Managing the Motivation of an IT Team

Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do and they will surprise you with their ingenuity. General George S. Patton

IT staff are valuable company resources because of their unique specialist skills, knowledge and experience.

They are a challenge to lead because: they are very intelligent and highly individual; and also because they are often involved in complex projects where they may have to work in isolation using considerable delegated discretion.

Most IT specialists will tell you that they prefer to be left alone to get on with the job. Nevertheless, like everyone else they do need to be given feedback, told when they’re doing a good job, corrected when they’re not. Providing feedback is particularly difficult when a goodly proportion of their time is spent working at home – out of the normal cycle of intra-office communication and observation.

Maintaining IT staff motivation is a crucial element in the success of a project. Knowing when to delegate and how to review is a key factor in achieving motivation.

If you are to do this well, and it does need doing well, you need to very aware of your own skills and abilities. You need to identify your management style and understand:

• The theory of motivation.
• How to delegate successfully.
• How to understand yourself and others – what drives you, what drives them?
• Why values are important and how to use them.
• How to communicate effectively with your team.
• How to build on-going fruitful relationships.

I’ve blogged before about the lack of management training that we IT professionals undertake. Here is a starting point – an opportunity to develop and deploy a very valuable set of skills that will help you, your organisation and your team members.

Stuart Sawle

www.sysop.co.uk

 

 

Banking the Green Dividend

In recent years, many organisations have reduced their costs and improved their effectiveness by rationalising their IT infrastructure:

• Reducing the number of servers
• Implementing load balancing
• Deploying storage area networks and using storage more effectively
• Reducing the number of software licences Improving resilience
• Reducing maintenance costs.

This is, of course, to be applauded. Return on capital employed is a critical success factor for any modern data centre. Yet, these organisations often feel to realise another major achievement – gained as a result of their efficiency drive.

• Data centre energy consumption is reduced significantly.
• Less heat is generated.
• Less energy is required to cool the server room.
• The IT Carbon footprint is substantially reduced.

More and more organisations find that adopting a sustainability policy not only reduces costs, it actually increases sales! The British consumer is actively supporting those businesses that can demonstrate real and tangible Green initiatives.

The sad thing is that, for the most part, data centres don’t measure their carbon footprint. This means that they aren’t able to claim their full share of the credit when their efficiency programmes return a Green dividend.

The carbon footprint of the IT Industry is now greater than that of the global airline industry. Some 40% of the energy consumption within a typical administration complex is due to that used by the IT infrastructure.

We need to become Green aware. We need to be able to measure our carbon footprint. We need to be able to predict the improvement in greenhouse gas emissions and to justifiably claim credit for the improvements we have made.

The ISEB Foundation Certificate in Green IT is a good first step towards helping an organisation to achieve its sustainability goals.

Stuart Sawle

The value of service management

I’m often asked for examples of the return on investment that sound IT service management delivers and I’m always put on the spot to quote concrete examples.

Whatever your position in your company, like me you know that IT Service Management matters. You know that implemented correctly, the ITIL® Service Management disciplines will provide you with a stable, reliable, and cost effective environment for the provision of your IT services.

I’m sure that at some point, early in the ITIL implementation lifecycle you conducted a baseline exercise and that, as you conducted further measurements, you found real evidence of process improvement:

• better problem management resulting in fewer incidents,
• Improved change management resulting in smoother implementations and fewer post-implementation glitches,
• more comprehensive monitoring of device performance resulting in fewer hardware failures and capacity issues,
• more realistic customer expectations as a result of sound service level agreements,
• greater customer satisfaction as a result of better service level monitoring and reporting.

All of these things are real and tangible benefits of improved service management processes. All are measurable. But none of them are expressed in terms of the contribution to the profit and loss account. What’s the bottom-line effect?

I’m sure there are organisations out there that have calculated the return in this way – I’m just surprised that they are not readily available as case studies. Do you know differently?

Stuart Sawle

Why eschew management training

It’s long struck me how ill prepared IT specialists are for management responsibilities.

As long ago as 1992 when we first began to offer the ITIL “Managers” course we were surprised at how poorly developed were the presentation skills of the course attendees. Our students were often tongue-tied and seemed incapable of marshalling their thoughts to convey the simplest of ideas. They also struggled with any aspect of financial management – even simple budgeting techniques were totally alien to them.

As we delved further into the management skills that were required to transform highly competent technical specialists into team leaders it also became apparent that motivational and performance management skills were also absent.

I have been at the Learning & Skills / Learning Technologies exhibitions this week. During the two days I was there, I spoke to many HR managers from a whole range of organisations – public and private, large and small. A common theme of our conversations was the under-development of general management skills within IT specialists.

Perversely, it seems, training to support these skills are readily available. Sysop, for example, has a range of management development courses specifically designed for IT specialists.

