Posts Tagged ‘planning’

CIO’s Overestimate How Good Of A Manager They Are

Wednesday, March 2nd, 2011
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How Do You Think That You Measure Up As A Boss…?

How Do You Think That You Measure Up As A Boss…?

With a little luck, every CIO realizes that they are only as good as the people that they have working for them. What this means is that they need to be a good boss if they want to be successful. This leads to a critical question: how good of a boss are you? It turns out that most of us seem to think that we’re a better boss than we probably really are…

The Survey

The good folks over at the consulting firm Development Dimensions International, Inc. have just completed a study of 1,100 front-line managers (you know, the folks that CIOs eventually get chosen from). The results are not what you’d hope for.

What would you hope for? Well, you’d like this collection of mangers to realized that they don’t know it all. You’d want to hear some self-doubt and you’d especially like to hear that they realize that they’ve got a ways to go in order to become truly effective managers. That’s not what DDI found.

Instead, what their survey showed was that most managers, and CIOs, tend to over-estimate their management skills. On top of this, they seem to have very little self-doubt. Hey, I’m all for self confidence, but it sure looks like the CIO pool is just a little bit too confidant.

Two of the questions that DDI asked in their survey really drove this too much self-confidence issue home. One question asked if during their first year the mangers ever regretted being promoted – a very natural feeling. A whopping 74% said no. The next question asked if during the first year the new manager ever questioned their ability to lead others. Once again, 72% said no. Ouch! We seem to be just a little bit too full of ourselves here.

What Makes Someone A Good CIO?

It’s the rest of DDI’s survey that really provides the interesting information for CIOs. DDI has broken the job of being a CIO down into 10 different skill sets. As you take a look at this list, you’ll be able to see how each one of them is a critical CIO skill:

  • Setting work standards

  • Planning and organizing

  • Decision making

  • Communication

  • Technical and professional skills

  • Initiating action

  • Adaptability

  • Coaching

  • Gaining commitment

  • Delegating

The survey showed that CIOs and managers believe that they do a good job of setting work standards along with planning and organizing. Although they think that they do a good job here, it doesn’t always show. It would have been interesting if the survey had included feedback from the staff that is being managed!

Somewhat not surprising, the areas that CIOs feel that they need to work on the most include many of the soft skill areas. These include such management tasks as delegating and getting commitment from their teams. CIOs have their technical skills down, it’s the people skills that still need the most work.

What All Of This Means For You

What the results of this survey show us is that most of us have an over inflated view of our ability to manage an IT department. It appears as though this belief is with us when we first become CIO and it doesn’t seem to leave as we advance in our career.

It turns out that there are 10 different skill sets that we need to have as a CIO if we want to do a good job of leading our department. We believe that we do the best job of setting work standards and we need the most assistance in the area of delegating.

This information is critical for us as CIOs to study and understand. None of us are perfect; however, by understanding where we are weakest we can focus our efforts to become better.

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Department Leadership Skills™

Question For You: What do you think CIOs should do during their first year to become better managers?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Ok, admit it – cloud computing is here to stay. If you haven’t already signed up for a cloud then you will be doing so shortly. However, before you start writing the check, you really should know what you are buying. Everyone likes to talk about how good / bad cloud computing is; however, before now nobody has ever taken the time to talk about what you should be looking for when you go cloud shopping…

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Posted in management | 1 Comment »

It Turns Out That Top-Down Decisions Are What CIOs Need To Make

Wednesday, February 24th, 2010
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To Get An IT Project Done On Time, The CIO Needs To Make Some Decisions

To Get An IT Project Done On Time, The CIO Needs To Make Some Decisions

What’s Wrong With The Way That We Schedule IT Projects?

At the end of the day, an IT department is simply a collection of projects. Some of these projects are short lived (“we’ve got an outage!”) and some are much longer (“let’s install a new ERP solution”). However, it turns out that today’s CIOs have been taking the wrong approach when it comes to scheduling these IT projects and it shows.

All too often once the decision has been made to fund a project, the CIO takes a hands off approach until the project has been completed. What this means in practical terms is that the planning for the project is done by the project team itself. This is where things start to go off-track from the very beginning.

Put yourself for a moment in the shoes of the poor IT planner who has just been handed a large IT project. Sure, you’re excited about the opportunity to manage so much responsibility; however, you also realize that not delivering the project when you say that you will can sink your career. What will you do?

Simple – it’s called “sandbagging” . What you will most likely do will be to add extra time to the project so that when things start to slip, the end date for the project won’t be impacted. Shucks, if you can get away with it you’ll add a lot of extra time to the project so that you just might be able to deliver it early and get the admiration of your bosses for being such a good project manager.

Take this situation and then consider what happens when what the project manger is working on is just one part of a bigger project. Additional time will be added to each of piece of the project and eventually the “time padding” will grow so large that you may have doubled or even tripled the real time that the project is expected to take.

The Power Of Top-Down Planning

The way to solve this is for the CIO to step in and supply some top-down planning. This is where the CIO sets the dates for the project and hands these dates to the project team. Jay Bahel reports that a recent study of 75 large IT projects revealed that the ones that were the most successful were the ones that had their milestone dates set in a top-down fashion by the senior IT leadership.

Why does this type of heavy-handed approach to setting IT project dates work so well? It’s actually pretty simple. By establishing the dates by which work needs to be completed, the CIO is sending a very clear message to the IT team – this is your goal, make it happen. This sets up a sense of urgency within the team and it can go a long way in preventing those internal conflicts that always seem to arise as a team tries to set dates for a project.

