IT Leadership Blog

If you are a project manager, hard project management skills such as planning are essential to the success of your project, but equally important are soft skills involving people. How you interact with the people on your project, and with sponsors and the other parties involved, can make or break an otherwise technically perfect endeavour. Often, these will involve doing unpleasant things such as performance management, or overriding the wishes of some members of the team or the customer for the sake of the project. Because they are unpleasant, they often don’t get done properly or at all, and the project suffers. Why ?

Firstly, people like to be liked. They like those around them to like them, and working in an atmosphere where there is dislike can be draining. In your private life, you may be able to choose who you associate with so as to avoid this, but this isn’t necessarily so in the world of work. Your main responsibility is the success of the project: most other things are incidental, including whether you are liked or not. So if you have to make unpleasant decisions or say unpleasant things to people, so be it. The best project managers can manage to make decisions and remain popular, but if you can’t, go with project success. It is, ultimately, better for all.

Secondly, people don’t like conflict. Some are happier with it than others, but most find it stressful. Unfortunately, if you avoid conflict, your project will suffer. There are always opposing views which must be resolved, and this will involve conflict of some sort. If the team can’t make a decision, then you will have to do it, and override at least some of them. Again, your main responsibility is the success of the project, and timely decisions must be made. This may make you unpopular, but again, it’s ultimately better for all.

Some tips for dealing with unpleasant subjects within teams:

• Be open and transparent as much as is possible. If you make a decision, tell everyone why, even if it’s only “because that’s the way I want it done”. Accept negative comments gracefully, but don’t waver.

• Deal with performance problems immediately. Don’t let them linger: it’s not fair to coworkers, or to the individual concerned. Nip resentment within the team in the bud. Again, you may receive negative comments from the person involved: accept these, but don’t waver.

• Be positive where this is possible, and demand evidence. People may speculate negatively about others within and without the project, and impute motives to them which they have no evidence for. This creates inactivity: they may cease working with individuals because they think they’re not going to perform, even when they have no knowledge about their situation. Demand evidence, and encourage your team to talk in order to understand.

• Be prepared for emotion, but try to remain factual. When dealing with others, present evidence and seek to understand their view, but remain firm and calm, even if they are angry or upset.

In all cases, you should do these things because your project will suffer otherwise. And that remains your main responsibility at all times.

We can enhance your soft (and hard) project management skills, either one-to-one or as a group. Contact us for further details.

Lots of our customers are small businesses that have outsourced IT support to one of the many companies which exist, today, to do just that. Often, we become involved because their IT isn’t working for them in some way, and when we analyse the situation we find that at least part of the problem is support. But why ? Haven’t you employed an expensive bunch of experts to provide the expertise you don’t have, and take your IT problems away ? Well, probably not, for a couple of reasons.

Firstly, there’s often a mismatch between what your staff expect and what you’ve contracted for. Support companies cannot make money unless they control the amount of time they will spend on a particular client, and so they will sell services which they can bound, and quote extra for anything else. If you previously had an in-house IT person, they probably knew the business and your staff, and would be prepared to sit next to them and explain things. Often this facility disappears when support is outsourced, and this makes life harder for your staff.

Secondly, time passes, and what you need will change. Without someone on your staff who is at least thinking about IT, you will get what you’ve always been getting from your support provider, and this may not be right for you. Your staff will learn to take up the slack between what they need and what you’re getting, with predictable results: inconsistent processes, wasted effort, and often much grumbling about IT.

What to do, then ? It is absolutely key to know what it is your business needs from a support provider, and to make sure you get it. As mentioned above, there are many, many companies in this market now, and they offer many different flavours of IT support. Write down what you want, and conduct a formal comparison of companies to make sure that your candidate companies offer the services you want. It’s best not to start with any preconceived ideas, otherwise it’s all too easy to end up with what another version of what you already have. If necessary, get help from an uninterested third party with experience of requirements definition in order to ensure you have the best chance of getting what you need.

We can help you with defining your support requirements, either separately or as part of an IT HealthCheck. Contact us for further details.