The shocking revelation, from the HR people I spoke to, was that IT specialists are incredibly reluctant to undertake this training. When it is identified as a logical career development step, they view it as some sort of punishment detail.

So, why do we IT guys shy away from developing our management skills? What is it about our psyche that makes us view them as a chore rather than an essential and enjoyable career development step?

I confess, I don’t know. I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Stuart Sawle

The Business as “A Customer” – a Challenge for the Future

Service management best practice positions “the business” to which services are provided as “the customer”. This is a point of view that is particularly emphasised when attempting to instil a service culture into IT technical teams. We all know that IT technical staff will tend to focus on their technical specialism and believe, for the most part, that this can continue no matter what the business need is or the activities are.

We overcome this by describing our business users as customers. We talk about providing service. We remind our technical teams that without the business operating effectively, making profit, the demand for IT services, and their job, might be abruptly curtailed.

Our strategy works. Once the service culture becomes the norm: IT services improve; effectiveness increases; costs reduce; and the virtuous circle of continual service improvement becomes well established. Job done – we may think; but hold on!
Why have we created “a Them” and “Us”? Why do other specialist groups within the organisation see themselves as part of the business – not some-how external to it? We don’t hear of HR specialists or facilities management staff talking about customer service and “the business” as some discrete entity.

This conundrum highlights where IT service management has to go next. The” business as a customer” analogy works well in the initial stages of IT service management implementation but we must recognise it as flawed. Our IT Director will not see him/herself as just a service provider. Indeed IT Directors need to and do provide valuable input to the corporate decision making process. They take responsibility for the advice they give and accept their share of the corporate objectives.

The challenge, in years to come, will be to complete the integration of the entire IT specialism -encouraging them to continue to pride best of breed service but from within not as a semi-detached group somehow grafted onto the side of the business operation.
Your comments on how this might be achieved are awaited with interest.

Stuart Sawle

Change Management – Managing Change

Within the disciplines of IT service management we tend to think we’re pretty adept at managing change – after all a big chunk of our responsibility is about making sure that the changes are implemented for the business reliably, safely and accurately and in a controlled and disciplined manner. However that’s Change Management in ITIL speak. I’m talking here about managing those changes that affect you and / or your teams.

I think it’s a hugely ironic that IT specialists at the forefront of implementing change for the business are, as a group, most resistant to change themselves. That makes it very difficult to develop a culture of continual service improvement and to implement a framework like ITIL®.

It is widely accepted that the top three barriers to service improvement are:
• Plan, Do, Stop
• Saying Yes and meaning No
• Lack of Commitment from senior management.
Planning and acting to overcome these three obstacles is a crucial element in any programme of change.

Resistance is good. Winning people over helps validate that Yes really means Yes and that the improvement programme will continue even when the initial focus is switched elsewhere.

Management commitment is more difficult but goes to what I said in an earlier blog about speaking truth to power. All too often I see projects effectively killed off because senior managers display an attitude characterised by “You have my full commitment – just so long as you don’t need my time, effort, budget or involvement”.

Project Management – Speaking Truth to Power

Many years ago, in a heated discussion about missed project deadline, a colleague rather sneeringly said to me: “It’s alright for you Stuart, you always allow yourself enough time to complete your projects!”

This remark hurt at the time and that’s probably why I remember it so vividly. But shouldn’t I have taken it as a compliment? After all the essence of sound project management is to plan for and demand sufficient resource to meet the project criteria.

Some years later, I was engaged on an assignment to deliver a project that had a deadline that just could not be moved (the clue is: it was the 5^th April).  Given that end date is fixed, the only other variable is the level of manpower available – more bodies for a shorter time or, in our case, more hours in longer days.

That’s when I fully understood the perspective of my colleague.  He was Applications Development Manager driven very much by business imperatives, I was Technical Manager – relatively free to set and manage my own deadlines.

Nevertheless, of course, project management is just that – the sound management of a project. There is no merit in taking on a project that has either unrealistic timescales or inadequate resources to enable it to be delivered to the required quality.

That’s why in our PRINCE2 ® training courses we take a very practical and pragmatic approach to the real-life challenges that face project managers. Our course takes a workshop approach based on the principles of accelerated and practical learning. We know that people learn more effectively where learning events are activity-centred and that they can better relate the theory to the real world. Sadly, the dynamics of modern business do not always fit the theoretical model.

Project managers need to be flexible and prepared to stand up for their project. If the planning reveals that there is insufficient time, budget or resource to deliver reliably – the project manager has not only a right but a duty to escalate to the project board. Senior management need to know and acknowledge risk. The ability to speak truth to power is an essential quality that project managers must have – backed by sound planning and an international accepted framework – the true value of PRINCE2 ®.