IT Management 101 – First Things First

IT Management 101 – First Things First

As you develop your plans for your area of responsibility, you have to address “first things first”. The best way I know how to develop this idea with you is to use an example of an IT manager that becomes a CIO for a company. With the CIO position, you have to take all aspects of the technology support delivery for a company into perspective. We will go through a high level thought process that a CIO has to work through to develop an overall strategy for the company.

We spent a lot of time discussing the assessment phase of developing an IT strategy, or plan. Getting as clear of a picture of where you are and where the company wants to be is as important as anything you can do. It’s very hard to hit the target if you don’t know what you’re shooting at and what tools you have to shoot with.

And remember, there rarely exists a straight line “from here” to “the objective”.

The objective of the assessment was to:

• determine where the company wants to go
• the goal determine the state of technology services today
• the starting point begin identifying the issues that must be addressed to achieve the goal
• the plan

As we discussed earlier, the manager must start with a very tactical (30-90 day) plan that puts the organization into position as quickly as possible to take on larger objectives that lead to reaching the goal.

At a CIO level, the entire technology requirements of the company must be reviewed, analyzed, and a plan developed for each area that supports every part of the IT organization leading to the overall objectives. There will be competing needs for IT resources from the company, and possibly even within the IT organization. When a CIO creates his/her plan to develop the IT services needed for the company’s overall objective, there is a hierarchy that must be followed.

We looked at this hierarchy earlier. Let’s take a closer look: When a CIO does his assessment, there is a long list of items that are discovered:

Client service capability
Size of company
Change management process
Growth plans
IT services being provided
Business requirements of the future company
Quality of IT services being delivered
Key technology advances required
Growth capacity of IT services
Differences in future client needs
Staff strengths and weaknesses
New product or service lines required
Staff skill gaps
Productivity gains facilitated by technology
Infrastructure status
Cost of IT as a per cent of revenue
Data center security
User capability in using technology
Support desk status and issues
Support problem trends and issues
Problem escalation procedures
Business applications status
Business application needs
Project management capabilities

This is by far a ‘short list’ of all the issues that will be discovered. The point is that the assessment includes a very disperse set of issues. In order to achieve the goals of the company, most, if not all, of these issues must be addressed to compliment the overall plan that will lead to success. It will be virtually impossible to take care of all issues simultaneously. An effective CIO will establish a set of priorities that follows the hierarchy we showed in the IT Project Hierarchy.

The goal of any real CIO is to work on strategic projects (the part that sits atop the pyramid structure in our diagram). Those projects might be the introduction of totally new products or services that have a major impact on productivity of the company or it might be to assimilate the technologies of acquired companies. Either way, the CEO and other senior managers are eager to get to the part that helps really improve or grow their business.

It would be nice to be able to just go straight for the “gusto”. Unfortunately, it’s not normally a straight line as mentioned now at least 4 times.

The reason we spent so much time on assessment is that the assessment makes up the very foundation that you will build all your objectives on. You will tweak those plans over time but the major pieces of the plan will probably stay intact if you’ve done a good job in assessing the situation.

OK, the race is on! We want to get to some strategic projects (the top of the pyramid) as soon as possible. We also want to be able to have a very sound foundation by which to develop and support new technologies, one that is not only stable but scalable.

It works like this:

• You can’t fix or improve anything if you don’t know what the issues are. (Assessment)
• You can’t make changes if you don’t understand the problems, have capable staff to do the work, and have a sound change management process in place. (Staffing, Support Desk, and Change Management)
• It’s very hard to develop software applications without solid systems infrastructure. (Systems Infrastructure Strategy)
• Before taking on strategic projects, you need to have stable applications in place. (Business Applications Strategy)
• Finally, we get to strategic project work.

This does not imply that many parts of this hierarchy cannot be worked on at the same time. In fact, much of it does get worked on simultaneously. What is emphasized is that before you develop your Business Application strategy, you should have put your infrastructure game plan together. It’s also important to note that when you develop the Infrastructure Strategy, you must consider elements that will be required for your business applications such as:

• what the business applications and technology services will be
• number of users that will be using the applications
• locations of the users
• security implications
• etc.

A strategy, as I define it, is creating the high level plan on how you will achieve the objective. You don’t have to know how you will achieve your Business Applications Strategy needs when you create your Infrastructure Strategy, but it certainly helps to know what the applications and services are that will be needed for the infrastructure to support. If you are not sure, it should automatically tell you that your Infrastructure Strategy must be somewhat open in order to add critical applications determined at a later date or to scale in size to support an undetermined user base.

