A simple tactic for fighting the ever-growing list of legacy applications, spreadsheets, reports, customizations, and processes that no one knows how to maintain, but nobody seems to want to get rid of (aka Technical Debt).
I'll tell you about this visualization from a recent internal conversation, but I may end up aggravating some career IT people out there. Yes, I have massively oversimplified things - but I'm trying to develop a broader understanding, and I think it's a good first step. The original question was "How do I manage IT?", but it quickly morphed into "how can I drive / derive value from IT?" (note the powerful difference that a single letter makes - derive sounds sustainable)…
At technology conferences, vendor seminars, and user group, I enjoy the networking conversations - professionals looking to leverage each others' background, experience, and relationships, ostensibly to forward their own careers, but openly trying to solve a problem with a win-win for both sides of the connection. Inevitably, however, the conversations refine and regress down to a common theme - the classic oversimplification "change is hard". Much of the time, I'd wager that change in your organization is comparatively easy -…
Cut to the chase! An effective style of communication is to "run to the bad news"; for time-starved stakeholders, this approach works by focusing the attention on the critical few decision points and issues.
Interesting line of conversation around an internal Help Desk project ... "What exactly is the point of my help desk ticketing system?", posits the hardy IT Tech. "I, like so many other IT technicians, am expected to solve end-user problems quickly with my infinite knowledge of every potential PC / software combination, not to mention a dizzying array of specialty printers, alternative input devices, smartphones, and tablets. And I, like so many other IT technicians, realize that the most capable,…
It's not enough to capture Lessons Learned at the end of your projects; build in a process step to review Learnings from the past, to start new projects off right.
Cloud and open source have been around for some time - long enough for the term "cloud" to [finally] fade away as a differentiator (it's just assumed!). Still, some continue to dismiss these technologies for their corporate solutions - but it's getting tougher to just ignore this stuff ... Scale? Cloud provider Amazon continues to dominate the market, with five times the market share of all of their competitors combined. The breadth, depth, and scale of some of their customers…
Classic lament of IT - I just want get involved, be part of the conversation - I want a seat at the table. Classic lament of everyone else - How can IT deliver value to the business? It sounds like two people reaching for each other - but in the dark. They want to connect, but they don't know how. The problem, of course, is that many - from IT and other areas of the business - default to the…
Even in the overhyped world of technology, these non-technical issues (resources, cost, time, priorities) are often the root cause of project difficulty and failure. Talking things out up front can save a lot of headaches and disappointment later.
I'm working this holiday week to get the majority of the written work completed for my 2013 Performance Reviews; I realize it's something that folks do not enjoy doing, but I see it as an incredibly important effort. I like to think my organization and I are doing a fairly good job of communicating on a regular basis, but the structure and the formality of the annual Review process ensures that we are "on the same page" regarding the critical…