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).
