Don't Do This Mistake #1

One of the top mistakes that IT Managers do is focusing on the technology not the business; it is really a big mistake when you do this.

Focusing on the technology comes from technical background of the typical IT manager. From their technical background, the focus their efforts in their expertise when in fact they should be seeking for the ways to help, enhance, and activate the business.

To be success the IT Managers must become business oriented leaders and turn their focus and expertise to business.

As IT Manager you have to focus on Business issues and problems. To give your business what they need with cost efficiency for the organization. Keep your focus on the business will enhance the business environment, improve the employee knowledge in the business of the organization and increasing the customer satisfaction.

You have to start working on this concept by building a good knowledge about your business and participating in business meetings.

Your next level of business starting now

Do you planned to improve your team skills? Do you have any idea to improve your team members motivation? What is your expectation about your team? Are you ready to move to next level with your business? Did you start your housekeeping? Is your team satisfied about your work, management and decisions? Are you open minded to hear from your team?

Many questions you have to think about to improve your IT team skills and competencies if you looking to move to next level with business, when you are thinking as businessman IT Manager you have to set your plan to align with your business for current and future expectations.

You have to start your planning right now if you didn't before to improve your team members skills and give them the guideline to start their self-motivation.

My advice to you is to put the questions above on a paper and start to answer them honestly, once you review your answers, meet your team members and share them the questions and ask them to answer them, compare your answers with your team members answers find the gaps and solve them immediately.

Your team members are the most valuable asset to innovate your business and they are the base to move your business to next level, take care of them will increase the opportunity to success your business, don’t forget to give your team members the chance to share their ideas with you some ideas will be the base block to build your business for future.

Motivation, Motivation, Motivation keep this word always in your mind and always do the best to build the motivation in your team, help your team members to improve their skills, give them the tools and guidelines to increase their efficiency and maximize their productivity.

Simplified IT Management & Operations

I engaged to a new job 1 month ago and the first thing I did is thinking about my mission, I read my job description a lot and I reviewed the company mission, vision and values to create a sentence collect all these information, my sentence is “Simplified IT Management & Operations”.

When I looked to this sentence many times I found it very hard to implement and we have to start inside the company before we go outside, I spent a lot of time to set the market plan to help the company to achieve this mission, but really I found it very interesting mission and we can implement it easily.

Many of IT people thinking the processes and procedures are developed to make the work more complex, in my point of view is procedures and processes help us to simplify the work and help us to automate the work specially those repeated tasks.

What is the simplification mean?

In my point view I see the simplification is set of procedures, policies and procedures set to control and organize the work and IT infrastructure and applications aligned with those polices procedures and processes. Awareness is needed also to do the simplification better.

Simplifying IT Management & Operation gives the IT people the opportunity to focus on the business, you need very good communication skills to contact with business, just keep in your mind the business people is your customer and you have to keep them satisfied.

Unbreakable IT Environment

Business is looking always for a robust IT environment with the lowest down time, building unbreakable IT environment is a mission for IT department, and the functional or business department should support the IT to build this environment.

Key of success for any organization is a strong work environment, metrics to measure strong work environment depends on business needs which means the strongest work environment must be compatible with business needs, IT department should analyze the business needs to know if it doable or not, and discuss the result with business departments.

IT department should document all business requirements and the analysis results and sign it from authorized person or group from business side.

Unbreakable IT environment is one of the things that will keep the functional and business departments satisfied, and will decrease down time and cost. IT people should focus on service not on technology to give the business what they expect.

Weak IT environment in some businesses will cost the business extra money, reputation will be negatively affected, decrease customer satisfaction, and maybe pay to the government penalties.

The business should support the IT people to build a strong work environment by giving them the authority, budget and human resources as needed.

To build your unbreakable IT environment there are many technologies you can use like (cloud, virtualization, mirroring ...etc). You can use your facilities or you do it with outsourced company.

Good understanding of the company’s business and business needs it’s a mission for IT people, this mission will give the IT better chance to build unbreakable IT environment.

My advice to build your unbreakable IT environments is:

1-      Collect the business needs and do the business impact analysis to categories the business processes that depend on IT environment.

2-      Analyze the requirements to determine if they are applicable or not.

3-      Be honest with your business people by reporting them the result of your analysis, and say “No” when it’s needed.

4-      Choosing a good technology depends on the budget, business needs and analysis results.

5-      Don’t try to give the business extra features it is a “Gold Plating”.

Motivate your team, Key of success

Most or all managers expect from employees to do their work with a high performance, but some of those managers think about the work but do not think about the employee’s satisfaction, how keep the employees in good performance? How can appraise the work performance? How to enhance employee’s creativity?

I will explain in this blog my point of view about one thing to keep your employees in good performance and always creative. Your employees work together to achieve the organization targets but not all employees work in same performance, not all employees achieves their targets.

Motivate your good employees by rewards, rewards not always a money, “Thanks” in some cases will be more effective than money or reduce the work assignments will be a good choice, don’t forget or ignore giving rewards to the good performer employees, if you forget or ignore rewards expect the employee will do the same for his/her work, he/she will forget or ignore his/her work or some of his/her work, if you don’t have the decision, fight for it.

Know your employee needs, and give them their needs as is as rewards and appreciate employee effort and help them to work in high performance. The high performance work will increase cost of rework or delay, and increase the productivity.

Remember these words” Motivation and creativity comes from satisfied employees”, keep it in your mind when you manage your team to get the best performance, keep you employees satisfied and have a reasons to implement their best performance.