Does this sound familiar to you ? You’re a medium-sized company, perhaps 50 employees. You’re good at what you do: all your staff are hands-on and committed. As you’ve grown, you’ve gradually increased your use of IT systems, and now you realise you can’t do without it. Well, that’s certainly what your people think, as they’re always complaining to you about it, especially those who work away from the office a lot. In fact, it’s such a big deal now that one of your people does IT almost full-time. The person was a good worker in their previous job, and seemed to know more about PCs than anyone else, so it was a good fit. You’re not so sure now, as IT complaints seem to be rising, and nothing ever gets finished.

You’ve got a micro-IT department: one person who slipped into the job without any real experience or formal training. This works fine when a company and it’s IT demands are not so big, but as soon as IT becomes really important to day-to-day operations, it’s hard for such a person to know what to do and why: they need more knowledge and experience than they have or can easily get. Often, they are enmired in day-to-day support issues, and so can’t find the time to do anything else, let alone think strategically.

Business owners and managers need to recognise when this is happening and ensure that the IT function gets the management it needs. This may mean employing an IT professional to take over the job, which can be painful, although micro-ITers often recognise that the situation isn’t satisfactory, for the company or for them. Experienced, forward-looking IT management enables the business to cut costs and grow. Without it, your people will still be complaining to you at this time next year.

We can help you decide whether you have a micro-IT department, and what you should do about it. Contact us for further details.

There has been some publicity recently, on the BBC and in some IT-industry magazines, about companies which allow, or even positively encourage, their employees to use their own computing equipment at work. The reasons cited for this seem mainly to do with expectation: a generation of workers is rising which has known the laptop and smartphone since they were children, and which balk at being plonked in front of a beige box running XP while at work. Why, they reason, can’t I connect to the work network the way I do in Starbucks, and use whatever tools I use now to do my job ?

And some employers are letting them. The main downside for employers is that it requires an amount of work to make their networks both safe and compatible with this kind of use. Safe, so that employees’ equipment doesn’t spread viruses to the rest of the company, and so that they can’t take local copies of important data, for example. Compatible, so that they don’t let general computer use become more inefficient because of incompatibilities between systems and applications, as might easily be the case. Companies contemplating this should also have a relatively mature support organisation, whether this is internal or outsourced, to deal with the problems which will arise when new equipment is connected. This may cost more, as outsourced support costs generally drop for environments which are uniform, and rise with novelty.

So why should employers contemplate this ? It makes workers happier, it seems, as they can use facilities which are familiar to them and over which they feel they have some control. Some employers part-fund equipment for employees who wish to do this, arguing that it’s cheaper than the company paying for it all. And employees will often upgrade their equipment more often than the company might, avoiding those 20-minute waits for boot-up on a 4-year old laptop.

A more mixed blessing, though, is the intermingling of work and social life that might take place. Employees are probably more likely to work when they’re not at work, so to speak, as they also use their facilities for socialising, but they might also be socialising when they’re at work. Your organisation will need to manage this: work with your HR department to ensure that you are framing your staff’s goals by results, rather than simply by attendance. Work truly does need to be what you do, rather than where you do it, and this necessitates good management, good goal-setting, and a measure of trust in your employees.

A common complaint in many businesses is that IT projects are easy to start, but hard to finish. Often they take far longer than intended, or cost far more, or simply fizzle out. The reasons for doing them become blurred, and the expected benefit doesn’t materialise. Why is this, and what can be done about it ?

One common problem is that the project might actually be impossible for the company at that time, not technically, but organisationally: the company is just not organised correctly to deliver the desired outcome.

To take a concrete example, many companies we speak to have a project list, discussed weekly at the management meeting. And every week, project milestones are missed, and pushed back a week. Seeing this happen again and again really drains away the confidence that IT can deliver, and is demoralising for those working on the project.

This is usually a symptom of an organisational problem: that the project has been started in circumstances which will make it hard to complete. It is rare that such projects are technically impossible: usually they fail for very simple organisational reasons: for example, the IT staff involved are doing too many things at once, and can’t devote enough time to it, or that they are doing support as well as development, and thus spend their days reacting to problems rather than pursuing the new project.

We can help your projects to succeed by ensuring they start in the best possible circumstances. We can provide advice on IT planning, as well as rolling our sleeves up and getting involved during the start-up phase of the project. Finally, our IT Health Check is a good way of assessing how the project process works in your organisation, and what you can do to avoid those demoralising milestone meetings.