The Role Of The Core Team

Yes, yes – I know that things will be different when you become CIO. However, let’s assume for just a moment that even you won’t be able to spend all of your waking hours lording over any single IT project. What can be done to keep things on track and moving towards the milestones that you have laid down?

Creating a so-called “core team” that keeps a watchful eye on an IT project can be a great help in ensuring that the project stays on track. It’s important that this team not be too large – 4-6 senior management leaders should do the trick. The role of this team will be to bring the interests of both IT and the rest of the business to the table in order to manage the project.

The core team is ultimately responsible for making sure that the CIO’s project milestones are met. In order to do this they will have to resolve the conflicts that arise during the project as well as ensuring that the project team is able to interface with the rest of the business in order to complete project tasks.

What All Of This Means For You

Moving to a top-down project planning process will require changes to be made in your IT department. Expect some bruised feelings especially from the project managers – they’ll feel like you are taking some of their power away from them.

Picking the members of the core team that will be watching over the IT project is not something to be done lightly. Not only do they need to bring solid set of skills to the table, but they also need to be able to get along with each other.

Once again, it becomes clear that a CIOs job is not necessarily to actually do things, but rather to make things happen. When it comes to IT projects, the CIO needs to show the rest of the IT department the way by setting timelines and milestones in a top-down fashion…

Do you think that top-down IT planning would help your IT department’s projects to be more successful?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

I believe that one of the reasons that it is so hard for a CIO to get the IT department to align with the rest of the business is that finding the correct opportunities where alignment is possible can be a big challenge. Well I’ve got some good news for you: it looks like such an opportunity is getting ready to show up and it’s called XBRL…

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Posted in IT project | 5 Comments »

7 Wrong Ways To Outsource Your IT Department

Monday, December 1st, 2008
There Are Many More Ways To Do Outsourcing The Wrong Way...

There Are Many More Ways To Do Outsourcing The Wrong Way...

Outsourcing, off-shoring, call it what you will, it’s been with us long enough that you’d think that the rules for how to do it correctly would be well known, right? It turns out that this isn’t always the case.

The current down economy is probably going to have most IT shops looking for ways to further trim costs and, of course, outsourcing MORE will be an attractive option. Geraldine Fox and Nigel Hughes work over at Compass and they’ve got a few words of caution for the rest of us when it comes time to consider IT outsourcing.

It’s all too easy to do this stuff the wrong way…

Skip The Planning, Dive Right In:

This is how all to many firms approach the outsourcing of their IT operations. All too often, firms view outsourcing as an opportunity to simply replace their expensive onshore headcount with less expensive offshore staff.

This view is not only short sighted, but just flat out wrong as lots and lots of firms discovered during the first wave of outsourcing in the 1990′s. It takes time and lots of planning in order to move IT functions from inside the firm to an outsourcing shop. Once they are there, you’re going to need more management resources than you have right now in order to stay on top of how the work is going.

“Lift & Shift”:

Many firms attempt to just pick up their existing IT operations and move them over to the outsourcing operation hoping that lower salaries there will automatically deliver the savings that they are looking for. What’s missing from this thinking is the simple fact that it will always take MORE people at the outsourcer to do the same job.

A good rule of thumb is to expect a 15% increase in headcount. Sure, you can probably move your ineffective IT operations offshore and experience some immediate short-term savings. However, very quickly these will vanish as outsourcing salaries continue to go up and staff turnover rates range annually from 25%-80%.

Out Of Sight, Out Of Mind:

Just dropping the work off and then not paying any attention to the people who are now doing the work is a clear recipe for disaster. Your firm is going to have to take on a whole new set of responsibilities.

These will include retaining outsource staff, investing in outsourced resources (training, orientation, retention), and making sure that they have a clear career path. Oh, and by the way, you had better be doing all of these things for your onshore / in-house staff or else they will become very jealous very quickly!

More, More, More:

One well known reality of outsourcing is that that productivity will drop. This means that it’s going to take more bodies to accomplish the same task. When you couple this with a high rate of turnover, you can pretty much wave goodbye to any outsourcing cost savings that you were counting on.

Smart firms realize that the solution to low productivity is not to throw more bodies at the problem; instead, you need to work with the outsourcer to fix the productivity problem at its source.

Everyone Else Is Not Doing Better At This Than You Are

No matter what your competition may be telling the press, don’t worry. No firms are really seeing monster discounts because of their outsourcing efforts. Many firms claim that they are achieving 40% cost saving when the reality is that at best they really are seeing cost savings in the 20% range.

Hold Those Horses:

When you decide to outsource more of your IT operations, keep in mind that this will have a major impact on your firm. Companies don’t do a good job of dealing with change and outsourcing part of your internal processes most definitely is change. Take some time to create the right mix of in-house and outsourced operations and then use a measured approach to implement it.

It Takes Two To Tango:

There is always the possibility that an oursourcing effort won’t work out. If this happens, you need to realize that both your firm and the oursourcer are to blame.

Don’t waste everyone’s time pointing fingers at the oursourcer and expecting them to fix everything. Instead, acknowledge your part in creating the problem and then sit down with the outsourcer and get to work finding a way to fix it.

Has your firm already started to use outsourcing firms to perform IT operations? How has it gone so far? What is the most important thing that you know now that you didn’t know when you started outsourcing? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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Posted in outsource | 3 Comments »