How is the IT Team Viewed?
How does the organization view the IT team and IT Management in your business? Do they see IT as an effective group of individuals who are dedicated to highly professional, timely service? Do they see IT as a less than stellar group of amateurs who over promise and under-deliver? Here are six steps to assist when building successful IT teams.
A highly qualified IT team with a bad organization can be incredibly ineffective and conversely, a mediocre, highly organized team can also be extremely weak. To be great, the IT team has to be strong across these six areas of IT strength.
Defined service objectives
An IT executive that sets the tone for the team with a well-defined purpose and mission and who walks the talk can inspire a culture of service. Getting the entire team to share and engage in the service objective builds strength.
- Skilled and capable team members: A team that gets it, wants to work and who has the capability of doing the job is essential. Sounds easy; however, many organizations fail at finding, hiring and keeping the right people. Make improvements to your hiring and review processes to get and keep the right talent.
- Data management. Having a reliable database system that will help to service customers and measure performance is critical to continual improvement. You get what you measure; so measure what you expect. Implement data management systems to help you service clients, execute on projects, measure outcomes and support your team.
- Simple processes: Processes that can be understood quickly and that facilitate the service objective are imperative. Document your processes using the 80/20 rule – 80% of what you need to communicate is in 20% of the process so just create short process documents that can be used and remembered. Get the process documentation done and ensure that they are “followed by all.”
- Issues management: Having an issue tracking, or problem management system are two major contributors to ongoing success and the end to repetitive problems. A good issues management system is key to your success. Implement an IT Management system with problem management but also develop an issues management process wrapped into your weekly meetings to solve problems permanently.
- Traction on objectives and getting work done: Your team will be measured by a few metrics but will be remembered for an even shorter list. Getting work done and being consistent are two components of traction. Create an organization that gets things done by implementing weekly meetings where each person is held accountable for their roles, priorities, and to-dos.
Delivering the Promise of an IT Organization
Delivering on your service objective is imperative. If broken processes and team result in the organization not being able to deliver on the customer promise, then one of the six components above are to blame. IT teams succeed to the degree that each of these components is strong.
Keeping your IT Organization Simple
As organizations grow they become more complex. There are more people, more applications, more equipment. It’s important to simplify your IT Team, processes, applications, etc. to facilitate growth. IT can then become a significant factor in organizations achieving their objectives.
Bring together help desk, project management, service desk and simple IT approaches to help small and medium organizations simplify processes and systems, effectively deliver on service and measure results. Click here to see how.
