CTO/CIO perspectives

“Hot stove” lessons in IT, part I

Peter Kretzman — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 01:04:06 +0000

Regular readers here have certainly noticed the recurring nature of many of my posts: “things about IT that should be obvious, but clearly aren’t.” Each week, as I set about writing on my chosen topic, it often strikes me that what I have to say is anything but new or radical; rather, it seems to embody fundamental, well-known practices and underpinnings that should be, if not incredibly obvious, at least quite familiar to anyone who’s spent much time in or around IT. Yet, as I reflect on my actual experiences, I realize anew that I’ve spent much of my career working up and down the executive and worker chain to absorb and impart these basic principles again and again.

So here comes more of the same. In fact, this dual post encapsulates a lot of what I’ve written about on this blog for the last year: lessons learned and lessons still learnable about IT for the people who work in it and the people who have to deal with it. In other words, I should hasten to say, these are not only IT management lessons, but lessons related to development, operations, QA, and project management: in other words, the whole spectrum.

As I’ve observed before, IT is hard. In fact, it’s so hard that it seems most people have to learn certain core lessons by themselves. It seems like everyone needs to burn his or her own hand on the hot stove. So here are some of the glowing redhot stove elements that I’ve watched make fingers (including mine, for I’m not immune either from learning some things the hard way) sizzle over the years. I’ll start here in part I with lessons particular to management, and next time will cover similar lessons/myths relating to other IT areas.

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Speed vs. bureaucracy: management issues confronted by companies in transition

Peter Kretzman — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 00:49:14 +0000

I was at a relatively young company once where a senior executive suddenly sent out a message to the entire employee base, asking for general input on the cause and treatment of the following concerns:

“There is a feeling that the company is not able to move fast enough or nimbly enough — we’re not delivering products fast enough or turning projects around fast enough
“People feel that it’s very difficult to get things done
“There is a feeling that we’re getting too bureaucratic in everything
“People aren’t working collaboratively; there appears to be a ‘contract’ mentality in dealing with people”

Aside from the unfortunately vague, passive-voice constructions in this message (”there is a feeling”: meaning one person? everyone? just senior management?), this message didn’t surprise me much. In fact, it wasn’t (at all) the first time I’d seen this kind of sentiment arise in a young company.

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More astounding IT utterances

Peter Kretzman — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 00:26:30 +0000

A few months back, I wrote a post on various “Astounding Sayings” that I’ve encountered in my career in information technology. It turns out that it’s been one of the more popular posts I’ve written, judging from page views, so in true Hollywood fashion, it must be time for a sequel. I am retitling it slightly, though, to distinguish it from the Peterisms I post from time to time. The point of writing about the “astounding” sayings was that they usually reflect misguided energy (or, to put it bluntly: wrong-headed thinking); the point of the Peterisms, on the other hand, is to distill and communicate absolute, undeniable, sublime truth and wisdom at every possible turn. (Hopefully it’s unnecessary, but just in case, .) Hence, I’m now going to call these non-truthful, unwise sayings “astounding utterances” instead.

Here are two more such utterances, with moral-of-the-story observations for each. Note: as before, these are true stories. I may have changed some of the facts, lightly, to make them less identifiable. They also always come from at least several years in the past, to provide a healthy amount of distance for everyone.

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Getting an IT assessment: pitfalls to watch for

Peter Kretzman — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 01:19:02 +0000

One key ongoing goal of mine is that I constantly strive to pay attention. In this case, specifically, through web logging reports, I can see the Google searches that drive people to this blog every day. One of the most common of these, it turns out, is people searching on the phrase “how to improve IT department”. Another is “IT assessment”. I somehow picture bleary-eyed CEOs and COOs, late at night, pondering how they can get more throughput or better results from IT, and turning to Google in their frustration.

Since it’s in essence a frequently requested topic, let’s talk about it. I’ve been on both ends of such assessments, multiple times. I’ve done them, and I’ve had them done for me. Before entering into such an assessment, it’s worth considering some of the surrounding issues and common pitfalls.

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IT, States of Denial, and more Peterisms

Peter Kretzman — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 01:12:08 +0000

Yes, I admit it’s an old and hackneyed play on words, but I’ll repeat it anyway: in the course of my career, I’ve worked in IT positions in the fine States of New York, California, and Washington, but I’d have to say that the most frequent state I’ve encountered in IT matters has been the State of Denial.

It seems to be a common trend, up and down the levels of a company, to engage in a bit of willful self-delusion about IT matters, practices, outcomes. As I thought about this, I realized that several of my key “Peterisms” (these being sayings that come out of my mouth again and again, as already chronicled here and here) have evolved as a response to this persistent theme of “states of denial”. So let’s talk about three more of those Peterisms in that light.

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Serving your IT customers: be careful of being The Wizard of Oz

Peter Kretzman — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 00:58:26 +0000

Cultural references are among the most powerful language tools around. The old cliche may be true that a picture is worth a thousand words, but equally, a well-targeted cultural reference, used as an analogy, can stream light onto a subject better than dozens of droning paragraphs of prose.

So here’s one that comes to mind over and over again in the course of IT management: the Wizard of Oz. And it’s not a flattering analogy; in fact, it serves more as a warning or a reminder of what not to do.