Let’s take a closer look at each layer of the IT Project Hierarchy illustration:

Assessment – As mentioned over and over, this is a critical stage to insure that you are directing IT resources in the right places to:

• achieve company goals
• fill resource gaps
• position systems for growth and stability
• establish a quality delivery of services
• complete projects that have value for the business

Support Desk, Staffing, Change Management Process – This layer focuses quickly on three key areas that are important for any successful IT organization:

Support Desk – It’s critical that the CIO establish a quick process to provide base level support for infrastructure (systems) issues and business applications issues. Creating a functional support desk (assuming none exists) to support user challenges and needs in these two areas does two important things:

1. Improves day to day support
2. Starts gathering information that will tell you what the problems are.

Staffing– Start sizing up staffing needs right away to resolve issues such as:

• capacity
• skill gaps
• bench strength (backup) for key skills

Hiring new staff has to be balanced with budget availability and your ability to define the job. A good CIO is always lining up the staff needed to move the organization to the next level and knows well in advance of hiring the skill sets that will be needed.

You always want to try to hire proactively in a manner that anticipates needs of the company. You should try to avoid hiring defensively or in a reactionary manner.

I also recommend that you hire strong, motivated candidates. I would always prefer to manage a few senior level people that are very capable, may make a lot of money, and outperform a staff that’s 25% larger. It’s usually cheaper and a lot more fun to manage because you’ll be more successful.

Much more is discussed in Building a Successful IT Organization which is part of the IT Manager Development Series.

Change Management Process – If you are to implement change to the company by completing new projects, you must have sound change management processes in place.

Even if the goal is simply to maintain existing systems and applications, you still need to manage changes effectively. Otherwise, the support delivery of your IT team(s) will be unpredictable and will likely incur a good bit of breakage.

Infrastructure Strategy – Define your plan for each part of the company’s infrastructure and the timing of each key project. Infrastructure requirements include addressing each of the components listed below. As you build a game plan for each, the plan should include elements that address capacity, functionality, security, backup, recovery, redundancy, support, scalability, and standards.

• System server needs (for business applications)
• Network server needs
• E-mail standards and address naming convention
• Remote connectivity architecture
  • dial-up
  • wide area network (WAN)
  • local area networks (LAN)
  • other connectivity
• Network monitoring and support
• Internet connectivity and usage
• Intranet connectivity and usage
• IP addressing standards
• Data center
• Security
  • systems
  • networks
  • applications
  • physical facilities
  • remote access
• PC’s & supported PC application software
• Printing standards
• Fax server
• Printing distribution capabilities
• Backup and off-site storage
• Data center operations
• Disaster recovery
• Phone systems (voice)
• Support desk and escalation procedures
• Change management process
• Infrastructure systems diagram & maintenance
• Technology assets inventory
• Software license inventory and compliance
• Systems tools

Business Applications Strategy – Addressing functionality needs of business departments and/or your external clients are very important. I don’t need to tell you that, though. As you begin developing and implementing plans on the lower levels, you may also be getting into needs of this layer as well, especially if there are urgent needs or key gaps in your business applications.

In most cases, the resources that focus on the business applications are different than those that work on networks, and hardware issues. This makes it very reasonable to focus resources on both layers at the same time. The key is that the infrastructure team has to be laying the groundwork for the business applications to have adequate systems and connectivity to function as needed.

It’s sort of like laying the rails before the train can move down the track.

Laying groundwork is not the most exciting or fun work to do, but just as the train has to have the track, business application enhancements have to have the infrastructure that supports them.

Strategic Projects – The quickest approach to implement key projects that provide excellent return for the company is not necessarily, nor normally, to go right to the strategic project and begin implementing. OK, already; that’s the last time I mention the ‘straight line’ concept. I promise.

Always remember that if you build your foundation on wobbly legs, the full success of implementing a strategic project is going to be minimized.

Let me explain a bit. Let’s assume that a strategic objective is to assimilate acquired company technologies as soon as you can. An IT manager can definitely begin an assimilation day one if he/she so chooses. However, without a solid systems infrastructure (hardware and network) in place that has the additional capacity or the ability to increase capacity easily to accommodate the new business, the ability to manage a technology assimilation is complicated by other issues required to address infrastructure scalability. You will go much faster and smoother if you have the infrastructure foundation already in place that supports growth easily and predictably.

Strategic projects as defined here are IT projects that add significant, new capability to the business. In my acquisition assimilation example, any major technology conversion (opposed to simply continuing to maintain the existing technology) would be considered a significant change requiring a major project focus.

The real objective is not just to complete strategic projects. It should be to work on strategic projects in as productive a manner as possible so that the company can achieve the desired results with minimal problems and as cost effectively as possible.

Reacting to issues that have not been anticipated in the lower foundation levels discussed earlier when you are in the midst of a strategic project can add complexity, cause damage, and add costs that are otherwise avoidable.