Visual Management: Right or Wrong ?

In IT Production, people work on the intangible: virtual jobs, virtual processes, virtual environments… but hey, incidents are real, money is not so virtual, and, above all, users and clients tend to be very real…

When you work in a factory, it’s “easy” (well… not so in fact) to “see” the problems: stacks of parts, idle machines, piles of raw materials…

IT Production is a “virtual factory”: our stacks, spare parts, stores, inventories… Everything is “virtual”.

So? How do we make visible the invisible ?

Try Visual Management of the Performance: one of the key features of the Lean!

However… You might have some (bad) surprises. You might discover stacks of waste, piles of lost time… There is always room for improvement!

Happy Week End!

Welf, Happy man in the Happy IT Production

Management for Dummies: Motivate your troops!

IT is one of the world’s most difficult management environment. Perhaps just behind hospitals and Delta Forces. IT Teams are a bunch of young geeks who cannot do the same thing twice, old mainframe techies who “always did things that way”, self-proclaimed experts of obscure languages and freshly graduated long-toothed crooks.

IT management operates with strenuous budgets. The clients (real people with real people) want to control their IT budgets. The golden era of neverending budgets is over, gone with the first internet bubble in 2000. Now, they want some bang for the buck, and don’t want to spend a dollar more for IT, while their demands on IT explodes.

Thus, it is often hard to motivate the “troops”, within changing organisations, pressure, norms, incidents, angry users, weird changes, loopholes, complex processes and ever evolving technologies.

Managers must animate their teams. But not like puppets. To get the most of people while preserving a happy mood for work is a hard thing to do… Motivation does not comes free.

“Want to get heard? Speak slowly and carry a big stick” (Theodore Roosevelt).

Security 1: keep it simple!

Security is a big issue for IT Production. Especially for some risky businesses (banks, nuclear industry, R&D, harmonica factories in Libya and the like).

There is a general trend to view IT security as a stacking of infinite layers of firewalls, secure network bubbles, DMZs, encryption protocols, secure ID tokens, RFID chips, etc etc etc…

However, no matter how modern and technologically up to date the IT security might be, it still depends on human rules and regulations, and there is always a man in the loop…

Thus, in the “real life”, most security breaches and real estate losses are caused not by hackers and IT attacks, but by physical errors, misconducts, neglects and, sometimes, seldom, premeditated crimes and massive frauds (banks, please take note).

90% of securities issues in IT production can be solved at a very modest price, with a bit of personal commitment, common sense, and logical behaviour. Never jot passwords of scraps of paper, never put some sensible data on an USB key attached to your keying, always use the paper shredder to destroy confidential documents… And above all, SHUT YOUR MOUTH when you are in public transports. Every year, I can hear sensible conversations about big contracts in the train, by the same people who advocate to invest 5 millions in the latest RFID Security Architecture to ensure “full IT Security”…

Jurassic Solutions for a small planet

I love Big Blue Corps... They always have the "best engineering solution". A bit like the T-Rex: the most potent dinosaurus... But hey, chaps: sometimes, you just need a good bacteria. You just need yeast to brew beer, not a marvel of engineering...