Many of the issues plaguing IT
departments can be mitigated or sidestepped altogether. Here are some
ways to deal with several common pitfalls.
IT faces challenges on a daily basis. But most
experienced IT’ers have learned to avoid the worst sand traps so they
can prevent time and energy drains. What are today’s biggest IT sand
traps — and what best practices can you use to circumvent them?
1: Uncooperative users
Uncooperative users are still out there, as they have been through
the years. Most don’t cooperate out of fear of a new application — or
because of a comfort level with a present application that they don’t
want to give up. It is important for IT to remember that when it changes
an application, it also changes a person’s daily workflow. This can be
disconcerting, even for younger users. The key is to engage users in
application dialogues at the very beginning. Involve them in early app
design and prototyping so they already know and buy into how the app is
going to work before it is ever plugged into production.
2: Unhelpful users
Unhelpful users are trickier to work with because they frequently
come in the guise of “helpful” individuals who cross a threshold when
they become too helpful. They offer reams of tweak suggestions
for apps and never want to accept an app as being complete for a given
release. Enhancement creep of this nature introduces risk into IT
project deadlines. The best way to deal with it is to establish firm
cutoffs for app development and enhancement cycles that everyone agrees
to.
3: Lack of tool integration
Everyone talks about cloud, mobile computing, and the blurring of
lines between computing platforms. But vendors of infrastructure
software don’t necessarily make managing across a diverse environment
easier. Each vendor wants you to use its own toolset for management, and
it isn’t always clear which tools are subordinate to other software
infrastructure management tools. Consequently, it becomes difficult to
fit everything into an “uber” infrastructure solution where you really
can see everything through a single pane of glass. The best thing for IT
to do is to require prospective tool vendors to show what application
programming interfaces (APIs) they have that work with other management
software. The APIs can be tested with other software in a proof of
concept (POC) before buying. Finally, avoid the use of homegrown tools
that don’t readily interface with anything on the market.
4: Platform loyalty
IT’s strength is its technical know-how. This know-how is accumulated
over the years and becomes a career calling card for most IT
professionals. Unsurprisingly, the sledding can get rough when someone
who has worked on say, UNIX, for 20 or 30 years, is told to move to a
Linux environment.
One way to ease the transition (if it is necessary) is to introduce
these individuals to the new platform and provide the training and
support they need for the crossover. If they’re adamantly opposed to the
change, there might be an opportunity for them to move into a
maintenance role for systems that will continue to run on the old
platform. If you can’t provide that role, as a last resort you might
have to encourage them to seek employment elsewhere — in a shop that
continues to use the platform they want to work on. In all cases, it is
best to address these platform loyalty cases immediately and upfront,
before resentment (and even lack of cooperation in projects) begins to
set in.
5: Poor project management
Despite new project management techniques and tools, project
management remains a weak area in IT. There are several reasons for it: a
failure to cross-communicate across the project; the failure of project
managers to “walk around” and really check out first-hand the status of
work (besides just seeing the updates on a project tracking chart); and
a breakdown of communications between the IT and the end user sides of
the project team.
The best way to ensure great results in projects is to make projects
smaller (and therefore more manageable), to encourage (and enforce) open
communications, and to use collaborative project management tools that
are now available in the market. It is equally important to perform post
mortems of all project work — to learn what went right and what could
have been done better on each project — and to take that knowledge into
future projects.
6: Lack of documentation
Documentation isn’t stressed in IT, which makes it a weak link in
most IT work. No wonder most IT departments report that upward of 50
percent of their time is consumed in app maintenance. Less time would be
spent in maintenance if documentation of what the original app was
doing (along with history of maintenance already performed) had been
done. Two ways to combat this are the adoption of new app development
software that automatically documents work and a build-in of project
time for app documentation and QA of the doc.
7: Poor data quality
The best technology in the world isn’t going to change duplicate
customer records with misspelled addresses or incomplete phone numbers.
For data already on record, data deduplication can be used to ferret out
duplicate records before they are stored or archived to disk. For new
data, better field edits in applications can improve the quality of data
that is being entered into data repositories.
8: Jargon
IT (like other technical disciplines) can become so comfortable using
acronyms and jargon that it doesn’t realize that it is using these
terms with business users who might not understand them. This can
generate communications breakdowns or even intimidation in
relationships. IT can avoid this by stressing (and if necessary,
training) IT staffers who work with end users to avoid these specialized
terms and to stick with plain English.
9: Unrealistic deadlines
The pace of business is relentless and quick. As usual, IT gets
pushed into accepting project deadlines that are too aggressive for the
work that needs to be done. When this happens, IT delivers incomplete
projects that are missing key pieces that subsequent enhancement cycles
must handle. This is okay if the business is in total agreement with the
approach. (In fact, it has worked very well in some areas, such as
marketing.) However, if there is a governance/security issue, or if the
app is required to be both complete and thoroughly tested, it is IT’s
responsibility to tell business management what the effort will take,
how long it will take, and what the risks are if the effort is not
undertaken.
10: Lack of people skills
IT continues to come up short in soft skill areas.
CIOs should recognize this by budgeting for and providing people skills
training to key IT contributors — and they should up the ante by
soliciting feedback from end users on the quality of IT interpersonal
communications.
Thanks & Regards,
"Remember Me When You Raise Your Hand For Dua"
Raheel Ahmed Khan
System Engineer
send2raheel@yahoo.com
send2raheel@engineer.com
sirraheel@gmail.com
send2raheel (skype id)
My Blog Spot
http://raheel-mydreamz.blogspot.com/
