in a software application, or simply getting e-mail in place.

Regardless of how you approach it, there are a few “influencers” that should always take priority. Client needs, company plans, and expense influences must always be at or near the top of your evaluation. If you have a lot of immediate challenges, you have to break them into pieces and to establish priorities that buy time by hitting the most urgent needs of the client and/or company first.

In general, there is a hierarchy within IT that must be followed to be truly successful. If you build your business on a weak IT structure, it ultimately topples with growth. This is such an important issue that we devote a whole section to it titled First Things First. Normally, I would wait to get into that section but part of the concept needs to come out here.

Developing a 90-day plan and a 1-year plan has to tie to a basic understanding that you must develop a strong and stable framework before you focus on the strategic projects. If the company does not have stable, reliable systems in place, placing strategic projects on top of them will only cause the crash that ultimately happens to be louder and quicker.

We need a picture:

As a CIO, I have always managed from a principal that to achieve consistent results, you have to insure you have a solid foundation to work from. Look at the pyramid example above to better understand. The approach I highly recommend, is to begin at the ‘ground floor’.

In this publication, we have spent time so far in discussing the first layer – assessment and identifying the issues. The next layer has to do with IT processes and the IT organization’s ability to support the technology of the company.

Follow with the systems infrastructure and the business applications layers and then, and only then, are you really prepared to go after real strategic projects. In the section you will read later titled First Things First, we will go into more detail. The point I’m making here is that you should have this concept in the back of your mind as you’re developing your 90-day issues list and developing priorities for them.

If you think back to the Support Desk example we used, the real objective that we wanted to get to was to position the organization to support a major new application that was to be released in 6 months. As we assessed this part of the IT business, it also became apparent that we would be short staffed and that the current support approach needed improvement. So, our plan actually went through many steps just to get to the part we wanted to get to – developing the new application support plan.

Going straight to the strategic task that we want to accomplish without having a solid foundation only creates a bigger challenge to fix later on. Remember the old Bardahl oil commercial, “Pay me now, or pay me later.” ? This message is very true in managing IT resources.