Easy scapegoats...

Always try to blame :

- the same people
- those who cannot defend themselves
- those whose job is impossible to understand
- those who seem to be at the center of everything (but nowhere in particullar)

That is: the Network!

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).

Incidents Management : No Solution?

Amongst the many golden rules of incidents management, there is one that must be kept in mind everyday, everywhere, at any time : « If there is no solution, there is no problem ».

Thus, is something happens that YOU cannot solve, then, it is not YOUR business. You MUST call somebody else as soon as possible (the ASAP paradigm, as usual). There is no shame to call for help if you cannot fix it!

As an addendum to this golden rule, there is always something that you can do in the meanwhile, to keep the initiative, communicate with your clients, furnishers and hierarchy, and still pretend to lead the resolution of that blasted incident: create a Task Force.

To create an optimum Task Force you must:

- Pile a dozen of telephones on a table, even if they are not plugged (pretend to lead a “wireless IP phone solution”),

- order some twenty pizzas (and eat them cold),

- brew pots of coffee (and drink it cold),

- remove all neckties,

- print big “Task Force 1” on A4 papers, and stick some on the doors of all offices (and the lavatories).

- stick on the walls many complex (yet meaningless) charts, diagrams and listings, and use a red pencil to underline the must “relevant” parts,

- get a paperboard, and jot raw ideas on it,

- stick Post-It(TM) everywhere,

- call the people of the Communication, so they can take a picture of your Task Force, and publish a paper in the next internal newsletter.

Thus, you can send this picture of your Task Force (preferably from the Blackberry of your team manager) to all your clients, furnishers, partners, top managers, and so on…

Everybody will be sure that YOU are in charge, fully committed to solve this problem. Even if you don’t get a shit on it.

And remember… It there is no solution, there is no problem…

The New Norm 2: Project Management

Project Management is one of the foremost activities if IT Production. A world in itself.

Sometimes, to kill a stupid idea (or, more often, a good one), you just need to start a project. Here comes the times of “project meetings”, “steering committees”, “scheduling meetings”, “project management tools”, “project management document repository tool”, “project follow-up committees”, etc etc etc…

99% of the Project Manager time (and budget) is sucked by “methods, norms and compliance”. Consequently, it spins off, drags, and falls into oblivion…

Yet, sometimes, you can see boasts and claims of marvellous projects delivered “in advance on the schedule”. There are many accomplishments in the IT Production to be sure. But, often, they are re-qualified as “project” once they are finished, and subsequently entered in the “Project Management System”*. In the meantime, the actors of the project were able to use 99% of their time on it…

Or “PMS”, or “Pre Menstrual Syndrom”: somewhat annoying and recurring, and nothing to do to advert it!

ps: I thank my Lean Coach for the "kill the initiative with a project" remark yesterday...