Dear uncreative IT professionals, saying “no” is not a business process

We have all encountered the IT professional the quotes company policy to you when you come to them with a problem.  Be it the desk side support person telling someone they need to log a ticket when someone stops them in the hall with a problem.  These are the infamous “Hall Grabs” IT service managers who manage by metrics spend their waking hours and sleepless nights trying to prevent.  Another is the person the quotes a server change request you have asked for is not allowed by process.

I don’t think that these are immediately bad things, but they are bad when they become the norm.  No is easy to say if you have a document that supports you.  Many ITIL and or ITSM shops seem to make no the safest response.  If you are ITIL and or ITSM certified and are currently fuming because you think I don’t fully understand how to use problem management and therefore do not know what I am talking about, I say find me a properly staffed and properly used problem management group.  Those groups are the first to have their staff cut when budgets get cut.  Who wants to pay a bunch of people lots of money to think when you can pay people less to just do from a chart.

Some people think why say yes?  Yes only gets you in trouble.  Breaking from the mold and doing something like fixing and Operating System is difficult.  Just wiping the server and “repaving” it with an new OS is so much faster.  It may be faster if you have team of people that don’t know what they are doing.  If you have an experienced team of professionals that have solved the problem you are facing in the past by using diagnostic techniques and problem solving skills it might take seconds to resolve an issue that you are about to spend a days of downtime working on.

I am constantly shocked and uncreative IT people following a script laid out by people who will often admit to knowing little to nothing about the technology their staffs manage.  If you choose to simply follow the well worn process flow chart in the “3-ring binder” on yours desk, I am speaking to you.  That is a fine path if you have no idea what you are doing.  Why do you not know what you are doing?  Go learn.  Try something.  Risk failure.  If you fail, you will learn.  I guarantee it.

If you want to do your job like a robot, let me assure you, it will be done by a robot soon.  Just saying no and following the script is a recipe for career failure.

Failing Faster v1.1 the eBook is now available

Failing Faster v1.1 is not available in eBook form from NoiseTrade.com.

Everyone is a problem solver, technical professionals live problem solving every day.Failing Faster is an action oriented problem solving methodology to improve technical problem solving that puts an emphasis on action rather than analysis. In this brief eBook the author explains the methodology and gives real world examples.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Wunderlist – How we track complex desktop deployments

Legal IT has some unique challenges.  One of the largest is the most obvious when you think of lawyers and staff, they are not technical and should not have to be.  Lawyers, paralegals and support staff are specialists.  They focus on their work product.  Successful Legal IT involves helping the department/firm produce work product without getting in the way.  We use the term, “white glove” treatment at Turner for executives and other specialist that due to their job don’t have time and would not be expected to do their own computer updates.   Consider that you do not want the company treasurer or head of programming to be sitting and her desk worrying why a prerequisite for an install gave an error.  We face the same thing but on a larger scale.  If a member of the legal department is delayed or has their time “wasted”  it is most likely delaying something that either makes money for the company or saves money for the company.

A common requirement for my team is to perform an update of all legal systems software on computer.  Fortunately all computers are standardized.  Unfortunately, the desktop software has some finicky installation requirements.  We automated what we could with 6000 lines of combined Powershell and batch file code.  That said, we still face approximately 2 hours of work for each machine:

• Uninstall all legal software
• Uninstall MS Office (This is not fast, and requires a reboot)
• Install New version of MS Office (This is just not fast)
• Patch Operating System (This is the unknown time sink)
• Install Legal Software
• Verify configuration (There are some steps that the automated procedures just hiccup on about 10% of the time.)

How in the world do you manage to keep all of that straight with a limited time frame, 15 offices spread around he globe and only a handful of employees and few local resources?

Answer: A great checklist.

We have great checklists and instructions, but it is easy to lose track of who is where and who is doing what at what time.  We use Wunderlist and a shared list.  My lead support analyst has gotten quite adept and maintaining and update the lists despite the lack of an import feature.

With Wunderlist installed on our phones, desktops and accessible via the web, as a manager I know exactly where we are in the upgrade process and where I can redirect resources to help.  Sometimes that resource is me, sometimes it is other teammates that have completed their work and are now available to assist.

The high level of up time, low cost ($0) and versatile ways to access make Wunderlist a key tool in our Legal IT toolbox.

How many hats do you wear at work?

I have a hat rack in my office, I am a People Manager, Technical Manager, Project Manger, Business Analyst, Programmer, Database Administrator, Data Modeler, System Administrator, System’s Architect, and occasional furniture mover.  I am sure I have forgotten a hat or two, they are probably stuck under another hat.

How do I wear all of those hats?  One at a time and very carefully.  I am very lucky to be in a job that allows me to be a “hybrid” IT professional.  I have had jobs that were only one hat, Programmer, or Database Administrator.  I found those to be restrictive.  I am not sure that I could go back to just having one job to do each day.  I am never bored, and I have a to do list that my successors will still be working to clear, regardless of when I retire.

How do you handle the hat juggle?

Why people don’t use Service Level Agreements

Service Level Agreements  are scary.  They are a contract between you and the customer spelling out when you will start and how long it will take you to do something.  That is terrifying when applied to the unknown.  We would never work as IT professionals without an agreement as to how much we will get paid and when.  Why do we expect the customer to work without a contract spelling out how we will work for them and when?

Many IT people think of SLAs as a restriction that ties them up in knots.  Many customers have no idea what and SLA is.  They just want to know how long you are going to let their application be broken.  We need to look at the SLA as a “living document.”  Not a set of commandments that we need a lawyer to interpret for us.

