Pete, I have taken two companies through the transition from startup (~20 people, 1 site) to more enterprise (~150 people, multiple sites worldwide) as an IT manager/director. I started with 1 - 2 staff members and ended up with 5 - 9. Things I would do are:
- find a meetup group and/or mentor so you have a group to bounce ideas off of before you try them on your staff - with your staff, write up what works and is not working and then work with them to create solutions. It is critical to get them to buy into the changes. - solicit ideas from your staff and allow them to implement them (even if you would do it differently) as long as the end goal is met and it is sustainable. - figure out the company's natural cycles (e.g. yearly, quarterly, monthly, based on software release, etc.). Make sure your staff know about these cycles so you do not make changes at a critical time for your company (e.g end of the month when they are trying to meet sales targets). - work with the other managers to find out their pain points and then see what you can do to alleviate the pain points. - work with your staff to find their pain points and then see what you can do to alleviate the pain points. - above all keep it fun - when folks work hard on a project have a party when it is done. Congratulate folks in public, show disappoint in private. - take your staff's temperature at least once a week. By this I mean talk with them to get a feel for where they are emotionally, how they feel about work, life, and everything. - only put in extra paperwork when needed to meet the above items Things not to do are: - add in extra paperwork because some mgmt book or course said you need to (e.g. at a third company I spent a lot of time with each staff member writing down their goals for the year in a format recommended by a mgmt course I took. Basically just made everyone upset because it was not needed - I could just walk around the corner and talk with them). - tell staff how to do their job. You hired them, let them do the work. Realize that for a junior person you need some checks on them or else you may get a few late nights like I did when a junior person decided that incremental Exchange backups for year were a good thing (took us three days to recover the system). For a senior person, let them work. Instead work them to get agreement on what needs to be done. - just pass on every project that the rest of the company dreams up onto your staff. You need to protect your staff from project creep and too many projects. As a leader, you are there to mentor staff, act as a project filter and interface between the other managers and your staff, and provide guidance on what must be done. Hope this helps. cheers, ski On Tue, 7 Jan 2014 10:15:38 -0500 Peter Grace <[email protected]> wrote: > Hello list, > > Well, I've been an IT Director for about half a year now. In this > time I have learned quite a bit more about what it takes to be a > manager and the amount of self discipline it requires to keep all of > the pieces on the chessboard moving safely. > > After 6 months, my self evaluation is I suck at being in charge of an > IT department, and by gosh I want to fix that. I am asking for your > opinions on all manners of self-help: certification ideas, books that > have helped you "grok" how a department should work properly, ways to > improve process management, things of this nature. I want to be the > best I can be and I know that a lot of the people on this list have > "been there, done that" and have lived to tell the tale. I'd love to > hear yours. > > I struggle since the place where I work still has a lot of startup > mentality but they're getting to the size where we need to start > making it "enterprisey" to keep things moving smoothly. A lot of the > people in the organization feel like making things more > enterprise-like means that they'll be mired in paperwork and > mucky-muck and it's tough to break that opinion. What are your > experiences? > > Thanks in advance, > > Pete -- "When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it connected to the entire universe" John Muir Chris "Ski" Kacoroski, [email protected], 206-501-9803 or ski98033 on most IM services _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