Specifically, think about the Wizard of Oz’s behavior when Dorothy asks him to help her and her friends. She gets upset when it seems that the Wizard isn’t going to help them, but he assures them that he will, if they do just one little thing:

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Starve your voice mail, feed your e-mail

Peter Kretzman — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 01:34:29 +0000

I’ve touched on this topic briefly before, but here’s a lengthier discussion on why, in general, I find e-mail to be vastly preferable to voice mail for communication in the business world.

Here’s my stance: voice mail works reasonably well on a small scale in the home (i.e., personal voice mail implemented usually with answering machines), but it tends to break down completely in a large-scale business environment.

Until I took active steps to deal with it about a dozen years ago, I was getting between 50 and 100 voice mail messages a day. The “message waiting” light on my phone had become a night light for my office. At an average of a minute or two each to listen and respond, these messages were taking me hours a day to work through. I realized that our greater project team of several hundred people was able to put voice mail messages into my queue a lot faster than I could ever pull them out. Voice mail just wasn’t a good use of my personal bandwidth. So I took the radical step of putting an outgoing message on my voice mailbox, telling people that if they had a choice, please send me e-mail rather than voice mail, and I’d be able to get back to them a lot more quickly.

E-mail has flaws, of course, but sports many advantages over voice mail: most notably, it can be quickly skimmed, categorized, saved, searched, archived. What’s more, it puts you and others on the line: you can be held to what you argued, what you promised. At most, it can be misinterpreted, but it can’t easily be denied. And that’s healthy, for you, for your co-workers, and for your organization. Accountability drives responsibility.

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Start simple: a corporate desktop/laptop refresh model

Peter Kretzman — Thu, 29 May 2008 14:09:13 +0000

Here’s a topic that frankly shouldn’t even merit a post — it’s that much of a no-brainer if you think about it.

Yet, in the real world, I’ve found that it’s anything but a no-brainer, at both small and large companies. What I’m referring to is the need for organizations to track their laptops and desktops.

Shockingly, many/most organizations don’t do even close to a satisfactory job at this. The U.S. State Department recently made the news for losing track of as many as 10,000 laptops.

OK, chalk that up to government, perhaps. But admittedly, in any bustling, active enterprise, keeping tabs on machines, and who’s using what, isn’t a cakewalk. Even Microsoft has its issues in this arena, and turns to “rolling its own” applications as a stopgap.

Astonishingly, most organizations I’ve observed:

Don’t know how many machines they actually have
Don’t know their current penetration of laptops vs. desktops
Tend to budget by the seat of their pants for replacements for the coming year
Can’t tell you precisely where a specific purchased asset has been deployed
Don’t know the “aging profile” of their population of desktops and laptops (e.g., how many are more than a year old)
Don’t relate the actual handling of the asset (e.g., replacement after three years) to the financial handling (e.g., spreading the capital expense over three years from an accounting perspective). Replacement tends to be demand-driven, meaning (usually) crisis-driven.
Don’t have a solid process, or any process, for decommissioning a machine that is past its useful life.
Don’t have the ability to tell a given employee when his or her machine will be replaced.

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Executive questions, IT answers, pizza parlors, and speed chess

Peter Kretzman — Sat, 24 May 2008 07:10:05 +0000

Let’s mix some metaphors today, and attempt to relate them all to the world of information technology and project management.

I have a good friend and colleague, one of the top IT consultants I know. He’s able to execute crisply at the detail level while keeping the big picture in mind; he’s especially good at balancing on the fine line separating necessary diplomacy and straight-shooting directness.

For reasons I find simultaneously admirable and unfathomable, this indefatigable person, whom I’ll call Gunner here, is planning on opening a pizza parlor as a sidelight, and is currently embroiled in the process of threading the various bureaucracies and logistics to make his vision happen. We talk about this regularly, since I am a great pizza fan. In a recent conversation, he reported that he had just gotten city approval to use a specific lower-cost piece of equipment, news that greatly increases the chances of the pizza parlor actually becoming a reality. So I, of course, immediately asked when opening day would be.

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Why status reports really do matter

Peter Kretzman — Wed, 14 May 2008 00:53:16 +0000

Do a poll: many IT folks regard doing status reports as their least favorite task. My point here, though, will be that a lot of people, management and workers alike, don’t fully understand the real purpose of status reports, and that status reports should actually be a “must-have” arrow in your management quiver.

How a person regards status reports is, in my view, a litmus test that tends to reveal one’s basic approach and attitude towards management in general. Let me sketch the two diverging philosophies.

I’m a strong proponent of the first philosophy: the idea that managers and workers collaborate towards achieving common goals, just playing different “positions” in the game plan of how to get there. The opposite view, one that is held by more people than I’d like, is that the manager assigns work, sits back, and judges how well it was done. If you look at the status report through eyes colored by that second view, you might tend to approach doing a status report as drudgery, a checklist chore with little real utility, and with lots of potential downsides when your boss reads it and determines what you haven’t done well. That approach can result in status reports omitting or obscuring any bad news, providing all sorts of detail meant to show that everything is going swimmingly, and in essence attempting to prove that the author is a shining star and a veritable dervish of activity.

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