As IT professionals if we are constantly failing to meet the agreed SLA we need to sit down and determine if we are doing all that we can to meet the SLA.  If the answer is yes, then we need to go back to the customer and discuss the reality of the situation and adjust the SLA or increase the budget for the support.  A frank discussion must be had, about costs and trade offs.  if you can’t do it, promising to do it is worse that saying no.

The SLA should not be seen as an excuse to avoid work or something to avoid because it binds you to an agreement.  It is a tool for IT professionals to use to improve the customer relationship.  In the end the relationship with our customers is all we have.

Massively.com Reborn

The Massively.com crew is not giving up and folding.  They are going to keep going and I commend them.  An article about their kickstarter campaign is below.

http://siliconangle.com/blog/2015/02/06/after-closure-massively-respawns-as-massivelyop-and-heads-to-kickstarter/

All if this is good for Massively, but my concerns about journalism still stand.  If more large media companies turn their backs on specialized journalism the way AOL did we are in a for a rough time.  Social media is great for information but it is not journalism.

Maybe my concerns are unfounded.  There is a great hope that the internet will police itself and be better that media companies are at running new sites.  Fingers crossed that it all works out.

Msssively.com shutdown – First newspapers, now blogs are going under

Looking at the last posts from Massively,com got me thinking last night that “social media” is killing real journalism. I know I am not the first to say it. Just funny to see it hitting my world.

Aggregators need news to distribute and talk about.  Sites like reddit.com will collapse if there is nothing to aggregate.

I worry that all news will one day come from things that are tweeted by a guy on a bus.  @tony_soprano_42378 says World of Warcraft is shutting down. Two days later everyone has cancelled their subs because of the in-depth journalism from the bus rider filters to the world as fact.

The millennial generation has great bullshit detectors for work that does not need to be done, but I worry they will lack the information necessary for critical thinking and healthy skepticism.

We live in an age where real things sounds like jokes: Bruce Jenner is becoming a woman.  ISIS is burning captured pilots alive to cheers in the streets.  The leading early candidates for president are Bush and Clinton.  People choose not to vaccinate their children because of the research from a discredited doctor.  “Reality” television is scripted.  {People watch TV on their phones.

Crawling back into my nerd cave and avoiding reality.

Just Do It! You have time to do that project management stuff.

As a project manager we have all faced that manager, owner, boss who says, “You don’t have time for all that project management stuff, just do it.”

You may in fact not have time for “all” of that that project management stuff, but you have time to manage your team.

So when you are challenged to just do it:

• Just do it.  Do those project management plans, schedules, charts as you are managing the project team.
• Just do it.  Don’t talk about it.  Don’t drag your feet. Produce a project charter (don’t hold your breath waiting to get it signed)
• Just do it.  Get the Scope statement written.  You need that scope baseline.  How else will know when you are done?
• Just do it.  Create that WBS.  Turn that WBS Dictionary in an activity list as you are doing your planning.
• Just do it.  Make that resource calendar.  Turn that into a project management plan after you have you team working.
• Just do it.  Use rolling wave planning to update the WBS and schedule plan improving as you go.
• Just do it.  Test, track verify the quality of your project teams output.
• Just do it.  Get that customer acceptance, and close the project.
• You just did it.

When things go right you will know why and be able to discuss it.  When things go wrong you will have your lessons learned and know not to do that again.  Don’t make excuses as to why you can do the project management you need to do.  Just do it.

Things I should tweet but won’t (So I posted it here):

I want to hate @MathewMcconaughey for being so cool, but he is so cool he understands, appreciates, and celebrates my negative feelings for his coolness.

How to survive being outflanked by your workload and what that has to do with IT work.

Step one: do not let yourself be outflanked.  So that failed…  What do you do now?

Being out flanked on a battle field is when the opposing force manages to move around you and block your ability to maneuver in a direction that is advantageous to you.  When this happens it is almost always bad for the unit that is outflanked.  To get a good idea of this, imagine you  are a general and you have carefully planned out your battle strategy.  Suddenly the place you were going to maneuver to after the battle started is now filled with enemy soldiers.  Your plan just fell apart.

<Military Anecdote>

There is a basic infantry combat tactic taught in the Army.  When you are outflanked and unable to maneuver your entire unit moves toward a single point in the opposing force.  You can’t fight all sides at once and can’t panic.  Both are the sure way to lose everything. There are no guarantees for the unit that is already outflanked and unable to maneuver, but staying disciplined and working as a single unit is the only way to survive.

</Military Anecdote>

Why would an IT professional think about this?  It is the same thing you face everyday at work. You likely have a list of tasks and projects that could not be completed before you die if there were 10 of you.  You are effectively outflanked by your workload.

What can you do?  Stay calm, and pick a point to attack.  If you have an unpleasant call to make, make it.  if you have an ugly mess of a wiring harness that just needs to be torn apart and rewired, do it (provided you can get the system downtime.)

Much like an infantry battle you will be overwhelmed and lose if you stay in one place and try to fight on all sides at once.  When someone tells me they are overwhelmed and they don’t know what to work on first I always say, “Go left to right.”  It sounds silly when you read it but invariably that person just starts working.  Maybe they do so just have me stop giving them silly advice, but they are working nonetheless.   I actually mean it.

When I don’t know what to do with a desk covered in work , I go from left to right.  I don’t think about it, I just start.  I my case that generally means checking messages and returning calls since my phone is on my left, sending emails and handling reminder notes when I get to the middle, project documentation work which sits on the largest open part of my desk and then process my physical inbox which sits on my far right.  I get the inbox more often than you think.

This goes back to core idea of Failing Faster:  Don’t just sit there, do something!  Next time you are outflanked, you will know what to do.  Pick a target and fight your way out.