IT is like pulling babies out of the water

I had a mentor once that described life in IT in the following manner. I think it’s a great story about the difference between being a tactical thinker and a strategic thinker.

A man was sitting by the edge of the stream one day and noticed a baby floating helplessly down the stream. He dropped the book he was reading and immediately jumped in the water, swam out, and got the baby and brought it safely back to the shore. As he put the baby on his blanket, he noticed that another baby was also floating down the stream. He jumped back in the water and swam out and saved this baby also. As he placed the second child safely on his blanket, he noticed a third baby in the water. Tired and exhausted the man jumped in the water and struggled, but successfully pulled the child out. As he turned around and saw the fourth baby in the water, he took several steps, clutched his heart, and fell dead on the side of the stream.

Sadly, the man never journeyed the 100 yards to the top of the stream, where he would have found the person who was putting the babies in the water and stopped him.

What does this have to do with IT?

Like the man who was too busy doing his job, IT leaders don’t stop long enough to look at what independent variables are causing the workload to grow within their organizations. We are constantly trying to be the heroes who save projects, write applications, and deploy systems when it is killing our teams. Instead of going the 100 yards upsteam to stop or at least retard the demand on IT services, we stay in the water waiting for the next baby to come down the stream. We’ve been in the water so long that it seems a normal way to behave.

What can you do about it?

Unfettered demand for IT resources is not sustainable. The costs are measured in sick time, attrition, and recruiting costs. To retain your staff, your leadership team, and your sanity, you need to inject a governance process into your organization. One thing you can implement quickly is a “Plan of Record.” A plan of record is the authoritative list of IT projects that have business sponsors. This list is critical because it lists, at a minimum, the name of the project, the expected completion date, the business owner, and a rough estimate of hours and dollars.

Once you have a PoR, you can now engage your business units in a discussion of their projects and their competiting demands on your resources. When you sit down with your business owner, you can have a fact based discussion like the following, “Jim, I am workingon four projects for your division, this new one is going to use the same resources as the other four. Can you help me prioritize which ones I should be working on first?”

As IT leaders we can take control of how many babies are being put in the water by going upstream and solving the problem on the front end. Using a Plan of Record as a tool for face to face meetings with your business partners help everyone reduce the frustration and sense of being a hero pulling projects out of the water.

Of course we care about you. We just don’t want to hear from you!

I had this client last year who wanted to get the pulse of his new organization. He asked me to take a look and see what I could learn. Pretty straight forward stuff.

I scanned the enviornment and listen to many annadotes about his team’s unhappieness. Story after story articulated a variation of “we don’t get training” or “nobody respects what we do.” So then I asked the obvious question to the senior leadership which was “have we ever done an employee opinion survey?” Chortles of laughter ensued. “We don’t want to actually ASK them how they feel” said one Vice President in IT. “Beware of what you are going to find out if you do this” cautioned another SVP in HR.

As I survey the company it was almost as if people in leadership positions knew that there were HR problems but by not discussing them they hoped they would go away. This is a classic example of the executive team thinking they are actually smarter than the people in the trenches who are doing the work. I hate to break this to some senior leaders but command and control org charts just don’t stand a chance next to the informal grapevine that runs through companies. If you think the DBA doesn’t know how low morale is in her department, you’re sadly mistaken. If you don’t think the person working third shift NOC knows who does and doesn’t have their resume posted on Monster. com or an updated listing in LinkedIn, you have your head in the sand. The problems are there. Everyone in the department knows this. Do something to FIX the problem instead of ignoring the problem.

Here’s what the client and I did to address the internal issue:

• You don’t have to spend alot of money to get a survey off the ground. Go to Surveymonkey.com and create an account. This will give your employees a degree of confidence that the survey is actually anonymous.

• Pick five to ten questions using a 1…5 scale that ask about key indicators of employee satisfaction. Here are some samples I’ve used in the past:

1. “How satisfied are you with the work you do?”,
2. “I feel it is easy to accomplish work in my department”,
3. “I have had a 1:1 with my manager in the past 30 days”,
4. “I feel I am paid fairly for the work I perform”
5. “I believe the leadership team is effective in leading our department”

• Add an opened ended question (or two) asking them to provide additional comments.
• Survemonkey.com will provide a link that you can send out to the team.

Once you close the survey, you will have mathmatical facts to support the pulse of your department. Don’t just sit there and check off that you’ve completed a survey. Do something with the data! Pull your leadership team together to review the data. Present your findings at your next staff meeting and your next department all hands.

Publish the honest and brutal truth. This is what separates leaders from followers. Now once you have published it, people are actually going to expect you to do something with it. That’s why connecting the questions with measurable initiatives is so important. Implement training on how to conduct 1:1s. If people feel they are underpaid, have HR do a competitive analysis. If they don’t have confidence in the leadership team, hire a consultant to find out why.

The problems of aligning human resources around the business direction is always challenging. It’s made more challenging when the leadership team has no idea that they are leading but nobody in their department is following. Surveying your department and helping understand their joys and pains will help retain the talent you have which means you have a better chance of hitting your department and business goals.



The Idea Gap

When I talk to fellow IT leaders regionally and internationally there seems to be a common frustration among my peers. The problem is not now nor has it ever been the difficultly in finding people to perform IT jobs. I can stand outside with a hiring req and yell a salary and I’ll get tons of candidates. The problem is when you actually talk to them or bring them into your organization.

One of the things that helps me identify tomorrow’s leaders very quickly is how the phrase problems. A technologist, be it individual contributor through VP, who looks at a technical problem as, well, just a technical problem is firmly planted on a career treadmill going nowhere fast.

Technologist who will distinguish themselves from their contemporaries will be those who translate technology into business value. For a certain audience that reads this it will sound obvious. Sadly there will also be people that think that they are in technology for the sake of technology. Dude, those days have passed!

If technology purchases are not redefined as “IT investments” and looked at in that light, we will never align our department with the business direction. Sorry folks but if IT investments (capital, expense & labor) are not solving business problems by either enabling increased revenue or reduced expenses then it’s probably not an IT project aligned with any business results.

And it shouldn’t have been funded.

Ideas on how we drive business value is where people separate themselves. It’s certainly what I look for in potential candidates and existing staff. It should be just as much of the interview process as asking candidates technical questions.